conceptual

Reading “On what there is” again in 2026, I am vert surprised about many things about it. Not onyl the tone – even though Alejandro Vazquez del Mercado has reminded me of how much the tone of analytic scholarship has changed in the last century, I was still surprised – but also how good it is!  So many good and deep thoughts! And also how ba d it is, as well!  It is rigurous in following his and his opponents arguments to their consequences, but when it comes to give a final argument against Meinongianism and Platonism, he just shrugs and claims that: “I remain free to maintain that the fact that a given linguistic utterance is meaningful (or significant, as I prefer to say so as not to invite hypostasis of meanings as entities) is an ultimate and irreducible matter of fact; or, I may undertake to analyze it in terms directly of what people do in the presence of the linguistic utterance in question and other utterances similar to it.” And later “The problem of explaining these...

 In philosophy of logic, it has become common to find arguments based on one logic outperforming another in accounting for the data, i.e., capturing and systematizing our pre-theoretical intuitions and practices regarding what follows from what, what is consistent with what, etc. However, our intuitions are not well suited for this job. They are too messy and mushy. Our intuitions do not use logical or, in general, theoretical language. We may have a positive intuitive reaction towards a certain assertion, it is not innocuous to say that the assertion is intuitively true. So perhaps we should moderate our expectations when we deal with cases and intuitions. “What counts as the relevant reasoning in as scientific case, which aspects of the case should be abstracted away, and how thew resulting reasoning should ve formally represented are tghemnselves matters of methodological and philosophical interpretation” (Martínez Ordaz 2026) It does not follow, of course, from the fact that ar...