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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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79Recent 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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394Meaning‐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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53TruthHistory 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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190Characterizing vaguenessPhilosophy Compass 2 (6). 2007.Philosophy Compass 2: 896-909. (Link to Philosophy Compass.).
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A Vindication of Tarski's Claim About the Liar ParadoxIn TImothy Childers (ed.), The Logica Yearbook, Acadamy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. 1998.
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19Book 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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101What 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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28Realism 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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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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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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