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604The Frege–Geach problem and Kalderon's moral fictionalismPhilosophical Quarterly 59 (237): 705-712. 2009.Mark Eli Kalderon has argued for a fictionalist variant of non-cognitivism. On his view, what the Frege–Geach problem shows is that standard non-cognitivism proceeds uncritically from claims about use to claims about meaning; if non-cognitivism's claims were solely about use it would be on safe ground as far as the Frege–Geach problem is concerned. I argue that Kalderon's diagnosis is mistaken: the problem concerns the non-cognitivist's account of the use of moral sentences too.
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112Book Review. Quantifier Variance and Realism: Essays in Metaontology. Eli Hirsch. (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Review. 2011.
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297Recent Work on VaguenessAnalysis 71 (2): 352-363. 2011.Vagueness, as discussed in the philosophical literature, is the phenomenon that paradigmatically rears its head in the sorites paradox, one prominent version of which is: One grain of sand does not make a heap. For any n, if n grains of sand do not make a heap, then n + 1 grains of sand do not make a heap. So, ten billion grains of sand do not make a heap. It is common ground that the different versions of the sorites paradox arise because of vagueness in a key expression, in this case ‘heap’. O…Read more
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Paradox: Logical, Cognitive and Communicative Aspects (Proceedings of the First International Symposium of Cognition, Logic and Communication) (edited book)University of Latvia Press. 2006.
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Paradoxes and the Foundations of Semantics and MetaphysicsDissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 2000.Numerous philosophical problems, otherwise quite different in character, are of the following form. Certain claims which seem not only obviously true, but even constitutive of the meanings of the expressions employed, can be shown to lead to absurdity when taken together. All such problems can justly be called paradoxes. The paradoxes I examine are the liar paradox, the sorites paradox, and the personal identity paradox posed by the fission problem. ;I argue that in these cases, the claims that …Read more
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231The picture of reality as an amorphous lumpIn Theodore Sider, John Hawthorne & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics, Blackwell. pp. 382--96. 2008.(1) Abstract objects. The nominalist (as the label is used today) denies that there exist abstract objects. The platonist holds that there are abstract objects. One example is numbers. The nominalist denies that there are numbers; the platonist typically affirms it.
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379Meaning‐ConstitutivityInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 50 (6): 559-574. 2007.I discuss some problems faced by the meaning‐inconsistency view on the liar and sorites paradoxes which I have elsewhere defended. Most of the discussion is devoted to the question of what a defender of the meaning‐inconsistency view should say about semantic competence
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190Characterizing vaguenessPhilosophy Compass 2 (6). 2007.Philosophy Compass 2: 896-909. (Link to Philosophy Compass.).
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57TruthHistory and Philosophy of Logic 33 (1). 2012.History and Philosophy of Logic, Volume 33, Issue 1, Page 106-108, February 2012
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A Vindication of Tarski's Claim About the Liar ParadoxIn Timothy Childers & Ondrej Majer (eds.), The Logica Yearbook, Filosofia. 2001.
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72Book Review. Vagueness in Context. Stewart Shapiro. (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (5). 2006.
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185Putnam on OntologyPoznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 95 (1): 203-222. 2008.I here critically discuss Hilary Putnam's views on ontology, especially as recently expounded in his Ethics without Ontology. In particular, I discuss Putnam's thesis of conceptual relativity and his criticism of the thesis that objectivity requires objects. Although I think that much of what Putnam says is important, and that there are important elements of truth to it, my points will largely be negative. Along the way I will discuss Putnam's and Wittgenstein's views in the philosophy of mathem…Read more
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226What Vagueness Consists InPhilosophical Studies 125 (1): 27-60. 2005.The main question of the paper is that ofwhat vagueness consists in. This question must be distinguished from other questions about vagueness discussed in the literature. It is argued that familiar accounts of vagueness for general reasons failto answer the question ofwhat vagueness consists in. A positive view is defended, according to which, roughly, the vagueness of an expression consists in it being part ofsemantic competence to accept a tolerance principle for the expression. Since toleranc…Read more
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63Realism and Antirealism Edited by William P. Alston Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002, viii + 303 pp (review)Dialogue 44 (4): 786-788. 2005.
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3Finzione, indifferenza e ontologiaRivista di Estetica 32 (32): 71-92. 2006.1 Introduzione Quando i filosofi fanno affermazioni del tipo “gli A sono finzioni”, il più delle volte ciò che dicono è ambiguo in un modo cruciale. Secondo una certa lettura, ciò che viene detto ha chiare implicazioni ontologiche: non ci sono, in realtà, cose come gli F. Ma c’è anche un modo diverso, non ontologico, di leggere tali affermazioni: come se dicessero semplicemente che le A-asserzioni sono avanzate, di norma, in uno spirito finzionale. Chiaramente, si può sostenere che normalment...
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122The liar paradox, expressibility, possible languagesIn J. C. Beall (ed.), Revenge of the Liar: New Essays on the Paradox, Oxford University Press. 2007.Here is the liar paradox. We have a sentence, (L), which somehow says of itself that it is false. Suppose (L) is true. Then things are as (L) says they are. (For it would appear to be a mere platitude that if a sentence is true, then things are as the sentence says they are.) (L) says that (L) is false. So, (L) is false. Since the supposition that (L) is true leads to contradiction, we can assert that (L) is false. But since this is just what (L) says, (L) is then true. (For it would appear to b…Read more
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22Book Review. The Philosophy of Philosophy. Timothy Williamson. (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 88 (4): 752-4. 2010.
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77Schiffer on vaguenessPacific Philosophical Quarterly 87 (1). 2006.I go through, and criticize, Stephen Schiffer's account of vagueness and the sorites paradox. I discuss his notion of a happy-face solution to a paradox, his appeal to vagueness-related partial belief, his claim that indeterminacy is a psychological notion, and his view that the sorites premise and the inference rule of modus ponens are indeterminate.
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44Review of Fraser MacBride (ed.), Identity and Modality (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (3). 2007.
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107Vagueness and Second-Level IndeterminacyIn Richard Dietz & Sebastiano Moruzzi (eds.), Cuts and Clouds: Vaguenesss, its Nature and its Logic, Oxford University Press. 2010.My theme here will be vagueness. But first recall Quine’s arguments for the indeterminacy of translation and the inscrutability of reference. (I will presume these arguments to be familiar.) If Quine is right, then there are radically different acceptable assignments of semantic values to the expressions of any language: different assignments of semantic values that for all that is determined by whatever it is that determines semantic value are all acceptable, and all equally good. Quine even ar…Read more
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482Multitude, tolerance and language-transcendenceSynthese 187 (3): 833-847. 2012.Rudolf Carnap's 1930s philosophy of logic, including his adherence to the principle of tolerance, is discussed. What theses did Carnap commit himself to, exactly? I argue that while Carnap did commit himself to a certain multitude thesis—there are different logics of different languages, and the choice between these languages is merely a matter of expediency—there is no evidence that he rejected a language-transcendent notion of fact, contrary to what Warren Goldfarb and Thomas Ricketts have pro…Read more
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647Deconstructing Ontological VaguenessCanadian Journal of Philosophy 38 (1): 117-140. 2008.I will here present a number of problems concerning the idea that there is ontological vagueness, and the related claim that appeal to this idea can help solve some vagueness-related problems. A theme underlying the discussion will be the distinction between vagueness specifically and indeterminacy more generally (and, relatedly, the distinction between ontological vagueness and ontological indeterminacy). Even if the world is somehow ontologically indeterminate it by no means follows that it is…Read more
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105The Aims of Logical Empiricism As a Philosophy of ScienceActa Analytica 15 (25): 137-59. 2000.According to the received view on logical empiricism, the logical empiricists were involved in the same project as Popper, Lakatos and Kuhn: a project of describing actual scientific method and (with the exception of Kuhn) prescribing methodological rules for scientists. Even authors who seek to show that the logical empiricists were not as simpleminded as widely believed agree with this assumption. I argue that the received view has it wrong.
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541Bad company and neo-Fregean philosophySynthese 170 (3): 393-414. 2009.A central element in neo-Fregean philosophy of mathematics is the focus on abstraction principles, and the use of abstraction principles to ground various areas of mathematics. But as is well known, not all abstraction principles are in good standing. Various proposals for singling out the acceptable abstraction principles have been presented. Here I investigate what philosophical underpinnings can be provided for these proposals; specifically, underpinnings that fit the neo-Fregean's general ou…Read more
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89Reply to Beall and PriestAustralasian Journal of Logic 6 94-106. 2008.In my “Deep Inconsistency”, I compared my meaning-inconsistency view on the liar with Graham Priest’s dialetheist view, using my view to help cast doubt on Priest’s arguments for his view. Jc Beall and Priest have recently published a reply to my article. I here respond to their criticisms. In addition, I compare the meaning–inconsistency view with Anil Gupta and Nuel Belnap’s revision theory of truth, and discuss how best to deal with the strengthened liar.
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215Peter Van Inwagen on material beingsRatio 15 (3). 2002.Peter van Inwagen's book Material Beings is centered on the special composition question: the question of when some simples constitute a complex object. Van Inwagen's answer to this question is that simples only constitute a complex object when they constitute an organism. I argue that van Inwagen's reasoning in favor of this conclusion is unconvincing, and also that the significance of the special composition question itself is doubtful
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283Sider on existenceNoûs 41 (3). 2007.In (2001), (2003), and elsewhere, Ted Sider presents two arguments concerning the existential quantifier which are justly central to the recent discussion of metaontology. What we will call Sider's indeterminacy argument is an attempted reductio of the suggestion that the existential quantifier might be semantically indeterminate. What we will call Sider's naturalness argument is an argument for the claim that the semantic value of the existential quantifier is the most eligible existence-like m…Read more
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