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323On DesignatingMind 114 (456): 1069-1133. 2005.A detailed interpretation is provided of the ‘Gray's Elegy’ passage in Russell's ‘On Denoting’. The passage is suffciently obscure that its principal lessons have been independently rediscovered. Russell attempts to demonstrate that the thesis that definite descriptions are singular terms is untenable. The thesis demands a distinction be drawn between content and designation, but the attempt to form a proposition directly about the content (as by using an appropriate form of quotation) inevitabl…Read more
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310The Resilience of Illogical BeliefNoûs 40 (2). 2006.Although Professor Schiffer and I have many times disagreed, I share his deep and abiding commitment to argument as a primary philosophical tool. Regretting any communication failure that has occurred, I endeavor here to make clearer my earlier reply in “Illogical Belief” to Schiffer’s alleged problem for my version of Millianism.1 I shall be skeletal, however; the interested reader is encouraged to turn to “Illogical Belief” for detail and elaboration. I have argued that to bear a propositional…Read more
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309The dogma that the propositional logic of metaphysical modality is S5 is rebutted in related installments (previously published and unpublished essays).
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304Sleeping Beauty: Awakenings, Chance, Secrets, and VideoIn Alessandro Capone, Pietro Perconti & Roberto Graci (eds.), Philosophy, Cognition and Pragmatics, Springer Nature Switzerland. pp. 53-65. 2024.A new philosophical analysis is provided of the notorious Sleeping Beauty Problem. It is argued that the correct solution is one-third, but not in the way previous philosophers have typically meant this. A modified version of the Problem demonstrates that neither self-locating information nor amnesia is relevant to the core Problem, which is simply to evaluate the conditional chance of heads given an undated Monday-or-Tuesday awakening. Previous commentators have failed to appreciate the signifi…Read more
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285The Philosopher's Stone and Other Mythical ObjectsIn Stuart Brock & Anthony Everett (eds.), Fictional Objects, Oxford University Press. 2015.
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279The theory that Kit Fine calls 'semantic relationism' replaces standard semantic compositionality with an alternative according to which statements of the form '... A … A ...’ and ‘... A … B ...’ (e.g., ‘Cicero admires Cicero’ and ‘Cicero admires Tully’) differ in semantic content—even where the two terms involved are exactly synonymous—simply in virtue of the recurrence that is present in the former statement and absent from the latter. A semantic-relationist alternative to standard composition…Read more
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256SynonymyIn Alessandro Capone, Pietro Perconti & Roberto Graci (eds.), Philosophy, Cognition and Pragmatics, Springer Nature Switzerland. pp. 45-52. 2024.Alonzo Church famously provided three principal competing criteria for “strict synonymy,” i.e., sameness of semantic content. These are his Alternatives (0), (1), and (2)—numbered in order of increasing course-grainedness of content. On Alternative (2), expressions are deemed strictly synonymous iff they are logically equivalent. This criterion seems hopeless as an account of the objects of propositional attitude. On Alternative (1), expressions are deemed synonymous iff they are λ-convertible. …Read more
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254A Problem in the Frege-Church Theory of Sense and DenotationNoûs 27 (2): 158-166. 1993.There is an inconsistency among claims made (or apparently made) in separate articles by Alonzo Church concerning Frege's distinction between sense and denotation taken together with plausible assertions by Frege concerning his notion of ungerade Sinn-i.e., the sense that an expression allegedly takes on in positions in which it has ungerade Bedeutung, denoting its own customary sense. As with any inconsistency, the difficulty can be avoided by relinquishing one of the joint assumptions from whi…Read more
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253That FPhilosophical Studies 141 (2). 2008.Jeffrey King's principal objection to the direct-reference theory of demonstratives is analyzed and criticized. King has responded with a modified version of his original argument aimed at establishing the weaker conclusion that the direct-reference theory of demonstratives is either incomplete or incorrect. It is argued that this fallback argument also fails
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253How to Measure the Standard MetreProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 88 (1). 1988.Nathan Salmon; XII*—How to Measure the Standard Metre, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 88, Issue 1, 1 June 1988, Pages 193–218
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248On What ExistsIn Frederique Janssen-Lauret (ed.), Quine, Structure, and Ontology, Oxford University Press. pp. 200-229. 2020.Quine’s criterion of theoretical ontological commitment is subject to a variety of interpretations, all of which save one yield incorrect verdicts. Moreover, the interpretation that yields correct verdicts is not what Quine meant. Instead the intended criterion unfairly imputes ontological commitments to theories that lack those commitments and fails to impute commitments to theories that have them. Insofar as Quine’s criterion is interpreted so that it yields only correct verdicts, it is trivia…Read more
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245Relational BeliefIn Paolo Leonardi & Marco Santambrogio (eds.), Metaphysics, Mathemeatics, and Meaning, Cambridge University Press. pp. 206-228. 1995.
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243The Good, the Bad, and the UglyIn Marga Reimer & Anne Bezuidenhout (eds.), Descriptions and beyond, Oxford University Press. pp. 230--260. 2004.
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241A Paradox about Sets of PropertiesSynthese 199 (5-6): 12777-12793. 2021.A paradox about sets of properties is presented. The paradox, which invokes an impredicatively defined property, is formalized in a free third-order logic with lambda-abstraction, through a classically proof-theoretically valid deduction of a contradiction from a single premise to the effect that every property has a unit set. Something like a model is offered to establish that the premise is, although classically inconsistent, nevertheless consistent, so that the paradox discredits the logic em…Read more
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240Wholes, Parts, and NumbersPhilosophical Perspectives 11 1-15. 1997.A puzzle concerning fractional and mixed numbers of things (e.g., two and a half oranges) is examined.
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234The Decision Problem for Effective ProceduresLogica Universalis 17 (2): 161-174. 2023.The “somewhat vague, intuitive” notion from computability theory of an effective procedure (method) or algorithm can be fairly precisely defined even if it is not sufficiently formal and precise to belong to mathematics proper (in a narrow sense)—and even if (as many have asserted) for that reason the Church–Turing thesis is unprovable. It is proved logically that the class of effective procedures is not decidable, i.e., that no effective procedure is possible for ascertaining whether a given pr…Read more
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227Effective ProceduresPhilosophies 8 (2): 27. 2023.This is a non-technical version of "The Decision Problem for Effective Procedures." The “somewhat vague, intuitive” notion from computability theory of an effective procedure (method) or algorithm can be fairly precisely defined, even if it does not have a purely mathematical definition—and even if (as many have asserted) for that reason, the Church–Turing thesis (that the effectively calculable functions on natural numbers are exactly the general recursive functions), cannot be proved. However,…Read more
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University of California, Los AngelesDepartment of PhilosophyVisiting Distinguished Professor (Part-time)
APA Western Division
Los Angeles, California, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
1 more
Philosophy of Language, Misc |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic, Misc |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Logic in Philosophy |