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  1. Representing or shaping reality? What 'class' can teach about 'woman'.Teresa Marques - forthcoming - In Manuel Gustavo Isaac, Kevin Scharp & Steffen Koch (eds.), New Perspectives on Conceptual Engineering. Synthese Library.
    Haslanger (2000) has argued that we should ameliorate concepts of race or gender to better capture existing structural inequalities. Her analysis was criticized by Simion (2018a), who argued that a concept should be ameliorated only if doing so preserves epistemic accuracy. But, as I argue, this criticism misses Haslanger's target. In response, Podosky (2018) and McKenna (2018b) have argued that conceptual revisions need not preserve "epistemic accuracy" since concepts can "shape reality", not just represent it. Here I argue that social (...)
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  2. 7 Berkeley On the Meaning of General Terms.Keota Fields - 2024 - In Manuel Fasko & Peter West (eds.), Berkeley’s Doctrine of Signs. Boston: De Gruyter. pp. 127-142.
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  3. General-term rigidity is meaning constancy.Fredrik Haraldsen - 2022 - Analysis 82 (1):41-49.
    It is often thought that some general terms or kind terms, in particular natural kind terms, are rigid designators, and that a properly extended notion of singular-term rigidity can help explain the behaviour of such general terms. In this article, I argue that the only legitimate notion of general-term rigidity is a trivial one and identify some crucial asymmetries between a posteriori necessary truths involving names and a posteriori necessary truths involving general terms. If we pay attention to these asymmetries, (...)
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  4. Common nouns as modally non-rigid restricted variables.Peter Lasersohn - 2020 - Linguistics and Philosophy 44 (2):363-424.
    I argue that common nouns should be analyzed as variables, rather than as predicates which take variables as arguments. This necessitates several unusual features to the analysis, such as allowing variables to be modally non-rigid, and assigning their values compositionally. However, treating common nouns as variables offers a variety of theoretical and empirical advantages over a more traditional analysis: It predicts the conservativity of nominal quantification, simplifies the analysis of articleless languages, derives the weak reading of sentences with donkey anaphora, (...)
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  5. When does communication succeed? The case of general terms.Peter Pagin - 2020 - In Teresa Marques & Åsa Wikforss (eds.), Shifting Concepts: The Philosophy and Psychology of Conceptual Variability. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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  6. Roads to Reference: An Essay on Reference Fixing in Natural Language.Mario Gomez-Torrente - 2019 - Oxford, Reino Unido: Oxford University Press.
    How is it that words come to stand for the things they stand for? Is the thing that a word stands for - its reference - fully identified or described by conventions known to the users of the word? Or is there a more roundabout relation between the reference of a word and the conventions that determine or fix it? Do words like 'water', 'three', and 'red' refer to appropriate things, just as the word 'Aristotle' refers to Aristotle? If so, (...)
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  7. A dilemma about kinds and kind terms.T. Parent - 2019 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 12):2987-3006.
    'The kind Lion' denotes a kind. Yet many generics are thought to denote kinds also, like the subject-terms in 'The lion has a mane', 'Dinosaurs are extinct', and 'The potato was cultivated in Ireland by the end of the 17th century.' This view may be adequate for the linguist's overall purposes--however, if we limit our attention to the theory of reference, it seems unworkable. The problem is that what is often predicated of kinds is not what is predicated of the (...)
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  8. General Terms and Relational Modality.Kathrin Glüer & Peter Pagin - 2012 - Noûs 46 (1):159-199.
    Natural kind terms have exercised philosophical fancy ever since Kripke, in Naming and Necessity, claimed them to be rigid designators. He there drew attention to the peculiar, name-like behavior of a family of prima facie loosely related general terms of ordinary English: terms such as ‘water’, ‘tiger’, ‘heat’, and ‘red’. Just as for ordinary proper names, Kripke argued that such terms cannot be synonymous with any of the definite descriptions ordinary speakers associate with them. Rather, the name-like behavior of these (...)
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  9. On the Rigidity of General Terms.Alper Yavuz - 2012 - Dissertation, Bogazici University
    The aim of this thesis is to discuss whether general terms are rigid and if they are, how their rigidity should be interpreted. To this end, I first present the problems related to the rigidity of general terms. The most important ones among them are the following: What do general terms refer to? Is there any difference between the terms called “natural kind terms” and other general terms? After that, I discuss the arguments of three competent interpretations which try to (...)
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  10. General terms, rigidity and the trivialization problem.Genoveva Martí & José Martínez-Fernández - 2011 - Synthese 181 (2):277 - 293.
    We defend the view that defines the rigidity of general terms as sameness of designated universal across possible worlds from the objection that such a characterization is incapable of distinguishing rigid from non-rigid readings of general terms and, thus, that it trivializes the notion of rigidity. We also argue that previous attempts to offer a solution to the trivialization problem do no succeed.
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  11. General terms as designators : a defence of the view.Genoveva Martí & José Martínez-Fernández - 2010 - In Helen Beebee & Nigel Sabbarton-Leary (eds.), The Semantics and Metaphysics of Natural Kinds. New York: Routledge. pp. 46--63.
    We argue that the view that kind terms designate universals does not fall prey to the trivialization problem. We also argue that the view can respond to other challenges, specifically, the claims that an adequate notion of rigidity for kind terms must: (a) classify natural kind terms as rigid and classify many other general terms as non-rigid and (b) account for the necessity of true theoretical identifications involving rigid terms.
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  12. Externalism, internalism, and logical truth.Corine Besson - 2009 - Review of Symbolic Logic 2 (1):1-29.
    The aim of this paper is to show what sorts of logics are required by externalist and internalist accounts of the meanings of natural kind nouns. These logics give us a new perspective from which to evaluate the respective positions in the externalist-internalist debate about the meanings of such nouns. The two main claims of the paper are the following: first, that adequate logics for internalism and externalism about natural kind nouns are second-order logics; second, that an internalist second-order logic (...)
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  13. Rigid general terms and essential predicates.Ilhan Inan - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 140 (2):213 - 228.
    What does it mean for a general term to be rigid? It is argued by some that if we take general terms to designate their extensions, then almost no empirical general term will turn out to be rigid; and if we take them to designate some abstract entity, such as a kind, then it turns out that almost all general terms will be rigid. Various authors who pursue this line of reasoning have attempted to capture Kripke’s intent by defining a (...)
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  14. A Puzzle about Properties.Berit Brogaard - 2007 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (3):635-650.
    The paper argues that the assumption that there are property designators, together with two theoretically innocent claims, leads to a puzzle, whose solution requires us to reject the position that all (canonical) property designators are rigid. But if we deny that all (canonical) property designators are rigid, then the natural next step is to reject an abundant conception of properties and with it the suggestion that properties are the semantic values of predicates.
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  15. (1 other version)Rigidity, General Terms, and Trivialization.Dan López de Sa - 2007 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 107 (1pt1):117 - 123.
    The simple proposal for a characterization of general term rigidity is in terms of sameness of designation in very possible world. Critics like Schwartz (2002) and Soames (2002) have argued that such a proposal would trivialize rigidity for general terms. Martí (2004) claims that the objection rests on the failure to distinguish what is expressed by a general term and the property designated. I argue here against such a response by showing that the trivialization problem reappears even if one pays (...)
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  16. General Terms and Non-Trivial Rigid Designation.Genoveva Marti & José Martínez-Fernández - 2007 - In Concha Martínez, José L. Falguera & José M. Sagüillo (eds.), Current topics in logic and analytic philosophy =. Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. pp. 103-116.
    we explore the view that defines rigidity of general terms as sameness of designation across possible worlds. On this view, a general term is rigid just in case it designates the same universal (species, substance or property) in every possible world. This view has been proposed most notably by Bernard Linsky, Nathan Salmon and more recently by Joseph LaPorte, and it has been criticised by several philosophers, including Stephen Schwartz and Scott Soames.
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  17. Analyticity, Modality and General Terms.Peter Pagin & Kathrin Glüer-Pagin - 2007 - In J. Josefsson D. Egonsson (ed.), Hommage à Wlodek. Philosophical Papers Dedicated to Wlodek Rabinowicz.
    In his recent paper ‘Analyticity: An Unfinished Business in Possible-World Semantics’ (Rabinowicz 2006), Wlodek Rabinowicz takes on the task of providing a satisfactory definition of analyticity in the framework of possible-worlds semantics. As usual, what Wlodek proposes is technically well-motivated and very elegant. Moreover, his proposal does deliver an interesting analytic/synthetic distinction when applied to sentences with natural kind terms. However, the longer we thought and talked about it, the more questions we had, questions of both philosophical and technical nature. (...)
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  18. General Terms as Rigid Designators.Bernard Linsky - 2006 - Philosophical Studies 128 (3):655-667.
    According to Scott Soames’ Beyond Rigidity, there are two important pieces of unfinished business left over from Saul Kripke’s influential Naming and Necessity. Soames reads Kripke’s arguments about names as primarily negative, that is, as proving that names don’t have a meaning expressible by definite descriptions or clusters of them. The famous Kripkean doctrine that names are rigid designators is really only part of the negative case. The thesis that names refer to the same object with respect to every possible (...)
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  19. General Terms and Mass Terms.Stephen P. Schwartz - 2006 - In Michael Devitt & Richard Hanley (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Language. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 274–287.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Traditional Description Theory Kripke and Putnam Criticisms of the Direct Theory Legacy of the Direct Theory.
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  20. Rigidity and general terms.Genoveva Marti - 2004 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 104 (1):131-148.
    In this paper I examine two ways of defining the rigidity of general terms. First I discuss the view that rigid general terms express essential properties. I argue that the view is ultimately unsatisfactory, although not on the basis of the standard objections raised against it. I then discuss the characterisation in terms of sameness of designation in every possible world. I defend that view from two objections but I argue that the approach, although basically right, should be interpreted cautiously.
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  21. Are General Terms Rigid?Nathan Salmon - 2004 - Linguistics and Philosophy 28 (1):117 - 134.
    On Kripke’s intended definition, a term designates an object x rigidly if the term designates x with respect to every possible world in which x exists and does not designate anything else with respect to worlds in which x does not exist. Kripke evidently holds in Naming and Necessity, hereafter N&N (pp. 117–144, passim, and especially at 134, 139–140), that certain general terms – including natural-kind terms like ‘‘water’’ and ‘‘tiger’’, phenomenon terms like ‘‘heat’’ and ‘‘hot’’, and color terms like (...)
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  22. Kinds, general terms, and rigidity: A reply to LaPorte.Stephen P. Schwartz - 2002 - Philosophical Studies 109 (3):265 - 277.
    Joseph LaPorte in an article on `Kind and Rigidity'(Philosophical Studies, Volume 97) resurrects an oldsolution to the problem of how to understand the rigidityof kind terms and other general terms. Despite LaPorte'sarguments to the contrary, his solution trivializes thenotion of rigidity when applied to general terms. Hisarguments do lead to an important insight however. Thenotions of rigidity and non-rigidity do not usefullyapply at all to kind or other general terms. Extendingthe notion of rigidity from singular terms such as propernames to (...)
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  23. Resemblance and general terms.John L. Tienson - 1988 - Philosophical Studies 54 (1):87 - 108.
    Any successful account of general terms must explain our ability to apply terms correctly to new instances. Many philosophers have thought resemblance offers an ontologically sparse basis for such an account. However, Any natural and plausible account of general terms on the basis of resemblance requires quite a rich ontology, Including at least second order properties and relations. Given a sufficiently rich structure of resemblances, We can surely account for the application of many general terms. I argue, However, That our (...)
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  24. Hume on universals and general terms.John Tienson - 1984 - Noûs 18 (2):311-330.
  25. General terms and common resemblances.Patrick L. McKee & William Slauson - 1979 - Mind 88 (349):120-123.
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  26. Comments on Nathan salmon “are general terms rigid”.Robert May - manuscript
    1. Nathan Salmon paper is entitled with a question: are general terms rigid? He asks this question in way of engaging the issue of the extension of the notion of rigidity beyond the domain of singular terms. While singular terms has been the province of most of the discussion of this rigidity since Naming and Necessity, it is well known that Kripke saw the notion extending to at least certain general terms such as terms for natural kinds. Scott Soames has (...)
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