Graeme (R.) Forbes

This chapter draws out some parallels between Chisholm's Paradox and puzzles about identity through time. It focuses on the example of Old Number One, the Bentley racing car in which Wolf ‘Babe’ Barnato won the Le Mans 24 hour race in 1929 and (debatably) 1930. Attempts in 1990 to sell a certain car, also referred to as Old Number One, were resisted by some on the grounds that too many upgrades, modifications, and repairs had taken place for the 1929 car to be considered the same car as the 1990 car. The chapter argues for the coherence of a ‘no fact of the matter’ verdict about such puzzles, and develops apparatus that involves a novel conception of degrees of truth in terms of higher-order levels of vagueness, thereby avoiding the need for talk of ‘degrees of identity’.

The term 'essentialism' in its popular usage is usually qualified in some way, as in 'biological essentialism', 'gender essentialism' and 'social essentialism'. The essentialist theses were defended on the grounds that denying them leads, under plausible assumptions, to pairs of worlds containing objects which are intrinsic and spatio‐temporal duplicates and yet which are numerically distinct. This chapter outlines some technical difficulties in getting the definitions of 'essential property' and 'individual essence' exactly right. It explains the idea of a metaphysically essential property in terms of Aristotle's 'essential/accidental' contrast. A popular idea is to invoke the notion, which has its roots in Aristotle's theory of essence and accident, of a substance sortal. A different way of developing a sortal‐based account of essential kinds is suggested by David Wiggins, who argues that it is only ultimate sortals that represent essential properties, where an ultimate sortal is the most general sortal corresponding to a given principle of individuation.

This paper is about a substitution-failure in attitude ascriptions, but not the one you think. A standard view about the semantic shape of ‘that’-clause attitude ascriptions is that they are fundamentally relational. The attitude verb expresses a binary relation whose extension, if not empty, is a collection of pairs each of which consists in an individual and a proposition, while the ‘that’-clause is a term for a proposition. One interesting problem this view faces is that, within the scope of many attitude verbs, ‘that’-clauses are not interchange able with certain other terms which stand for the same propositions as the clauses are supposed to. For example, (1a) below may be true, but (1c) is probably not: (1) a. Holmes {fears/suspects} that Moriarty has returned. b. That Moriarty has returned is the proposition that Moriarty has re turned. c. Holmes {fears/suspects} the proposition that Moriarty has returned. For only the exceptionally timorous fear propositions, and, excluding contexts in which we speak of a ‘suspect premise’, only the unusually paranoid suspect them. The truth-conditional change eVected by substituting propositional descrip tion for ‘that’- clause illustrated in (1) occurs with a wide range of attitude verbs. If you understand that the window of opportunity is closing, perhaps you should act before it is too late, but if you mere-.

Free-choice disjunction manifests itself in complements of comparatives, existential modals, and related contexts. For example, “Socrates is older than Plato or Aristotle” is usually understood to mean “older than each”, not “older than at least one”. Normally, to get an “at least one” reading, a wh-rider has to be appended, e.g., “whichever is younger” or “but I don’t remember which”. Similarly, “Socrates could have been a lawyer or a banker” usually means “Socrates could have been a lawyer and could have been a banker”. And “Socrates needs an umbrella or a raincoat” is normally understood in a way that isn’t synonymous with “Socrates needs an umbrella or Socrates needs a raincoat”. Roughly, the reading is “getting a satisfactory umbrella would meet his needandgetting a satisfactory raincoat would meet his need”.These examples all have “conjunctive force” and the question I address is whether there’s a satisfactory pragmatic account of why the force is with them. I present a simple Gricean argument that the “co-operative speaker” assumption, added to a disjunctive literal meaning, produces conjunctive force for epistemic modals. This argument may work for some other cases, but I express some pessimism about covering the full range of modals.

This book builds on the idea that pragmatics and philosophy are strictly interconnected and that advances in one area will generate consequential advantages in the other area. The first part of the book, entitled ‘Theoretical Approaches to Philosophy of Language’, contains contributions by philosophers of language on connectives, intensional contexts, demonstratives, subsententials, and implicit indirect reports. The second part, ‘Pragmatics in Discourse’, presents contributions that are more empirically based or of a more applicative nature and that deal with the pragmatics of discourse, argumentation, pragmatics and law, and context. The book presents perspectives which, generally, make most of the Gricean idea of the centrality of a speaker’s intention in attribution of meaning to utterances, whether one is interested in the level of sentence-like units or larger chunks of discourse.

Analytic philosophy has recently demonstrated a revived interest in metaphysical problems about possibility and necessity. Graeme Forbes here provides a careful description of the logical background of recent work in this area for those who may be unfamiliar with it, moving on to d discuss the distinction between modality de re and modality de dicto and the ontological commitments of possible worlds semantics. In addition, Forbes offers a unified theory of the essential properties of sets, organisms, artefacts, substances, and events, based on the doctrine that identity facts must be intrinsically grounded, and analyzes and rejects apparent counterexamples to this doctrine.