•  956
    Searle on Analyticity, Necessity, and Proper Names
    Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 19 (2): 109-136. 2012.
    My aim is to show that once we appreciate how Searle (1958) fills in the details of his account of proper names – which I will dub the presuppositional view – and how we might supplement it further, we are in for a twofold discovery. First, Searle’s account is crucially unlike the so-called cluster-of-descriptions view, which many philosophers take Searle to have held. Second, the presuppositional view he did hold is interesting, plausible, and worthy of serious reconsideration. The idea that Se…Read more
  •  680
    Artifactualism and Authorial Creation
    Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics 6. 2014.
    Artifactualism about fictional characters, positing Harry Potter as an abstract artifact created by J. K. Rowling, has been criticized on the grounds that the idea of creating such objects is mysterious and problematic. In the light of such qualms, it is worth homing in on an argument in favor of artifactualism, showing that it is the best way to include the likes of Harry Potter in our ontology precisely because it incorporates authorial creation. To that end, I will be exploring Kripke’s fleet…Read more
  •  639
    In this paper, I explore a line of argument against one form of realism about fictional characters : abstract artifact theory, the view according to which fictional characters like Harry Potter are part of our reality, but, they are abstract objects created by humans, akin to the institution of marriage and the game of soccer. I will defend artifactualism against an objection that Mark Sainsbury considers decisive against it: the category-mistake objection. The objection has it that artifactuali…Read more
  •  414
    In “Naming with Necessity”, it is argued that Kripke’s thesis that proper names are rigid designators is best seen as being motivated by an individual-driven picture of modality, which has two parts. First, inherent in proper-name usage is the expectation that names refer to modally robust individuals: individuals that can sustain modal predications like ‘is necessarily human’. Second, these modally robust individuals are the fundamental building blocks on the basis of which possible worlds shou…Read more
  •  340
    Ruzsa on Quine’s Argument Against Modal Logic
    Hungarian Philosophical Review (Magyar Filozófiai Szemle) (4): 40-48. 2010.
  •  302
    Analytic Truths and Kripke’s Semantic Turn
    Croatian Journal of Philosophy 6 (2): 327-341. 2006.
    In his influential Naming and Necessity lectures, Saul Kripke made new sense of modal statements: “Kant might have been a bachelor”, “Königsberg is necessarily identical with Kaliningrad”. Many took the notions he introduced-metaphysical necessity and rigid designation -- to herald new metaphysical issues and have important consequences. In fact, the Kripkean insight is at bottom semantic, rather than metaphysical: it is part of how proper names work that they purport to refer to individuals to …Read more
  •  300
    This paper offers a unified, quantificational treatment of incomplete descriptions like ‘the table’. An incomplete quantified expression like ‘every bottle’ (as in “Every bottle is empty”) can feature in true utterances despite the fact that the world contains nonempty bottles. Positing a contextual restriction on the bottles being talked about is a straightforward solution. It is argued that the same strategy can be extended to incomplete definite descriptions across the board. ncorporating the…Read more
  •  278
    Inferring Content: Metaphor and Malapropism
    Croatian Journal of Philosophy 55 (44). 2015.
    It is traditionally thought that metaphorical utterances constitute a special— nonliteral—kind of departure from lexical constraints on meaning. Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson have been forcefully arguing against this: according to them, relevance theory’s comprehension/interpretation procedure for metaphorical utterances does not require details specifi c to metaphor (or nonliteral discourse); instead, the same type of comprehension procedure as that in place for literal utterances covers metap…Read more
  •  278
    This paper concerns a thorny problem posed by conditional requirements: we expect some modal conditionals of the form ‘if p, then it must be that p’ to be false, yet they all come out true given two basic assumptions needed to account for ordinary conditional requirement like ‘If the light turns red, then cars must stop’. The first assumption is a semantic expectation linking conditional requirements with absolute ones, the second is the possible-worlds-based definition of modal sentences. Keep…Read more
  •  128
    My goal is to reflect on the phenomenon of inadvertent creation and argue that—various objections to the contrary—it doesn’t undermine the view that fictional characters are abstract artifacts. My starting point is a recent challenge by Jeffrey Goodman that is originally posed for those who hold that fictional characters and mythical objects alike are abstract artifacts. The challenge: if we think that astronomers like Le Verrier, in mistakenly hypothesizing the planet Vulcan, inadvertently crea…Read more
  •  103
    Inadvertent Creation and Fictional Characters.
    Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 22 (Supp. 1): 169-184. 2015.
    In several papers, Petr Koťátko defends an “ontologically modest account of fictional characters”. Consider a position (which I have been defending) that is anything but ontologically restrained: positing fictional characters like Andrei Bolkonsky in War and Peace as abstract artifacts. I will argue, first, that such a position turns out to offer a nice fit with Petr Koťátko’s proposal about narrative fiction, one that fares better than an alternative pretense-based theory that doesn’t posit Bol…Read more
  •  102
    Artifactualism and Inadvertent Authorial Creation
    Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics Vol. 7/2015. 2015.
    In a series of papers (two of them in previous ESA Proceedings), I have been defending a fictional artifactualist position according to which fictional characters (like Prince Bolkonsky in Tolstoy’s War and Peace are non-concrete, human created objects (which are commonly labeled abstract artifacts). In this paper, I aim to bring together from my previous work two lines of defending fictional artifactualism: that (for the fictional artifactualist) making room for (i) authorial creation and for…Read more
  •  86
    An Argument for Authorial Creation
    Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 22 (4). 2015.
    Artifactualism about fictional characters, positing Harry Potter as an abstract artifact created by J. K. Rowling, has been criticized on the grounds that the idea of creating such objects is mysterious and problematic. In the light of such qualms, it is worth homing in on an argument in favor of artifactualism, showing that it is the best way to include the likes of Harry Potter in our ontology precisely because it incorporates authorial creation. To that end, I will be exploring Kripke’s fleet…Read more
  •  54
    According to Sperber and Wilson, relevance theory’s comprehension/interpretation procedure for metaphorical utterances does not require details specific to metaphor (or nonliteral discourse); instead, the same type of comprehension procedure as that in place for literal utterances covers metaphors as well. One of Sperber and Wilson’s central reasons for holding this is that metaphorical utterances occupy one end of a continuum that includes literal, loose and hyperbolic utterances with no sharp …Read more
  •  27
    On Inclusive Reference Anaphora
    with Marcel den Dikken and Anikó Lipták
    In Karine Megerdoomian & Leora Anne Bar-el (eds.), WCCFL 20: Proceedings of the 20th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, Cascadilla Press. 2001.
  •  22
    Situations and Individuals (review)
    Philosophical Review 117 (2): 314-316. 2008.
  •  5
    Metafora, relevancia, jelentés (edited book)
    with Tibor Bárány and János Tőzsér
    Loisir Kiadó. 2015.
    Még 2013 májusában került sor arra a Metafora című nyelvészeti és filozófiai workshopra, amelynek a keretein belül elhangzottak a jelen kötetben helyet kapott tanulmányok alapját képező, az Erasmus Kollégium nyelvfilozófiai kutatócsoportjának tagjai által jegyzett előadások. Ezeknek, s így a mostani összeállításnak is kiemelt témája a relevanciaelmélet, amellyel (pontosabban annak metaforafelfogásával) részletesen foglalkozik a bevezető dolgozat, illetve az azt követő három írás. Ezek közül az e…Read more