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Quantification and Ontology

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  • Cian Dorr (2006). What We Disagree About When We Disagree About Ontology. In Mark Eli Kalderon (ed.), Fictionalist Approaches to Metaphysics. Oxford University Press.
    There was once a land inhabited by many tribes. For a long time, each of the tribes was isolated from all the rest. When they finally made contact, all were amazed to discover how similar they were to one another. All of them spoke languages with exactly the same syntax— that of English. Nevertheless, it soon became clear that there were systematic behavioral differences among the tribes. These differences were reflected in the tribespeoples’ reactions to..
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  • Matti Eklund, Carnapian Theses in Metaontology and Metaethics.
    In contemporary debates about ontology, one prominent skeptical view emphasizes the existence of different possible languages for doing ontology. Eli Hirsch, in recent years the most prominent proponent of a view like this, has defended the claim that “many familiar questions about the ontology of physical objects are merely verbal. Nothing is substantively at stake in these questions beyond the correct use of language” and the claim that “quantifier expressions can have different meaning in different languages”.1 Ted Sider, while critical (...)
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  • Michael Glanzberg (2004). Quantification and Realism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 69 (3):541–572.
    This paper argues for the thesis that, roughly put, it is impossible to talk about absolutely everything. To put the thesis more precisely, there is a particular sense in which, as a matter of semantics, quantifiers always range over domains that are in principle extensible, and so cannot count as really being ‘absolutely everything’. The paper presents an argument for this thesis, and considers some important objections to the argument and to the formulation of the thesis. The paper also offers (...)
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  • Thomas Hofweber (2007). Innocent Statements and Their Metaphysically Loaded Counterparts. Philosophers' Imprint 7 (1):1-33.
    One puzzling feature of talk about properties, propositions and natural numbers is that statements that are explicitly about them can be introduced apparently without change of truth conditions from statements that don't mention them at all. Thus it seems that the existence of numbers, properties and propositions can be established`from nothing'. This metaphysical puzzle is tied to a series of syntactic and semantic puzzles about the relationship between ordinary, metaphysically innocent statements and their metaphysically loaded counterparts, statements that explicitly mention (...)
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  • Thomas Hofweber (2005). A Puzzle About Ontology. Noûs 39 (2):256–283.
    Ontology is the philosophical discipline that tries to find out what there is: what entities make up reality, what is the stuff the world is made from? Thus, ontology is part of metaphysics, and in fact it seems to be about half of all of metaphysics. It tries to establish what (kinds of) things there are, the other half tries to find out what the (general) properties of these things are and what (general) relations they have to each other. Settling (...)
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  • Thomas Hofweber (2005). A Puzzle About Ontology. Noûs 39 (2):256-283.
    Ontology is the philosophical discipline that tries to find out what there is: what entities make up reality, what is the stuff the world is made from? Thus, ontology is part of metaphysics, and in fact it seems to be about half of all of metaphysics. It tries to establish what (kinds of) things there are, the other half tries to find out what the (general) properties of these things are and what (general) relations they have to each other. Settling (...)
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  • Thomas Hofweber (1999). Ontology and Objectivity. Dissertation, Stanford University
    Ontology is the study of what there is, what kinds of things make up reality. Ontology seems to be a very difficult, rather speculative discipline. However, it is trivial to conclude that there are properties, propositions and numbers, starting from only necessarily true or analytic premises. This gives rise to a puzzle about how hard ontological questions are, and relates to a puzzle about how important they are. And it produces the ontologyobjectivity dilemma: either (certain) ontological questions can be trivially (...)
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  • Thomas Hofweber & Jeff Pelletier, Encuneral Noun Phrases.
    The semantics of noun phrases (NPs) is of crucial importance for both philosophy and linguistics. Throughout much of the history of the debate about the semantics of noun phrases there has been an implicit assumption about how they are to be understood. Basically, it is the assumption that NPs come only in two kinds. In this paper we would like to make that assumption explicit and discuss it and its status in the semantics of natural language. We will have a (...)
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  • Shaughan Lavine (2000). Quantification and Ontology. Synthese 124 (1-2).
    Quineans have taken the basic expression of ontological commitment to be an assertion of the form '' x '', assimilated to theEnglish ''there is something that is a ''. Here I take the existential quantifier to be introduced, not as an abbreviation for an expression of English, but via Tarskian semantics. I argue, contrary to the standard view, that Tarskian semantics in fact suggests a quite different picture: one in which quantification is of a substitutional type apparently first proposed by (...)
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  • David Lewis (1990). Noneism or Allism? Mind 99 (393):23-31.
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  • Ruth Barcan Marcus (1972). Quantification and Ontology. Noûs 6 (3):240-250.
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  • T. Parent, Ontic Terms and Ontology.
    Terms such as ‘exist’, ‘actual’, etc., (hereafter, “ontic terms”) are recognized as having ontologically “innocent” or non-commissive uses, besides their commissive uses. (E.g., ‘Pegasus exists’ will be true when ‘exist’ is relativized to a world of Greek myth.) In this paper, I identify five different non-commissive uses for ontic terms, and along the way I attempt to define (by a kind of via negativa) the commissive use of an ontic term, focusing on ‘actual’ as my example. The problem, however, is (...)
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  • Graham Priest (2008). The Closing of the Mind: How the Particular Quantifier Became Existentially Loaded Behind Our Backs. Review of Symbolic Logic 1 (1):42-55.
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  • Nathan Salmon (1987). Existence. Philosophical Perspectives 1:49-108.
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  • Theodore Sider (2006). Quantifiers and Temporal Ontology. Mind 115 (457).
    Eternalists say that non-present entities (for instance dinosaurs) exist; presentists say that they do not. But some sceptics deny that this debate is genuine, claiming that presentists simply represent eternalists' quantifiers over non-present entities in different notation. This scepticism may be refuted on purely logical grounds: one of the leading candidate ‘presentist quantifiers’ over non-present things has the inferential role of a quantifier. The dispute over whether non-present objects exist is as genuine and non-verbal as the dispute over whether there (...)
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  • Ori Simchen (forthcoming). Polyadic Quantification Via Denoting Concepts. Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic.
    The question of the origin of polyadic expressivity is explored and the results are brought to bear on Bertrand Russell’s 1903 theory of denoting concepts, which is the main object of criticism in Russell’s ‘On Denoting’. It is shown that, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, the background ontology of the earlier theory of denoting enables the full-blown expressive power of first-order polyadic quantification theory without any syntactic accommodation of scopal differences among denoting phrases such as ‘all F’, ‘every F’, and (...)
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  • James E. Tomberlin (1993). Singular Terms, Quantification, and Ontology I. Philosophical Issues 4:297-309.
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  • Achille C. Varzi, On the Interplay Between Logic and Metaphysics.
    As a theory of reasoning, logic has—or ought to have—nothing to do with metaphysics. It ought to have nothing to do with questions concerning what there is, or whether there is anything at all. It is precisely because of its metaphysical commitments that Aristotelian syllogistics, for example, was eventually deemed inadequate as a canon of pure logical reasoning. The inference from an A-form statement such as (1) All humans are mortal to the corresponding I-form statement, (2) Some humans are mortal, (...)
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  • Christopher John Fards Williams (1981). What is Existence? Oxford University Press.
    A thorough and closely argued examination of a central issue in philosophical logic, an issue which is shown to have profound implications for the philosophy oflanguage and much o metaphysics.
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  • Robert Williams, Fundamental and Derivative Truths.
    This paper investigates the claim that some truths are fundamentally or really true—and that others are not. Such a distinction can help us reconcile radically minimal metaphysical views with the verities of common sense, and may do essential theoretical work as a unified basis for distinguishing between ‘elite’ and ‘merely abundant’ properties, objects, and the like.
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  • Edward N. Zalta (1985-1986). Lambert, Mally, and the Principle of Independence. Grazer Philosophische Studien 25:447-459.
    In this paper, the author analyzes critically some of the ideas found in Karel Lambert's recent book, Meinong and the Principle of Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Lambert attempts to forge a link between the ideas of Meinong and the free logicians. The link comes in the form of a principle which, Lambert says, these philosophers adopt, namely, Mally's Principle of Independence, which Mally himself later abandoned. Instead of following Mally and attempting to formulate the principle in the material (...)
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