Online research in philosophy

I want to begin by distinguishing between what I will call a pure Fregean theory of reference and a theory of direct reference. A pure Fregean theory of reference holds that all reference to objects is determined by a sense or content. The kind of theory I have in mind is obviously inspired by Frege, but I will not be concerned with whether it is the theory that Frege himself held.1 A theory of direct reference, as I will understand it, denies that all reference to objects is determined by sense or content. We will also distinguish between a theory of reference for thought, and for language. This gives us a fourfold classification of theories. What is puzzling about direct reference theories is not that the semantics of an expression in a public language should assign as its semantic value just a referent, but how such facts could be understood to reflect an underlying feature of thought. There are two interconnected aspects to this..

The importance of the connotation theory in Ockham’s semantics and metaphysics can hardly be overstated---it is the main mechanism that brings forth Ockham’s famous ontological elimination. Yet none of the extant interpretations can satisfactorily accommodate three widely accepted theses: (1) there is no synonym in mental language; (2) a connotative term has a semantically equivalent nominal definition; and (3) there are simple connotative terms in Ockham’s mental language. In this paper I offer an interpretation that I argue can accommodate all.

The best way of becoming acquainted with William of Ockham and his Dialogue would be to read A.S. McGrade's "Introduction", "Principal Dates in Ockham's Life", and "Suggestions for Further Reading" in..

Distributive bounded lattices with a dual homomorphism as unary operation, called Ockham algebras, were firstly studied by Berman (1977). The varieties of Boolean algebras, De Morgan algebras, Kleene algebras and Stone algebras are some of the well known subvarieties of Ockham algebra. In this paper, new results about the congruence lattice of Ockham algebras are given. From these results and Urquhart's representation theorem for Ockham algebras a complete characterization of the subdirectly irreducible Ockham algebras is obtained. These results are particularized for a large number of subvarieties of Ockham algebras. For these subvarieties a full description of their subdirectly irreducible algebras is given as well.

The purpose of this essay is to take issue with two aspects of Marilyn Adams's monumental work William Ockham . Part I deals with Ockham's ontology, arguing (i) that Adams does not sufficiently appreciate the use Ockham makes of the prinicple of ontological parsimony in his attempt to refute the thesis that there are extramental universals or common natures and (ii) that she sets an implausibly high standard of success for Ockham's project of showing that the only singular entities are substances and qualities. Part II argues that Adams fails to provide a convincing defense of Ockham's 'anti-secularist' answer to the question of how Christian thinkers should react to prima facie conflicts between the deliverances of faith and the deliverances of reason.

Philosophy of science, statistics, and machine learning all recommend the selection of simple theories or models on the basis of empirical data, where simplicity has something to do with minimizing independent entities, principles, causes, or equational coefficients. This intuitive preference for simplicity is called Ockham's razor, after the fourteenth century theologian and logician William of Ockham. But in spite of its intuitive appeal, how could Ockham's razor help one find the true theory? For, in an updated version of Plato's Meno paradox, if we already know that the truth is simple, we don't need Ockham's help. And if we don't already know that the truth is simple, what entitles us to assume that it is?

The question of intellectual intuition in medieval philosophy is generally associated with names like John Duns Scotus and William Ockham whose majorcontributions to the development of the theory of intuition are well established. Nevertheless the way they approached this philosophical question is strongly related to the Franciscan tradition to which they both belonged so that an extensive comprehension of their theories of intuition requires the inquiry of their sources. As this paper means to show, Matthew of Aquasparta is one of John Duns Scotus’s most important sources in this matter and his treatment of both thequestions of direct intellectual knowledge of the material individual and of the self-knowledge of the soul are important in order to understand the role of theintelligible species and the immediate character of intuitive cognition. While for Matthew of Aquasparta there is no contradiction between the implication of thespecies in intuitive cognition and its immediacy, John Duns Scotus and William Ockham both find a contradiction between these aspects of knowledge andtherefore they both reject the presence of the species in intuitive cognition which is immediate. This paper will show the background of Matthew’s theory and theway he demonstrated that the presence of a species does not always qualify as mediation in knowledge and does not as such hinder the intuitive cognition.

In this paper I examine William Ockham’s theory of judgment and, in particular, his account of the nature and ontological status of its objects. Commentators, both past and present, habitually interpret Ockham as defending a kind of anti-realism about objects of judgment. My aim in this paper is two-fold. The first is to show that the traditional interpretation rests on a failure to appreciate the ways in which Ockham’s theory of judgment changes over the course of his career. The second, and larger, aim is to show that careful attention to these changes in Ockham’s account (and to the motivations for them) sheds new light on broader developments in his philosophy of mind—specifically, on his views about the nature of concepts and on his account of the nature and structure of intentionality itself.

It is well-known that Chatton is among the earliest and most vehement critics of Ockham’s theory of judgment, but scholars have overlooked the role Chatton’s criticisms play in shaping Ockham’s final account. In this paper, I demonstrate that Ockham’s most mature treatment of judgment not only contains revisions that resolve the problems Chatton identifies in his earlier theories, but also that these revisions ultimately bring his final account of the objects of judgment surprisingly close to Chatton’s own. Even so, I argue that, at the end of the day, there remain significant differences between their respective analyses of the structure and intentionality of judicative states.

Externalist readings of Ockham are currently most prominent in the literature. For instance, an externalist interpretation with respect both to mental content and the meaning of expressions is advocated by prominent scholars. In this paper, I want to argue that although this externalist picture is certainly not incorrect, it is nonetheless incomplete. As I show, Ockham distinguishes between two ways of acquiring concepts: one of them can be accounted for in wholly externalist terms while the other involves the understanding of linguistic expressions. According to the reading of Ockham I suggest here, it turns out that we can have two kinds of concepts pertaining to the same kind of things. But only one of the two is completely determined by external relations. Thus I conclude that the externalist picture of Ockham calls for some additions.