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7Metaphysical Realism and Castañeda’s Minimal Transcendental RealismIn Adriano Palma (ed.), Castañeda and His Guises: Essays on the Work of Hector-Neri Castañeda, De Gruyter. pp. 97-106. 2014.
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42Type-free Property Theory, Bradley's Regress and Meinong and Russell ReconceiledGrazer Philosophische Studien 39 (1): 103-125. 1991.The type-free property-theoretic system EC, based on the mediation view of predication, is presented. According to the mediation view, the copula or exemplification is a necessary component of every proposition. It is explained how the system EC relates to Bradley's Regress regarding predication. Finally, the system EC is applied to the Meinong-Russell debate on non-existent objects and it is shown how EC allows us to preserve some important intuitions of both Meinong and Russell
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32Analytic Philosophy of Fiction: Editor's IntroductionRevue Internationale de Philosophie 262 (4): 481-482. 2012.
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45A Contingent Russell's ParadoxNotre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 37 (1): 105-111. 1996.It is shown that two formally consistent type-free second-order systems, due to Cocchiarella, and based on the notion of homogeneous stratification, are subject to a contingent version of Russell's paradox
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8Metaphysical Realism and Castañeda’s Minimal Transcendental RealismIn Guido Bonino, Greg Jesson & Javier Cumpa (eds.), Defending Realism: Ontological and Epistemological Investigations, De Gruyter. pp. 235-246. 2014.
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I sintagmi nominali incompleti da un punto di vista cognitivoAnnali Della Facoltà di Lettere E Filosofia. Università di Macerata 36 241-248. 2003.
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198Do We Really Need a New B-theory of Time?Topoi 34 (1): 1-14. 2015.It is customary in current philosophy of time to distinguish between an A- (or tensed) and a B- (or tenseless) theory of time. It is also customary to distinguish between an old B-theory of time, and a new B-theory of time. We may say that the former holds both semantic atensionalism and ontological atensionalism, whereas the latter gives up semantic atensionalism and retains ontological atensionalism. It is typically assumed that the B-theorists have been induced by advances in the philosophy o…Read more
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55Belief representation in a deductivist type-free doxastic logicMinds and Machines 4 (2): 163-203. 1994.Konolige''s technical notion of belief based on deduction structures is briefly reviewed and its usefulness for the design of artificial agents with limited representational and deductive capacities is pointed out. The design of artificial agents with more sophisticated representational and deductive capacities is then taken into account. Extended representational capacities require in the first place a solution to the intensional context problems. As an alternative to Konolige''s modal first-or…Read more
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30Tradition and innovation in ontology: the case of propositions and states of affairsPhilosophical News 5. 2012.I shall explain the notions of propositions and states of affairs as they are understood in the current ontological debate and I shall briefly relate them to similar notions in Aristotle and some Medieval authors. In contrast with the point of view of some philosophers who identify propositions and states of affairs, I shall argue that they need to be sharply distinguished. I shall then move on to a problem for propositions and, above all, states of affairs, known as Bradley’s regress, and hint …Read more
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153A Note on Analysis and Circular DefinitionsGrazer Philosophische Studien 54 107-113. 1998.Analyses, in the simplest form assertions that aim to capture an intimate link between two concepts, are viewed since Russell's theory of definite descriptions as analyzing descriptions. Analysis therefore has to obey the laws governing definitions including some form of a Substitutivity Principle (SP). Once (SP) is accepted the road to the paradox of analysis is open. Popular reactions to the paradox involve the fundamental assumption (SV) that sentences differing only in containing an analysan…Read more
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84Property theory and the revision theory of definitionsJournal of Symbolic Logic 65 (1): 212-246. 2000.Russell’s type theory has been the standard property theory for years, relying on rigid type distinctions at the grammatical level to circumvent the paradoxes of predication. In recent years it has been convincingly argued by Bealer, Cochiarella, Turner and others that many linguistic and ontological data are best accounted for by using a type-free property theory. In the spirit of exploring alternatives and “to have as many opportunities as possible for theory comparison”, this paper presents a…Read more
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105Meaning and circular definitionsJournal of Philosophical Logic 29 (2): 155-169. 2000.Gupta's and Belnap's Revision Theory of Truth defends the legitimacy of circular definitions. Circularity, however, forces us to reconsider our conception of meaning. A readjustment of some standard theses about meaning is here proposed, by relying on a novel version of the sense-reference distinction.
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139Dynamic events and presentismPhilosophical Studies 160 (3): 407-414. 2012.Dynamic events such as a rolling ball moving from one place to another involve change and time intervals and thus presumably successions of static events occurring one after the other, e.g., the ball’s being at a certain place and then at another place during the interval in question. When dynamic events are experienced they should count as present and thus as existent from a presentist point of view. But this seems to imply the existence of the static events involved in them. This in turn seems…Read more
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44The property-theoretical, performative-nominalistic theory of proper namesDialectica 54 (3). 2000.This paper embeds a theory of proper names in a general approach to singular reference based on type‐free property theory. It is proposed that a proper name “N” is a sortal common noun whose meaning is essentially tied to the linguistic type “N”. Moreover, “N” can be singularly referring insofar as it is elliptical for a definite description of the form the “N” Following Montague, the meaning of a definite description is taken to be a property of properties. The proposed theory fulfils the major…Read more
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45Armstrong’s Supervenience and Ontological DependenceIn Francesco Federico Calemi (ed.), Metaphysics and Scientific Realism: Essays in Honour of David Malet Armstrong, De Gruyter. pp. 233-252. 2016.
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304Stati di cose, esemplificazione e regresso di BradleyRivista di Filosofia 97 (3): 349-386. 2006.This paper examines the challenge that the argument known as "Bradley's regress" poses to the friends of states of affairs (facts), in its requesting an explanation of the existence of a fact as a unitary whole in addition to its constituents. All the main theoretical options, short of denying that there are facts, are considered. It is argued that only two of them are viable, namely a "Brute fact approach", according to which the existence of a fact cannot be explained with the typical tools of…Read more
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58Argument deletion, thematic roles, and Leibniz's logico-grammatical analysis of relationsHistory and Philosophy of Logic 21 (2): 147-162. 2000.I present a formal framework historically faithful to Leibniz's analysis of relational sentences, which: (i) engrafts thematic roles and the non-truth-functional connective insofar as (quatenus) into the monadic fragment of first-order logic; (ii) suggests a plausible ontological picture of thematic roles and relational facts; (iii) supports argument deletion and related inferential patterns that are not taken into account by standard first-order logic
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25Natural Language Semantics and Guise TheoryDissertation, Indiana University. 1986.I assume that the task of natural language semantics is to provide an unambiguous logical language into which natural language can be translated in such a way that the translating expressions display a structure which is isomorphic to the meaning of the translated expressions. Since language is a means of thinking and communicating mental contents, the meanings of singular terms cannot be the individuals of the substratist tradition, because such individuals are not cognizable entities. Thus I p…Read more
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Logica e teologia: l'argomento ontologico di Kurt GoedelNuova Civiltà Delle Macchine 12 (4): 95-104. 1994.
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2Considerazioni ontologiche e semantico-pragmatiche sulle prodizioniAnnali Della Facoltà di Lettere E Filosofia. Università di Macerata 38 413-420. 2005.
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36The Eightfold Ambiguity of Oratia Obliqua SentencesGrazer Philosophische Studien 47 (1): 197-205. 1994.Sentences such as "Holmes believes that the leader of the London gang is about to be incriminated" are commonly understood to have two readings: de re and de diclo. On the basis of the way which the de relde dicto distinction is customarily conveyed, it is shown that such sentences have not just two but eight readings. It is suggested that intensional entities - such as senses, guises or denoting concepts - are the most natural way to account for this variety of readings.
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97Quantum-mechanical Statistics and the Inclusivist Approach to the Nature of ParticularsSynthese 148 (1): 57-77. 2006.There have been attempts to derive anti-haeccetistic conclusions from the fact that quantum mechanics (QM) appeals to non-standard statistics. Since in fact QM acknowledges two kinds of such statistics, Bose-Einstein and Fermi-Dirac, I argue that we could in the same vein derive the sharper anti-haeccetistic conclusion that bosons are bundles of tropes and fermions are bundles of universals. Moreover, since standard statistics is still appropriate at the macrolevel, we could also venture to say …Read more
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45Metaphor and Truth-MakersJournal of Philosophical Research 26 103-129. 2001.This paper builds on Lakoff’s and Johnson’s theory of metaphorical concepts to propose that our conception of truth as correspondence with reality is metaphorically based on our conception of perceptual fields. In particular, it is argued that parts of reality, as metaphorically understood in terms of parts of perceptual fields, can play the role of objective truth-makers for sentences with empirical content; for instance, they meet the constraints on correspondence put forward by Barry Smith. F…Read more