Massimiliano Carrara

Sometimes mereologists have problems with counting. We often don't want to count the parts of maximally connected objects as full-fledged objects themselves, and we don't want to count discontinuous objects as parts of further, full-fledged objects. But whatever one takes "full-fledged object" to mean, the axioms and theorems of classical, extensional mereology commit us to the existence both of parts and of wholes – all on a par, included in the domain of quantification – and this makes mereology look counterintuitive to various philosophers. In recent years, a proposal has been advanced to solve the tension between mereology and familiar ways of counting objects, under the label of Minimalist View. The Minimalist View may be summarized in the slogan: "Count x as an object iff it does not overlap with any y you have already counted as an object". The motto seems prima facie very promising but, we shall argue, when one looks at it more closely, it is not. On the contrary, the Minimalist View involves an ambiguity that can be solved in quite different directions. We argue that one resolution of the ambiguity makes it incompatible with mereology. This way, the Minimalist View can lend no support to mereology at all. We suggest that the Minimalist View can become compatible with mereology once its ambiguity is solved by interpreting it in what we call an epistemic or conceptual fashion: whereas mereology has full metaphysical import, the Minimalist View may account for our ways of selecting "conceptually salient" entities. But even once it is so disambiguated, it is doubtful that the Minimalist View can help to make mereology more palatable, for it cannot make it any more compatible with commonsensical ways of counting objects.

We consider a “polarized” version of bi-intuitionistic logic [5, 2, 6, 4] as a logic of assertions and hypotheses and show that it supports a “rich proof theory” and an interesting categorical interpretation, unlike the standard approach of C. Rauszer’s Heyting-Brouwer logic [28, 29], whose categorical models are all partial orders by Crolard’s theorem [8]. We show that P.A. Melliès notion of chirality [21, 22] appears as the right mathematical representation of the mirror symmetry between the intuitionistic and co-intuitionistc sides of polarized bi-intuitionism. Philosophically, we extend Dalla Pozza and Garola’s pragmatic interpretation of intuitionism as a logic of assertions [10] to bi-intuitionism as a logic of assertions and hypotheses. We focus on the logical role of illocutionary forces and justification conditions in order to provide “intended interpretations” of logical systems that classify inferential uses in natural language and remain acceptable from an intuitionistic point of view. Although Dalla Pozza and Garola originally provide a constructive interpretation of intuitionism in a classical setting, we claim that some conceptual refinements suffice to make their “pragmatic interpretation” a bona fide representation of intuitionism. We sketch a meaning-asuse interpretation of co-intuitionism that seems to fulfil the requirements of Dummett and Prawitz’s justificationist approach. We extend the Brouwer-Heyting-Kolmogorov interpretation to bi-intuitionism by regarding co-intuitionistic formulas as types of the evidence for them: if conclusive evidence is needed to justify assertions, only a scintilla of evidence suffices to justify hypotheses.

Following the speech act theory, we take hypotheses and assertions as linguistic acts with different illocutionary forces. We assume that a hypothesis is justified if there is at least a scintilla of evidence for the truth of its propositional content, while an assertion is justified when there is conclusive evidence that its propositional content is true. Here we extend the logical treatment for assertions given by Dalla Pozza and Garola by outlining a pragmatic logic for assertions and hypotheses. On the basis of this extension we analyse the standard logical opposition relations for assertions and hypotheses. We formulate a pragmatic square of oppositions for assertions and a hexagon of oppositions for hypotheses. Finally, we give a mixed hexagon of oppositions to point out the opposition relations for assertions and hypotheses.

In To be is to be the object of a possible act of choice the authors defended Boolos’ thesis that plural quantification is part of logic. To this purpose, plural quantification was explained in terms of plural reference, and a semantics of plural acts of choice, performed by an ideal team of agents, was introduced. In this paper, following that approach, we develop a theory of concepts that—in a sense to be explained—can be labeled as a theory of logical concepts. Within this theory, we propose a new logicist approach to natural numbers. Then, we compare our logicism with Frege’s traditional logicism.

The Knowability Paradox starts from the assumption that every truth is knowable and leads to the paradoxical conclusion that every truth is also actually known. Knowability has been traditionally associated with both contemporary verificationism and intuitionistic logic. We assume that classical modal logic in which the standard paradoxical argument is presented is not sufficient to provide a proper treatment of the verificationist aspects of knowability. The aim of this paper is both to sketch a language $$\mathcal {L}_{\Box,K}^{P}$$, where alethic and epistemic classical modalities are combined with the pragmatic language for assertions $$\mathcal {L}^{P}$$, and to analyse the result of the application of our framework to the paradox.

According to the so-called strong variant of Composition as Identity (CAI), the Principle of Indiscernibility of Identicals can be extended to composition, by resorting to broadly Fregean relativizations of cardinality ascriptions. In this paper we analyze various ways in which this relativization could be achieved. According to one broad variety of relativization, cardinality ascriptions are about objects, while concepts occupy an additional argument place. It should be possible to paraphrase the cardinality ascriptions in plural logic and, as a consequence, relative counting requires the relativization either of quantifiers, or of identity, or of the is one of relation. However, some of these relativizations do not deliver the expected results, and others rely on problematic assumptions. In another broad variety of relativization, cardinality ascriptions are about concepts or sets. The most promising development of this approach is prima facie connected with a violation of the so-called Coreferentiality Constraint, according to which an identity statement is true only if its terms have the same referent. Moreover - even provided that the problem with coreferentiality can be fixed - the resulting analysis of cardinality ascriptions meets several difficulties.

The Knowability Paradox is a logical argument to the effect that, if there are truths not actually known, then there are unknowable truths. Recently, Alexander Paseau and Bernard Linsky have independently suggested a possible way to counter this argument by typing knowledge. In this article, we argue against their proposal that if one abstracts from other possible independent considerations supporting reasons for typing knowledge and considers the motivation for a type-theoretic approach with respect to the Knowability Paradox alone, there is no substantive philosophical motivation to type knowledge, except that of solving the paradox. Every attempt to independently justify the typing of knowledge is doomed to failure.

The book's aim is to give a working representation of what metaphysics is today. The historical contributions reveal the roots of metaphysical themes and how today's methods are linked to their Aristotelian and Leibnizian past. The volume also touches on the relationships between ontological and linguistic analysis, the questions of realism and ontological commitment, the nature of abstract objects, the existential meaning of particular quantification, the primitiveness of identity, the question of epistemic versus ontological vagueness, the necessity of origin, the nature of natural necessity, the possibility of intermittent existence, the notion of a temporal part and its place in an account of persistence, the question of identity and change across time and possible worlds, and many more. Readership: A toolbox for any researcher in metaphysics and an essential source for any PhD student with ontological interests.

This special issue of GPS collects 11 papers (and a long introduction), by leading philosophers and young researchers, which tackle more or less from close the topic of propositions by trying to provide the reader with a cross-section of the ongoing debate in this area. The raised issues range over the semantics, the ontology, the epistemology, and the philosophy of mathematics and stimulate the reader to reflect on crucial problems such as the following: are propositions objects? In the positive case, what kind of objects are they? Can they be grasped by cognitive creatures such as we are? When can we say that two people entertain the same proposition? Have propositions any role to play in speech act theory? Even though the notion of proposition has received considerable attention in the past philosophical debate, it is still of great interest, in particular in connection with the attacks which have recently been launched against it in the theory of language. The volume, which is equipped with a long and detailed introduction that supplies the young reader with useful background information on the different stances in the debate, could prove useful also for didactic purposes.

The entailment connective is introduced by Priest (2006b). It aims to capture, in a dialetheically acceptable way, the informal notion of logical consequence. This connective does not “fall foul” of Curry’s Paradox by invalidating an inference rule called “Absorption” (or “Contraction”) and the classical logical theorem called “Assertion”. In this paper we show that the semantics of entailment, given by Priest in terms of possible worlds, is inadequate. In particular, we will argue that Priest’s counterexamples to Absorption and Assertion use in the metalanguage a dialetheically unacceptable principle. Furthermore, we show that the rejection of Assertion undermines Priest’s claim that the entailment connective expresses the notion of logical consequence.

Aim of the paper is to make some steps towards a formal characterization of identity criteria. First of all, we analyse some logical requirements identity criteria are supposed to satisfy and observe that some commonly used identity criteria fail to meet some of them. We focus in particular on the equivalence requirement. We consider then the proposals which have been given so far and aimed at providing logical adequacy to non-equivalent identity conditions. To this purpose, we analyse Williamson’s and De Clerq and Horsten’s treatment of identity criteria. We expand their formal framework, characterizing identity conditions in terms of contexts and levels of granularity too.

In questo articolo l’autore intende fornire una risposta a questo quesito: è possibile identificare una specificazione di proprietà tale da evitare alcune obiezioni standard al Principio d’identità degli indiscernibili? dove con l’espressione "obiezioni standard" ci si riferisce a quell’insieme di argomenti proposti da M. Black e P.F. Strawson contro. Si argomenta che, se si segue Leibniz, ci si trova di fronte ad una empasse. Infatti, se si vuole evitare l’accusa di circolarità nei confronti di si deve negare l’esistenza di un certo tipo d’entità dette “questità”. Ma se si negano le questità si incorre nel contro-esempio di Black-Strawson. Modi leibniziani per uscirne? Sembra che si possano immaginare due strategie che Leibniz potrebbe utilizzare per uscire da questa difficoltà: ammettere che nella sua metafisica non si nega, in un qualche modo, l’esistenza di proprietà quali le questità, oppure negare la validità di un argomento alla Black-Strawson, caratterizzando in un modo differente le talità. Le due alternative vengono analizzate.

The Knowability Paradox is a logical argument showing that if all truths are knowable in principle, then all truths are, in fact, known. Many strategies have been suggested in order to avoid the paradoxical conclusion. A family of solutions –ncalled logical revision – has been proposed to solve the paradox, revising the logic underneath, with an intuitionistic revision included. In this paper, we focus on so-called revisionary solutions to the paradox – solutions that put the blame on the underlying logic. Specifically, we analyse a possibile translation of the paradox into a modified intuitionistic fragment of a logic for pragmatics inspired by Dalla Pozza and Garola in 1995. Our aim is to understand if KILP is a candidate for the logical revision of the paradox and to compare it with the standard intuitionistic solution to the paradox.

Relativists maintain that identity is always relative to a general term. According to them, the notion of absolute identity has to be abandoned and replaced by a multiplicity of relative identity relations for which Leibniz’s Law does not hold. For relativists RI is at least as good as the Fregean cardinality thesis, which contends that an ascription of cardinality is always relative to a concept specifying what, in any specific case, counts as a unit. The same train of thought on cardinality and identity is apparent among those – Artifactualists – who take relative identity sentences for artifacts as the norm. The aim of this paper is to criticize the thesis thatfrom FC it is possible to derive RI, and to explain why Artifactualists mistakenly believe that RI can be derived from FC. The misunderstanding derives from their assumption that the concept of artifact – like the concept of object – is not a sortal concept.

In Parts of Classes (1991) and Mathematics Is Megethology (1993) David Lewis defends both the innocence of plural quantification and of mereology. However, he himself claims that the innocence of mereology is different from that of plural reference, where reference to some objects does not require the existence of a single entity picking them out as a whole. In the case of plural quantification. Instead, in the mereological case: (Lewis, 1991, p. 87). The aim of the paper is to argue that one—an innocence thesis similar to that of plural reference is defensible. To give a precise account of plural reference, we use the idea of plural choice. We then propose a virtual theory of mereology in which the role of individuals is played by plural choices of atoms.

In this paper we disambiguate the design stance as proposed by Daniel C. Dennett, focusing on its application to technical artefacts. Analysing Dennett’s work and developing his approach towards interpreting entities, we show that there are two ways of spelling out the design stance, one that presuppose also adopting Dennett’s intentional stance for describing a designing agent, and a second that does not. We argue against taking one of these ways as giving the correct formulation of the design stance in Dennett’s approach, but propose to replace Dennett’s original design stance by two design stances: an intentional designer stance that incorporates the intentional stance, and a teleological design stance that does not. Our arguments focus on descriptions of technical artefacts: drawing on research in engineering, cognitive psychology and archaeology we show that both design stances are used for describing technical artefacts. A first consequence of this disambiguation is that a design stance, in terms of interpretative assumptions and in terms of the pragmatic considerations for adopting it, stops to be a stance that comes hierarchically between the physical stance and the intentional stance. A second consequence is that a new distinction can be made between types of entities in Dennett’s approach. We call entities to which the intentional designer stance is applied tools and entities to which the teleological design stance is applied instruments, leading to a differentiated understanding of, in particular, technical artefacts.

This is an excerpt from the contentThis symposium on Cognition and Rationality originated from two conferences held in Padua on March 17–21, 2003. The title of the first conference was Reasoning and understanding: mental models, relevance, and limited rationality approaches. The second one was entitled: Being rational. Models and limits of rationality in scientific research, economic behaviour, common sense reasoning. The papers published in these two issues are a selection of the ones presented.Why Cognition and Rationality? Let a cognitive agent be defined as one whose actions are at least partially driven by internal representations that are not the direct result of external physical states. On the contrary, an organism which is able to mentally represent contingent physical reality through perception, but which cannot mentally represent non-present realities, (e.g. past or future events, events o

Following the speech act theory, we take hypotheses and assertions as linguistic acts with different illocutionary forces. We assume that a hypothesis is justified if there is at least a scintilla of evidence for the truth of its propositional content, while an assertion is justified when there is conclusive evidence that its propositional content is true. Here we extend the logical treatment for assertions given by Dalla Pozza and Garola (1995, Erkenntnis, 43, 81–109) by outlining a pragmatic logic for assertions and hypotheses. On the basis of this extension we analyse the standard logical opposition relations for assertions and hypotheses. We formulate a pragmatic square of oppositions for assertions and a hexagon of oppositions for hypotheses. Finally, we give a mixed hexagon of oppositions to point out the opposition relations for assertions and hypotheses.