Eduardo Villanueva

This paper criticizes Ruffino’s illocutionary defense of Kripke’s famous example of the contingent a priori: the standard meter. Ruffino uses Searle and Vanderveken’s speech act theory to argue that measurement stipulations generate a priori knowledge of contingent facts. Against this, I argue that the institutional conditions underlying these stipulations cannot be separated from the grounds of justification. Unlike mathematical or logical knowledge, knowledge that these institutional conditions are satisfied is essential to knowledge of measurement stipulations, preventing genuine a priori status.

This paper examines three challenges to Bob Hale's Deflationary Conception of Properties (DCP) raised in Being Necessary (Fred-Rivera & Leech, OUP 2018). According to DCP, the existence of a meaningful predicate is sufficient for the existence of a corresponding property, a thesis central to the neo-Fregean programme's recovery of Frege's Theorem via Hume's Principle. I focus on objections by Shapiro, Cook, and Heck. Shapiro questions whether DCP can sustain the Axiom of Choice, since it requires that for every set there be a definable property holding of exactly its members. Cook extends DCP to infinitary predicates and shows that while this supports the Axiom of Choice on countably infinite domains, it fails on uncountable ones. In response to both, I argue that the relevant constraint should be reframed in epistemological terms -- from constructibility to intelligibility -- and sketch a reformulation of Hale's Property Principle along these lines. Heck's challenge targets the impredicative Comprehension Axiom needed for Frege's Theorem, proposing Arché logic as an alternative. I argue that the schematic reasoning on which Arché logic relies is fundamentally semantic, grounded in what expressions are supposed to do (reference, predication), preserving epistemological innocence without requiring explicit specification of the second-order domain.