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37What Kind of Non-Realism is Fictionalism?Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11. 2024.Fictionalists about a kind of disputed entity aim to give a face-value interpretation of our discourse about those entities without affirming their existence. The fictionalist’s commitment to non-realism leaves open three options regarding their ontological position: they may deny the existence of the disputed entities (anti-realism), remain agnostic regarding their existence (agnosticism), or deny that there are ontological facts of the matter (ontological anti-realism). This paper outlines a m…Read more
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21Pragmatic Analyses of Indispensability Arguments in advanceJournal of Philosophical Research. forthcoming.According to the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument (QPIA), we should be realists about mathematics because mathematics is indispensable to science. QPIA’s reasoning can be understood in two ways. Under the confirmational analysis, QPIA argues that mathematics is confirmed as part of our best scientific theories. Under the pragmatic analysis, QPIA argues that our scientific practices implicitly assume the truth of mathematics. The usual reasons given in favour of the pragmatic analysis are t…Read more
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26Arbiters of Truth and ExistenceEuropean Journal of Analytic Philosophy 20 (1): 1-23. 2024.Call the epistemological grounds on which we rationally should determine our ontological (or alethiological) commitments regarding an entity its arbiter of existence (or arbiter of truth). It is commonly thought that arbiters of existence and truth can be provided by our practices. This paper argues that such views have several implications: (1) the relation of arbiters to our metaphysical commitments consists in indispensability, (2) realist views about a kind of entity should take the kinds of…Read more
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21Interpreting mereotopological connectionAustralasian Journal of Logic 20 (1): 32-46. 2023.This paper examines ten possible topological interpretations of connection and for each interpretation, identifies sufficient conditions under which a significant class of topological spaces provides models of General Extensional Mereotopology with Closure Conditions (GEMTC) in which some key mereotopological ideas align with their topological analogues. In particular, there is an interpretation under which the non-empty sets of any symmetric topology are a model of GEMTC with alignment between …Read more
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32Fictionalism and MeinongianismTheoria : An International Journal for Theory, History and Fundations of Science 36 (1): 49-62. 2021.Fictionalism about a kind of disputed object is often motivated by the fact that the view interprets discourse about those objects literally without an ontological commitment to them. This paper argues that this motivation is inadequate because some viable alternatives to fictionalism have similar attractions. Meinongianism—the view that there are true statements about non-existent objects—is one such view. Meinongianism bears significant similarity to fictionalism, so intuitive doubts about its…Read more
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37A Functional Approach to OntologyMetaphysica 22 (1): 23-43. 2021.There are two ways of approaching an ontological debate: ontological realism recommends that metaphysicians seek to discover deep ontological facts of the matter, while ontological anti-realism denies that there are such facts; both views sometimes run into difficulties. This paper suggests an approach to ontology that begins with conceptual analysis and takes the results of that analysis as a guide for which metaontological view to hold. It is argued that in some cases, the functions for which …Read more
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34On Some Meta-Theoretic Topological Features of the Region Connection CalculusLogic and Logical Philosophy 1-31. forthcoming.This paper examines several intended topological features of the Region Connection Calculus (RCC) and argues that they are either underdetermined by the formal theory or given by the complement axiom. Conditions are identified under which the axioms of RCC are satisfied in topological models under various set restrictions. The results generalise previous results in the literature to non-strict topological models and across possible interpretations of connection. It is shown that the intended int…Read more
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386A Quinean Reformulation of Fregean ArgumentsActa Analytica 38 (3): 481-494. 2023.In ontological debates, realists typically argue for their view via one of two approaches. The _Quinean approach_ employs naturalistic arguments that say our scientific practices give us reason to affirm the existence of a kind of entity. The _Fregean approach_ employs linguistic arguments that say we should affirm the existence of a kind of entity because our discourse contains reference to those entities. These two approaches are often seen as distinct, with _indispensability arguments_ typica…Read more
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57J. Azzouni, Ontology without Borders, Oxford University Press, New York, 2017, xxxvi + 256 pp (review)Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 24 (2): 177-178. 2018.
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Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |