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815VaguenessIn Lynn Nadel (ed.), Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Vol. 4, Nature Publishing Group. 2003.This is an encyclopedia entry on vagueness, focusing mainly on the opposition between re re and de dicta (linguistic or cognitive) accounts.
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231Il catalogo universaleIn Roberto Finzi & Paolo Zellini (eds.), Forme della ragione, Clueb. 2008.There are more things between heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, says Hamlet. Right. But there are also philosophies that have dreamt of things that are neither here nor there, as Goodman says. There is a danger of suffering from ontological myopia just as there is a danger of suffering from ontological allucination. This paper is about some basic strategies that are available to (or have been elaborated by) philosophers to steer clear of both dangers in their efforts to draw…Read more
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314Nomi in crisi di identitàRivista di Estetica 38 143-156. 2008.An exchange of letters among proper names and natural-kind terms, dealing with various identity and individuation problems (rigid designation, use-mention ambiguities, translation) from their point of view.
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261Parti connesse e interi sconnessiRivista di Estetica 42 (20): 87-90. 2002.The Doctrine of Potential Parts says that proper undetached parts are merely potential entities, entities that do not exist but would exist if they were detached from the rest. They are just aspects of the whole to which they belong, ways in which the whole could be broken down, and talk of such parts is really just talk about the modal properties of the whole. Here I offer a reconstruction of this doctrine and present an argument to illustrate its hidden kinship with another, parallel but indep…Read more
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696Boundaries, continuity, and contactNoûs 31 (1): 26-58. 1997.There are conflicting intuitions concerning the status of a boundary separating two adjacent entities (or two parts of the same entity). The boundary cannot belong to both things, for adjacency excludes overlap; and it cannot belong to neither, for nothing lies between two adjacent things. Yet how can the dilemma be avoided without assigning the boundary to one thing or the other at random? Some philosophers regard this as a reductio of the very notion of a boundary, which should accordingly be …Read more
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289The Plan of a SquareCanadian Journal of Philosophy 41 (S1): 137-144. 2011.An imaginary report of Square’s plans for a journey aimed to find out whether the topology of Flatland is sphere-like or torus-like, intended as a trubute to Hans Herzberger’s uncompromising philosophical style, courage, and passion.
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31”, Formal Ontology in Information Systems. Proceedings of the Third International Conference (edited book)IOS Press. 2004.Just as ontology developed over the centuries as part of philosophy, so in recent years ontology has become intertwined with the development of the information sciences. Researchers in various fields have come to realize that a solid foundation for their projects calls for an explicit theorization of the types of entities and relations that make up their respective domains of inquiry, and as the need for integrating such projects arises, so does the need to identify common ontological principles…Read more
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249Ontologia: dove comincia e dove finisceSistemi Intelligenti 15 (3). 2003.As Quine famously argued, the answer to the question: ‘What Is There’ is just: ‘Everything’. But to say ‘Everything’ is to say nothing. So we need to go further. This paper deals with the question of whether we can go any further in ontology without doing metaphysics proper.
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276Self-reference Self-explainedPhiNews 6. 2004.A dialogue among statements that try to explain to each other the mechanisms and peculiarities of self-referential assertions and, particularly, of their context-dependence.
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7ForewordThe Monist 88 (3): 325-328. 2005.Might we some day be in a position to move about in time, just as we can already move about in space? Today, few would question that deliberate change in temporal location is logically possible. There is no contradiction in the thought that Tim could step into a time machine and travel backwards to visit his grandfather, or forwards to visit his grandchildren. That is, there is no contradiction provided that we take time travel to involve influencing the course of history rather than changing it…Read more
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392Mancanze, omissioni e descrizioni negativeRivista di Estetica 32 (2): 109-127. 2006.Assuming that events form a genuine ontological category, shall we say that a good inventory of the world ought to include “negative” events—failures, omissions, things that didn’t happen—along with positive ones? I argue that we shouldn’t. Talk of non-occurring events is like talk of non-existing objects and should not be taken at face value. We often speak as though there were such things, but deep down we want our words to be interpreted in such a way as to avoid serious ontological commitmen…Read more
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107The Context-Dependency of Temporal Reference in Event SemanticsIn Paolo Bouquet, Patrick Brezillon, Francesca Castellani & Luciano Serafini (eds.), in Modeling and Using Context. Proceedings of the Second International and Interdisciplinary Conference, Springer. 1999.Temporal reference in natural language is inherently context dependent: what counts as a moment in one context may be structurally analysed in another context, and vice versa. In this note we outline a way of accounting for this phenomenon within event-based semantics.
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1141Supervaluationism and Its LogicsMind 116 (463): 633-676. 2007.What sort of logic do we get if we adopt a supervaluational semantics for vagueness? As it turns out, the answer depends crucially on how the standard notion of validity as truth preservation is recasted. There are several ways of doing that within a supervaluational framework, the main alternative being between “global” construals (e.g., an argument is valid iff it preserves truth-under-all-precisifications) and “local” construals (an argument is valid iff, under all precisifications, it preser…Read more
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329Del fuoco che non brucia: risposte, riflessioni, ringraziamentiIn Elena Casetta & Valeria Giardino (eds.), Mettere a Fuoco Il Mondo. Conversazioni sulla Filosofia di Achille Varzi (Special Issue of Isonomia – Epistemologica), University of Urbino. 2014.An overview of the way I picture the amorphous world we live in, built around my comments and responses to nine festschrift essays by A. Borghini (on the Fedro metaphor and the art of butchery), F. Calemi (on the predication principle and metalinguistic nominalism), C. Calosi (on the argument from mereological universalism to extensonality), E. Casetta (on the role of “monsters” in the realism/antirealism debate), V. Giardino (on inductive reasoning, spatial representation, and problem solving),…Read more
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200L'autoriferimento si spiega da séRivista di Estetica 41 (18): 5-7. 2001.A dialogue among statements that try to explain to each other the mechanisms and peculiarities of self-referential assertions and, particularly, of their context-dependence.
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19Oggetti fiat (edited book)Rivista di estetica. 2002.A selection of recent philosophical texts—in Italian translation—dealing with the mereology of material objects and the nature of their boundaries. Introduction by L. Morena. Papers by R. M. Chisholm, P. M. Simons, B. Smith, A. Stroll, A. C. Varzi.
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393Complementary Logics for Classical Propositional LanguagesKriterion - Journal of Philosophy 4 (1): 20-24. 1992.In previous work, I introduced a complete axiomatization of classical non-tautologies based essentially on Łukasiewicz’s rejection method. The present paper provides a new, Hilbert-type axiomatization (along with related systems to axiomatize classical contradictions, non-contradictions, contingencies and non-contingencies respectively). This new system is mathematically less elegant, but the format of the inferential rules and the structure of the completeness proof possess some intrinsic inter…Read more
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110Vagueness, Logic, and OntologyIn Darragh Byrne & Max Kölbel (eds.), Arguing about language, Routledge. pp. 135-154. 2010.Remember the story of the most-most? It’s the story of that club in New York where people are the most of every type. There is the hairiest bald man and the baldest hairy man; the shortest giant and the tallest dwarf; the smartest idiot and the stupidest wise man. They are all there, including honest thieves and crippled acrobats. On Saturday night they have a party, eat, drink, dance. Then they have a contest. “And if you can tell the hairiest bald man from the baldest hairy man—we are told—you…Read more
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110Inconsistency without ContradictionNotre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 38 (4): 621-639. 1997.David Lewis has argued that impossible worlds are nonsense: if there were such worlds, one would have to distinguish between the truths about their contradictory goings-on and contradictory falsehoods about them; and this--Lewis argues--is preposterous. In this paper I examine a way of resisting this argument by giving up the assumption that ‘in so-and-so world’ is a restricting modifier which passes through the truth-functional connectives The outcome is a sort of subvaluational semantics which…Read more
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96Refining Temporal Reference in Event StructuresNotre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 37 (1): 71-83. 1996.This paper expands on the theory of event structures put forward in previous work by further investigating the subtle connections between time and events. Specifically, in the first part we generalize the notion of an event structure to that of a refinement structure, where various degrees of temporal granularity are accommodated. In the second part we investigate how these structures can account for the context-dependence of temporal structures in natural language semantics
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608Patterns, Rules, and InferencesIn Jonathan E. Adler & Lance J. Rips (eds.), Reasoning: Studies of Human Inference and its Foundations, Cambridge University Press. pp. 282-290. 2008.The “Game of the Rule” is easy enough: I give you the beginning of a sequence of numbers (say) and you have to figure out how the sequence continues, to uncover the rule by means of which the sequence is generated. The game depends on two obvious constraints, namely (1) that the initial segment uniquely identify the sequence, and (2) that the sequence be non-random. As it turns out, neither constraint can fully be met, among other reasons because the relevant notion of randomness is either vacuo…Read more
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412Confini. Dove finisce una cosa e inizia un’altraIn Andrea Bottani & Richard Davies (eds.), Ontologie regionali, Mimesis. 2007.Ci imbattiamo in un confine ogni volta che pensiamo a un’entità demarcata rispetto a ciò che la circonda. C’è un confine (una superficie) che delimita l’interno di una sfera dal suo esterno; c’è un confine (una frontiera) che separa il Maryland dalla Pennsylvania. Talvolta la collocazione esatta di un confine non è chiara o è in qualche modo controversa (come quando si cerchi di tracciare i limiti del monte Everest, o il confine del nostro corpo). Talaltra il confine non corrisponde a una discon…Read more
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576Universalism entails ExtensionalismAnalysis 69 (4): 599-604. 2009.I argue that Universalism (the thesis that mereological composition is unrestricted) entails Extensionalism (the thesis that sameness of composition is sufficient for identity) as long as the parthood relation is transitive and satisfies the Weak Supplementation principle (to the effect that whenever a thing has a proper part, it has another part disjoint from the first).
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155Higher-order vagueness and the vagueness of ‘vague’Mind 112 (446). 2003.R. Sorensen’s argument to the effect that ’vague’ is a vague predicate has been used by D. Hyde to infer that vague predicates suffer from higher-order vagueness. M. Tye has objected (convincingly) that this is too strong: all that follows from Sorensen’s result is that there are some border border cases, but not necessarily border border cases of every vague predicate. I argue that this is still too strong: Sorensen’s proof presupposes the existence of border border cases, hence cannot be used …Read more
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408Critical Notice of John Heil, From an Ontological Point of View (review)Philosophical Books 47 (2): 148-154. 2006.Book information: John Heil, From an Ontological Point of View, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003, xv + 267 pp, $45.00 cloth, ISBN 0-19-925974-7.
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176On the Boundary between Material and Formal OntologyIn Barry Smith, Riichiro Mizoguchi & Sumio Nakagawa (eds.), Interdisciplinary Ontology, Vol. 3: Proceedings of the Third Interdisciplinary Ontology Meeting, Keio University Press. 2010.There are two main ways, philosophically, of characterizing the business of ontology. On one account, made popular by Quine, ontology is concerned with the material question of what there is. On the other, which made its way into our times through Brentano and his pupils, ontology is concerned with the task of laying bare the formal structure of all there is, whatever it is. My question, here, is whether one can pursue one sort of theory without also engaging in the other—whether, or to what ext…Read more
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351Teoria e pratica dei confiniSistemi Intelligenti 17 (3). 2005.Are there any bona fide boundaries, i.e., boundaries that carve at the joints? Or is any boundary—hence any object—the result of a fiat articulation reflecting our cognitive biases and our social practices and conventions? Does the choice between these two options amount to a choice between realism and wholesome relativism?
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487OntologiaLaterza. 2005.An introduction to analytic ontology. Part 1 deals with the question, What is ontology?, focusing on (i) the interplay between ontological and broadly metaphysical concerns, and (ii) the difference between material ontology and formal ontology. Part 2 deals with the question, How is ontology done?, focusing on (i) the delicate interplay between ontology and truth-making (or: between meaning and existence), and (ii) the differences between revolutionary vs. hermeneutic, prescriptive vs. descripti…Read more
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733A Note on the Transitivity of ParthoodApplied ontology 1 (2): 141-146. 2006.That parthood is a transitive relation is among the most basic principles of classical mereology. Alas, it is also very controversial. In a recent paper, Ingvar Johansson has put forward a novel diagnosis of the problem, along with a corresponding solution. The diagnosis is on the right track, I argue, but the solution is misleading. And once the pieces are properly put together, we end up with a reinforcement of the standard defense of transitivity on behalf of classical mereology.
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Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |