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...

En un mundo ideal, Fregeano, el contenido de la aseveración sería también el contenido del item lingüístico que emitimos para realizar la aseveración. En otras palabras, idealmente, lo que afirmamos es el contenido de las palabras que decimos.   Sin embargo, nos dice  Mena, estos dos desiderata son insatisfacibles en conjunto: El contenido de la aseveración es el contenido del item lingüístico que emitimos para realizar la aseveración. El contenido de items lingüísticos es composicional. La solución tradicional, Lewiseana, contextualista, es introducir un dualismo de contenido, distinguiendo entre contenido semántico y contenido pragmático, de tal manera que (1) y (2) sean verdaderos, cada uno sobre un tipo de contenido distinto. (1) sería verdadero sobre el contenido pragmático y (2) sobre el semántico, así: El contenido de la aseveración es el contenido pragmático del item lingüístico que emitimos para realizar la aseveración. El contenido semántico de items lingü...

From early Greece to present-day researchers in communication, the belief is strong that the concepts the members of an audience hold of a speaker do affect how they respond to what is being said. ( Cripe 1985 : 348) Part of conversation consists in allocating voice—that is, determining who has standing to demand responses from us within the conversation and who has not. For example, we must decide which questions we are warranted in ignoring (for example, if they derail the conversation, if they change topic in an authoritarian way, etc.) and which we must respond to.  In general, if a speaker has standing, she has the responsibility of displaying (and sometimes, even signaling) such standing and the hearers have the responsibility of recognize her standing. Allocation of voice is important because ignoring people can be, well, horrible: To be ignored is to be excluded while physically present. One's opinions are unsolicited, comments unwanted, approval unneeded. It is the vi...

Para Avron (2005) la negación es un fenómeno lógico, porque es necesario poder expresar en el lenguaje formal de la lógica la falsedad. Hasta ahí, como buen expresivista, yo estaría de acuerdo, pero él lo entiende la falsedad como una propiedad. Lo cual podría sonar bien pero no es una afirmación filosóficamente neutral. Por ejemplo, si la falsedad es una propiedad, ¿cuál es su dominio? Litros de tinta han corrido – mucha de ella en México – tratando de responder esta pregunta. Asumamos que son proposiciones. Luego, aun si concedimos que la falsedad es una propiedad, no se sigue la tesis de Arvin de que la falsedad solo fija las condiciones de verdad del operador – bueno, en realidad, de los operadores, porque el tercer supuesto controversial de la propuesta de  Avron  es que es suficiente para que algo sea una negación que satisfaga estas condiciones de verdad.   Jõao Marcos ha criticado esta propuesta precisamente por esta razón. Estrada entra a la discusión cuestiona...

¿Qué determina que un operador oracional —una modalidad, un cuantificador, un adverbio— sea iterable o no? Se acepta comúnmente que los operadores modales del lenguaje natural son iterables, en la medida en que resultan inteligibles enunciados como "me gustaría que me gustara cocinar, de modo que disfrutara tener que hacerlo” donde “gustará” cae dentro del alcance de “gustaría”.   Existen, sin embargo, otros casos que resultan carentes de sentido, o en los que una de las ocurrencias del operador parece no aportar nada semánticamente, es decir, hacen que el enunciado suene redundante, como "Siempre ha estado ahí siempre", "Ya es definitivo que la carrera queda cancelada definitivamente" o  "El sensor es exactamente exacto" . Otro ejemplo, un poco mas controversial es el enunciado   "es posible que no se pueda hacer ya nada", donde el operador modal alético "pueda" cae dentro del alcance del operador modal alético"es posible...

  There is something suspicious about our reliance on simple recursive definitions in logic — specifically, our custom of introducing logical operators into the language via inductive clauses of the form: if F1, F2, … Fn are wffs, then On(F1, F2, … Fn) is also a wff. This formulation tacitly assumes that all logical operators are what I have elsewhere (1994) called "homogeneous": their values belong to the same category as their arguments. In particular, it assumes they are all sentential operators, since both their arguments and their values are sentences. There are undeniable metalogical advantages to conceiving of logical language this way — advantages pressed on me by both Raúl Orayén and David McCarthy, when I was a student. Yet several philosophers of logic, including Frege, Łukasiewicz, Haack, and myself, have challenged this orthodoxy. Frege, for instance, introduced a logical operation from sentences to their contents — a kind of restricted disquotation — that is not...