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Summary Some propositions, e.g., those containing proper names and indexicals, seem to be directly about particular objects in a special way.
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  1. Problems for Russellian Act-Type Theories.Arvid Båve - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    I here discuss two problems facing Russellian act-type theories of propositions, and argue that Fregean act-type theories are better equipped to deal with them. The first relates to complex singular terms like '2+2', which turn out not to pose any special problem for Fregeans at all, whereas Soames' theory currently has no satisfactory way of dealing with them (particularly, with such "mixed" propositions as the proposition that 2+2 is greater than 3). Admittedly, one possibility stands out as the most promising (...)
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  2. Higher-order logic as metaphysics.Jeremy Goodman - forthcoming - In Peter Fritz & Jones Nicholas (eds.), Higher-Order Metaphysics. Oxford University Press.
    This chapter offers an opinionated introduction to higher-order formal languages with an eye towards their applications in metaphysics. A simply relationally typed higher-order language is introduced in four stages: starting with first-order logic, adding first-order predicate abstraction, generalizing to higher-order predicate abstraction, and finally adding higher-order quantification. It is argued that both β-conversion and Universal Instantiation are valid on the intended interpretation of this language. Given these two principles, it is then shown how we can use pure higher-order logic to (...)
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  3. Does singular thought have an epistemic essence?James Openshaw - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    What is involved in having a singular thought about an ordinary object? On the leading epistemic view, one has this capacity if and only if one has belief-forming dispositions which would reliably enable one to get its properties right (Dickie, 2015). I first argue that Dickie’s official view entails surprising and unpalatable claims about either rationality or singular thought, before offering a precisification. Once we have reached that level of abstraction, it becomes difficult to see what is distinctively epistemic about (...)
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  4. A Puzzle about Belief-about.Alex Rausch - forthcoming - Mind.
    I present a puzzle for the standard, propositional semantic account of belief reports by considering novel inferences which it incorrectly predicts to be invalid under assumptions that are plausible by its advocates’ own lights. In response, I propose a conservative departure from the standard view on which certain ‘that’-clauses designate novel devices of semantic type that I call open propositions. After outlining some desiderata for a theory of open propositions, I provide some reasons for advocates of the standard view to (...)
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  5. Reference in remembering: towards a simulationist account.James Openshaw & Kourken Michaelian - 2024 - Synthese 203 (3):1-32.
    Recent theories of remembering and of reference (or singular thought) have de-emphasised the role causation was thought to play in mid- to late-twentieth century theorising. According to postcausal theories of remembering, such as simulationism, instances of the psychofunctional kind _remembering_ are not, in principle, dependent on appropriate causal chains running from some event(s) remembered to the occurrence of remembering. Instead they depend only on the reliability, or proper functioning, of the cognitive system responsible for their production. According to broadly reliabilist (...)
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  6. Los monstruos kaplanianos y la lógica de los demostrativos.Tomas Barrero - 2023 - Ideas y Valores. Revista Colombiana de Filosofía 72 (181):221-244.
    ¿Cómo puede la lógica representar expresiones indéxicas como “yo”, “aquí” y “ahora”? ¿Cómo no debe representarlas? Examino estas dos preguntas a partir de la Lógica de los Demostrativos (LD) de Kaplan y su impopular prohibición de operadores monstruosos. A pesar de algunos defectos de formulación, sostengo que dicha prohibición está guiada por una poderosa visión de las relaciones lógicas de validez entre oraciones con indéxicos que desafía la concepción tradicional de consecuencia lógica como preservación de la verdad y resalta el (...)
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  7. A modified Kripkean theory of negative existentials.Chaoan He - 2023 - Analysis 83 (2):243-248.
    In a 2019 paper, Hausmann raised a new and interesting problem for Kripke’s account of negative existentials. He argued that Kripke’s account leads to the absurd consequence that anybody who has good reasons to believe that there are no propositions also has good reasons to believe that he or she does not exist. In this paper I propose a modified Kripkean theory, which is invulnerable to a Hausmann-like argument. As will be seen, the modified theory can be squarely justified in (...)
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  8. À Propos de Pierre, Does He…or Doesn’t He?Nathan Salmon - 2023 - In Ernest Lepore & David Sosa (eds.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Language, 3. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. pp. 176-181.
    In Frege’s Puzzle (1986), Salmon analyzed ‘a withholds believing p’ in terms of a ternary relation BEL of x believing a proposition p under a guise g. The proposed analysis is the following: There is a proposition guise g such that a grasps p by means of g but a does not stand in BEL to p and g. Sean Crawford has made a proposal for Millians to evade propositional guises through second-order belief. Specifically, in effect, Crawford’s proposes to analyze (...)
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  9. What do propositions explain? Inflationary vs. deflationary perspectives and the case of singular propositions.Manuel García-Carpintero & Michele Palmira - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-21.
    In this paper we take up the question of the explanatory significance of the notion of propositional content. Our first goal is to disentangle two types of approach: According to what we call inflationism, propositions should be taken seriously enough to expect explanatory payoffs from them. The alternative deflationary approach rejects this claim. Our second goal is to explore the inflationism vs. deflationism contrast in depth by focusing on the distinction between singular and general propositions. We argue that inflationism fails (...)
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  10. Russellians should have a no proposition view of empty names.Thomas Hodgson - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Empty names are a problem for Russellians. I describe three ways to approach solving the problem. These are positing gappy propositions as contents, nonsingular propositions as contents, or denying that sentences containing empty names have contents. I discuss methods for deciding between solutions. I then argue for some methods over others and defend one solution using those methods. I reject the arguments that either intuitions about truth value, truth, content, or meaningfulness can decide between the solutions. I give an alternative (...)
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  11. Presentism.David Ingram & Jonathan Tallant - 2022 - The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Presentism is the view that only present things exist. So understood, presentism is primarily an ontological doctrine; it’s a view about what exists, absolutely and unrestrictedly. The view is the subject of extensive discussion in the literature on time and change, with much of it focused on the problems that presentism allegedly faces. Thus, most of the literature that frames the development of presentism has grown up either in formulating objections to the view (e.g., Sider 2001: 11–52), or in response (...)
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  12. Propositional contingentism and possible worlds.Christopher James Masterman - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-34.
    Propositional contingentism is the view that what propositions there are is a contingent matter—certain propositions ontologically depend on objects which themselves only contingently exist. Possible worlds are, loosely, complete ways the world could have been. That is to say, the ways in which everything in its totality could have been. Propositional contingentists make use of possible worlds frequently. However, a neglected, but important, question concerns whether there are any notions of worlds which are both theoretically adequate and consistent with propositional (...)
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  13. Talking About: An Intentionalist Theory of Reference.Elmar Unnsteinsson - 2022 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Combining new insights from cognitive science and speech act theory, Unnsteinsson develops a compelling theory of singular reference which avoids well-known puzzles. The theory, Edenic intentionalism, is grounded in a mechanistic perspective on explanation in cognitive science and a new Gricean account of speaker meaning and speaker reference.
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  14. Singular Propositions.Peter Hanks - 2021 - In Ernest Lepore & David Sosa (eds.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  15. Qu'est-ce qu'une pensée singulière?Ludovic Soutif - 2021 - Paris, France: Vrin.
    Parmi toutes les pensées que nous avons sur le monde, certaines portent sur des objets particuliers de façon plus directe (ou moins lâche) que les pensées dites descriptives et sont, pour cette raison, qualifiées de singulières. La pensée exprimée par l’énoncé : « Jean Nicod est mort en 1924 » n’est, intuitivement, pas la même que celle exprimée par l’énoncé : « L’auteur de la Géométrie dans le monde sensible est mort en 1924 », ne serait-ce que parce que la (...)
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  16. Russellians can solve the problem of empty names with nonsingular propositions.Thomas Hodgson - 2020 - Synthese 197:5411–5433.
    Views that treat the contents of sentences as structured, Russellian propositions face a problem with empty names. It seems that those sorts of things cannot be the contents of sentences containing such names. I motivate and defend a solution to the problem according to which a sentence may have a singular proposition as its content at one time, and a nonsingular one at another. When the name is empty the content is a nonsingular Russellian structured proposition; when the name is (...)
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  17. The Structure of Content is Not Transparent.Thomas Hodgson - 2020 - Topoi 39 (2):425-437.
    Sentences in context have semantic contents determined by a range of factors both internal and external to speakers. I argue against the thesis that semantic content is transparent to speakers in the sense of being immediately accessible to speakers in virtue of their linguistic competence.
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  18. Frege, Singularism, and Thinking Episodes.Ludovic Soutif - 2020 - In Jean Philippe Narboux & Denis Perrin (eds.), New Essays On Frege’s Logical Investigations. São Paulo, State of São Paulo, Brazil: Nonada. pp. 167-198.
    Logical Investigations (notably, The Thought) is one of the works wherein Frege voices his hostility to psychologism in logic, science, and semantics. Such hostility lies, arguably, behind his threefold conceptual distinction between thought (Gedanke), thinking (Denken), and ideas (Vorstellungen). In this essay I investigate, to begin with, Frege’s motivations for drawing the distinction and keeping thinking episodes (one of the meanings of ‘thoughts’ in English) out of the picture. It turns out, or so I argue, that psychologism threatens, on Frege’s (...)
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  19. An Argument for Existentialism.Yannis Stephanou - 2020 - Acta Analytica 35 (4):507-520.
    Existentialism about propositions is the view that a proposition expressed in a sentence containing a nonempty name or indexical depends ontologically on the referent of the name or indexical: the proposition could not exist if the referent did not. The paper focuses on names. It discusses some arguments for existentialism and then presents a novel one. That argument does not presuppose that propositions have constituents, and it could be accepted by those who hold broadly Fregean views about names. It shows (...)
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  20. Against Kripke’s solution to the problem of negative existentials.Marco Hausmann - 2019 - Analysis 79 (3):411-415.
    In this paper, I try to show that Kripke’s proposed solution to the problem of negative existentials fails. I try to show that Kripke’s proposal fails because it entails that anybody who has good reasons to believe that there are no propositions has also good reasons to believe that he or she does not exist. However, there were philosophers who had good reasons to believe that there are no propositions even though they didn’t have good reasons to believe that they (...)
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  21. Thisness Presentism: An Essay on Time, Truth, and Ontology.David Ingram - 2019 - Oxford, UK: Routledge.
    Thisness Presentism outlines and defends a novel version of presentism, the view that only present entities exist and what is present really changes. Presentism is a view of time that captures a real and objective difference between what is past, present, and future, and which offers a model of reality that is dynamic and mutable, rather than static and immutable. The book advances a new defence of presentism by developing a novel ontology of thisness, combining insights about the nature of (...)
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  22. Existentialism, aliens and referentially unrestricted worlds.Michael Tze-Sung Longenecker - 2019 - Synthese 196 (9):3723-3738.
    Existentialism claims that propositions that directly refer to individuals depend on those individuals for their existence. I argue for two points regarding Existentialism. First, I argue that recent accounts of Existentialism run into difficulties accommodating the possibility of there being a lonely alien electron. This problem is distinct from one of the better-known alien problems—concerning iterated modal properties of aliens—and can’t be solved using a standard response to the iterated case. Second, though the lonely alien electron problem might seem to (...)
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  23. Le fressellianisme face au dilemme de l’accointance.Michael Murez - 2019 - Les Etudes Philosophiques 130 (3):421-440.
    Selon le russellianisme, nous avons des pensées singulières faisant directement référence aux objets, fondées sur des relations d’accointance (1 re partie). Selon le frégéanisme, toute pensée est médiatisée par un concept (2 e partie). Le fressellianisme anti-descriptiviste cherche à réconcilier ces thèses apparemment opposées, et à éviter les objections auxquelles chacune s’expose, en postulant des concepts singuliers, individués par des relations d’accointance (3 e partie). Mais le fressellianisme rencontre un dilemme : s’il conçoit l’accointance en termes causaux, il rencontre les (...)
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  24. Acquaintance and first-person attitude reports.Henry Ian Schiller - 2019 - Analysis 79 (2):251-259.
    It is often assumed that singular thought requires that an agent be epistemically acquainted with the object the thought is about. However, it can sometimes truthfully be said of someone that they have a belief about an object, despite not being interestingly epistemically acquainted with that object. In defense of an epistemic acquaintance constraint on singular thought, it is thus often claimed that belief ascriptions are context sensitive and do not always track the contents of an agent’s mental states. This (...)
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  25. Frege’s puzzle is about identity after all.Elmar Unnsteinsson - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 99 (3):628-643.
    Many philosophers have argued or taken for granted that Frege's puzzle has little or nothing to do with identity statements. I show that this is wrong, arguing that the puzzle can only be motivated relative to a thinker's beliefs about the identity or distinctness of the relevant object. The result is important, as it suggests that the puzzle can be solved, not by a semantic theory of names or referring expressions as such, but simply by a theory of identity statements. (...)
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  26. Singular truth-conditions without singular propositions.Gregory Bochner - 2018 - Synthese 195 (6):2741-2760.
    In this paper I argue that propositionalism is what generates a tension between referentialism and harmony. Harmony can be preserved if we replace propositionalism by centred referentialism, according to which referential thoughts and utterances about an object have descriptive contents that must be evaluated relative to a world centred on that object at the relevant time. By disentangling truth-conditions and contents, this move allows us to dissolve the tension between referentialism and descriptivism. The view that emerges has three main components: (...)
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  27. Singular Thought, Cognitivism, and Conscious Attention.Heimir Geirsson - 2018 - Erkenntnis 83 (3):613-626.
    The focus of this paper will be on singular thoughts. In the first section I will present Jeshion’s cognitivism; a view that holds that one should characterize singular thoughts by their cognitive roles. In the second section I will argue that, contrary to Jeshion’s claims, results from studies of object tracking in cognitive psychology do not support cognitivism. In the third section I will discuss Jeshion’s easy transmission of singular thought and argue that it ignores a relevant distinction between general (...)
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  28. What is a Singular Proposition?Ephraim N. Glick - 2018 - Mind 127 (508):1027-1067.
    An account of the distinction between singular and general propositions should reflect the core ideas that have motivated the distinction. Those core ideas can be appreciated independently of many commitments regarding the metaphysics of propositions, but theorists with differing views on the latter have given quite different explanations of what it is for a proposition to be singular or general. Many of those explanations turn out not to reflect the core ideas adequately after all, either by misclassifying certain propositions or (...)
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  29. Russellians can have a no proposition view of empty names.Thomas Hodgson - 2018 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 61 (7):670-691.
    Russellians can have a no proposition view of empty names. I will defend this theory against the problem of meaningfulness, and show that the theory is in general well motivated. My solution to the problem of meaningfulness is that speakers’ judgements about meaningfulness are tracking grammaticality, and not propositional content.
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  30. Thisnesses, Propositions, and Truth.David Ingram - 2018 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (3):442-463.
    Presentists, who believe that only present objects exist, should accept a thisness ontology, since it can do considerable work in defence of presentism. In this paper, I propose a version of presentism that involves thisnesses of past and present entities and I argue this view solves important problems facing standard versions of presentism.
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  31. Referential Intentions: A Response to Buchanan and Peet.Elmar Unnsteinsson - 2018 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (3):610-615.
    Buchanan (2014) argues for a Gricean solution to well-known counterexamples to direct reference theories of content. Peet (2016) develops a way to change the counterexample so that it seems to speak against Buchanan’s own proposal. I argue that both theorists fail to notice a significant distinction between the kinds of cases at issue. Those appearing to count against direct reference theory must be described such that speakers have false beliefs about the identity of the object to which they intend to (...)
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  32. Three Arguments for Humility.David Yates - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (2):461-481.
    Ramseyan humility is the thesis that we cannot know which properties realize the roles specified by the laws of completed physics. Lewis seems to offer a sceptical argument for this conclusion. Humean fundamental properties can be permuted as to their causal roles and distribution throughout spacetime, yielding alternative possible worlds with the same fundamental structure as actuality, but at which the totality of available evidence is the same. On the assumption that empirical knowledge requires evidence, we cannot know which of (...)
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  33. Object‐Dependent Thought Without Illusion.Solveig Aasen - 2017 - European Journal of Philosophy 25 (1):68-84.
    When unknowingly experiencing a perceptual hallucination, a subject can attempt to think specifically about what is, as far as he or she can tell, the perceived object. Is the subject then deceived about his or her cognitive situation? I answer negatively. Moreover, I argue that this answer is compatible with holding that thought specifically about a certain object – singular thought – is object-dependent. By contrast, both critics and advocates of the view that singular thought is object-dependent have assumed this (...)
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  34. The Unsatisfactoriness of Unsaturatedness.Danny Frederick - 2017 - In Piotr Stalmaszczyk (ed.), Philosophy and Logic of Predication. Peter Lang.
    Frege proposed his doctrine of unsaturatedness as a solution to the problems of the unity of the proposition and the unity of the sentence. I show that Frege’s theory is mystical, ad hoc, ineffective, paradoxical and entails that singular terms cannot be predicates. I explain the traditional solution to the problem of the unity of the sentence, as expounded by Mill, which invokes a syncategorematic sign of predication and the connotation and denotation of terms. I streamline this solution, bring it (...)
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  35. Propositional Content. [REVIEW]Indrek Reiland - 2017 - Philosophical Review 126 (1):132-136.
  36. Direct Reference for the Narrow Minded.David Shier - 2017 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 77 (3):225-248.
    This paper develops a theory of belief and belief ascription which retains the core of the received Propositionalist theory but which, unlike the Propositionalist theory, is compatible with both Direct Reference and Individualism about belief. The focus is on developing an alternative analysis of belief ascriptions, drawing out its implications, and applying it to some standard problems. On that analysis, ascriptions involving directly referential embedded terms are seen as roughly characterizing, but not specifying, the contents of beliefs. This feature is (...)
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  37. Securing singular thought about merely hypothetical entities.Greg Ackerman - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (8):2193-2213.
    Although we are still in the dark when it comes to giving necessary and jointly sufficient criteria for what it takes to be thinking a singular thought, the paradigm cases are just ones where an agent is thinking about some particular object. When we erroneously think that Vulcan is a planet, our thought appears to be singular since it is, after all, about Vulcan. A promising way to explain this is to claim that there is something, a merely hypothetical entity, (...)
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  38. Semantics through Reference to the Unknown.Arslan Aran - 2016 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 16 (3):381-392.
    In this paper, I dwell on a particular distinction introduced by Ilhan Inan—the distinction between ostensible and inostensible use of our language. The distinction applies to singular terms, such as proper names and definite descriptions, or to general terms like concepts and to the ways in which we refer to objects in the world by using such terms. Inan introduces the distinction primarily as an epistemic one but in his earlier writings (1997: 49) he leaves some room for it to (...)
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  39. Singular Propositions, Negation and the Square of Opposition.Lopamudra Choudhury & Mihir Kumar Chakraborty - 2016 - Logica Universalis 10 (2-3):215-231.
    This paper contains two traditions of diagrammatic studies namely one, the Euler–Venn–Peirce diagram and the other, following tradition of Aristotle, the square of oppositions. We put together both the traditions to study representations of singular propositions, their negations and the inter relationship between the two. Along with classical negation we have incorporated negation of another kind viz. absence. We have also considered the changes that take place in the context of open universe.
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  40. Propositional Contingentism.Peter Fritz - 2016 - Review of Symbolic Logic 9 (1):123-142.
    According to propositional contingentism, it is contingent what propositions there are. This paper presents two ways of modeling contingency in what propositions there are using two classes of possible worlds models. The two classes of models are shown to be equivalent as models of contingency in what propositions there are, although they differ as to which other aspects of reality they represent. These constructions are based on recent work by Robert Stalnaker; the aim of this paper is to explain, expand, (...)
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  41. Propositions. [REVIEW]Thomas Hodgson - 2016 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 24 (4):585-587.
  42. The Virtues of Thisness Presentism.David Ingram - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (11):2867-2888.
    Presentists believe that only present things exist. But opponents insist this view has unacceptable implications: if only present things exist, we can’t express singular propositions about the past, since the obvious propositional constituents don’t exist, nor can we account for temporal passage, or the openness of the future. According to such opponents, and in spite of the apparent ‘common sense’ status of the view, presentism should be rejected on the basis of these unacceptable implications. In this paper, I present and (...)
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  43. Merricks vs. the Russellian Orthodoxy.Jeff Speaks - 2016 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 93 (2):469-477.
    Many Russellians endorse the theses that propositions (i) are structured, (ii) have logical forms, (iii) have objects they are directly about as constituents, (iv) cannot exist without their constituents and (v) exist contingently. In his Propositions, Merricks argues against (i)-(v). I respond to his arguments.
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  44. The problem of empty names and Russellian Plenitude.Joshua Spencer - 2016 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (3):1-18.
    ‘Ahab is a whaler’ and ‘Holmes is a whaler’ express different propositions, even though neither ‘Ahab’ nor ‘Holmes’ has a referent. This seems to constitute a theoretical puzzle for the Russellian view of propositions. In this paper, I develop a variant of the Russellian view, Plenitudinous Russellianism. I claim that ‘Ahab is a whaler’ and ‘Holmes is a whaler’ express distinct gappy propositions. I discuss key metaphysical and semantic differences between Plenitudinous Russellianism and Traditional Russellianism and respond to objections that (...)
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  45. Confusion is Corruptive Belief in False Identity.Elmar Unnsteinsson - 2016 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (2):204-227.
    Speakers are confused about identity if they mistake one thing for two or two things for one. I present two plausible models of confusion, the Frege model and the Millikan model. I show how a prominent objection to Fregean models fails and argue that confusion consists in having false implicit beliefs involving the identity relation. Further, I argue that confused identity has characteristic corruptive effects on singular cognition and on the proper function of singular terms in linguistic communication.
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  46. Hyperintensional propositions.Mark Jago - 2015 - Synthese 192 (3):585-601.
    Propositions play a central role in contemporary semantics. On the Russellian account, propositions are structured entities containing particulars, properties and relations. This contrasts sharply with the sets-of-possible-worlds view of propositions. I’ll discuss how to extend the sets-of-worlds view to accommodate fine-grained hyperintensional contents. When this is done in a satisfactory way, I’ll argue, it makes heavy use of entities very much like Russellian tuples. The two notions of proposition become inter-definable and inter-substitutable: they are not genuinely distinct accounts of how (...)
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  47. Modal Difficulties with Singular Propositions.Filip Kawczyński - 2015 - Filozofia Nauki 23 (1):39-58.
    Singular propositions are structured entities which sometimes include macroscopic concrete things as their elements. That leads to numerous difficulties, also those concerning modalities, good example of which is the famous argument developed by Plantinga, who concludes that accepting a theory of singular propositions leads to necessary existence of (apparently contingent) objects — elements of such propos¬itions. In the paper I present a possible way to avoid such harmful consequences and to undermine Plantinga’s reasoning. My approach involves the idea of two (...)
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  48. Propositions.Trenton Merricks - 2015 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
    Trenton Merricks presents an original argument for the existence of propositions, and defends an account of their nature. He draws a variety of controversial conclusions, for instance about supervaluationism, the nature of possible worlds, truths about non-existent entities, and whether and how logical consequence depends on modal facts.
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  49. Mental Files and Times.Vasilis Tsompanidis - 2015 - Topoi 34 (1):233-240.
    This paper argues that applying a mental files framework for singular thought to thoughts about specific times could produce an account of tensed thought with significant advantages over competing theories. After describing the framework , I argue for the conceivability of treating particular times as res of singular thoughts , and the possibility that humans open ‘object files’ for them during perception . Then I discuss the possible make-up and function of a NOW indexical mental file . The last section (...)
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  50. A Note on Logical Truth.Corine Besson - 2014 - Logique Et Analyse 57 (227):309-331.
    Classical logic counts sentences such as ‘Alice is identical with Alice’ as logically true. A standard objection to classical logic is that Alice’s self-identity, for instance, is not a matter of logic because the identity of particular objects is not a matter of logic. For this reason, many philosophers argue that classical logic is not the right logic, and that it should be abandoned in favour of free logic — logic free of existential commitments with respect to singular terms. In (...)
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