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...

Examen final de mi curso de licenciatura (pregrado) en Metafísica de la Ficción ¿De qué tesis metafísica es prima facie un contraejemplo la ficción y porqué?  ¿A qué tipo de entidad se refiere un nombre como “Pedro Picapiedra”, según el realismo ficcional? ¿Y a qué entidad en particular, de ese tipo, se refiere? Menciona dos ventajas del anti-realismo sobre lo ficticio sobre el realismo sobre lo ficticio. En otras palabras, ¿porqué mucha filosofía ha rechazado la hipótesis de que los personajes son entes que existen realmente? Menciona cuatro características de la ficción que abonen a la hipótesis de que es un caso excepcional de uso lingüístico ¿Cuál es la función de las representaciones según la tradición que Derrida llama “la metafísica de la presencia”? Da un ejemplo. Menciona cuatro hipótesis que respondan de manera distinta la pregunta ¿de qué trata una fábula como Pedro y El Lobo ? Menciona cuatro hipótesis que respondan de manera distinta la pregunta ¿cómo sabemos ...

Tradicionalmente, se piensa que gran parte del trabajo ontológico consiste en extraer una caracterización de los diferentes tipos de entidades que pueblan nuestra realidad a partir del tipo de cosas que se dicen de ellas en nuestras ciencias y, en general, discursos especializados correctos. Por ejemplo, sabemos qué tipo de objetos son los objetos físicos por lo que la física dice (y no dice) sobre ellos. Sabemos qué son los números por lo que la aritmética dice (y no dice) sobre ellos, etc. El problema, como es muy bien sabido, es que pocos objetos pertenecen a un solo tipo de discurso. Los objetos físicos tienen propiedades de las que no habla la física (por ejemplo, los animales que son entidades físicas piensan) y los números tienen propiedades y relaciones – incluso con objetos que no son números – de las que no habla la aritmética (por ejemplo, en física), etc. Esto genera muchas dificultades metafísicas, y nos orillan a un dilema – una de cuyas instancias mas famosas es el d...

  Following a suggestion from Rubenstein (2025), one can defend the very counter-intuitive hypothesis that there are no conjunctive propositions by arguing that whenever we seem to assert a conjunction what we are actually doing is distributively assert a pair of proposition and not a proposition that is a conjunction. The same for any other propositional attitude. Thus, there is no need to postulate conjunctions. However, following a many-ist strategy from Thunder (2025), it is possible to extend the argument so that nothing but elementary propositions exist.   According to Champollion (2015), the following are examples of sentences with distributive predication: John, Peter and Bill carried a briefcase. All the men carried a briefcase. The notion of distributive predication has been developed to account for “the behavior of predicates when they occur with plural definites, noun phrases headed by distributive quantifiers like every, and noun phrases coordinated by and.”...

In the view of logic I endorse (and this is something that is also held by many if not all logical realists and kantians), logic has no (metaphysical) relation to language or, at least, to semantics: it is not about what “and” means or about what we do when we negate something, etc. It is about logical phenomena, centrally about the logical phenomenon of what follows logically from what, but probably about other phenomena as well. Thus, logical systems are logical theories or models that aim to explain what follows from what and why. Logical notions like ‘negation’, ‘disjunction’, ‘conjunction’, etc. are theoretical concepts that logic develops to make sense of these phenomena. That is why, they are not directly testable – think of them as the non-empirical analogue to non-observational notions in the empirical sciences. Yes, these notions may also be the semantic values of some expressions in (at least some) natural languages, i.e., the so-called logical expressions. But this is not ...

When he is hallucinating, Johannes sees a pink rat, even though there are no pink rats. Kripke wants to maintain the intuitive truth of this later claim, but what is the semantic content of “Johannes sees a pink rat” here? My hypothesis is that verbs like “to see” generates an [otherwise known as "intensional" perhaps?] context where predicates in its scope acquire a new [perhaps we should also call "intensional"?] extension. So that what he sees is not a pink rat but something – an imaginary entity – that looks pink and looks like a rat. These two later properties: looking-pink and looking-like-a-rat are not actual empirical properties, i.e., properties of concrete objects that can be discovered empirically, like being pink or a rat. That is so because looking-pink is not being pink. It entails it defeasibly, sure, but neither logically nor metaphysically. Normally, pink things look thing, but commonly things that are not pink look pink, and is some extreme cases –...

Metaphysical Trivialism is the view that every metaphysical question of whether a putative ontological kind belongs in our ontology has a (trivial) positive answer: Are chairs real? Yes! Are tropes real? Yes! Are ghosts real? Yes! Yes! Yes! Everything is real! Even what is not is also real! (His is a dialetheist proposal) Vacek confronts us with a new (to me, at least), arresting puzzle at the heart of thinking about non-being as separate from being: remember that among the most compelling — perhaps the most compelling — motivations for ontological monism is precisely the desire to circumvent the notorious problem of inter-categorial interaction: how do mind and body communicate? How do abstract entities bear on concrete ones? As Plato understood with characteristic acuity, the monist who admits a distinction between being and non-being inherits a problem no less vexing than any of these: she must now explain how what is relates to what is not — a relation every bit as intractable as...

Las dos cuestiones de fondo en el trabajo reciente de Mario Gómez-Torrente sobre rigidez de términos generales son: primero, cual es el papel de la filosofía del lenguaje en la reflexión metafísica – tema que yo también he estado trabajando en años recientes – y, de manera muy relacionada, cuándo se debe eliminar o no un concepto de nuestro acervo filosófico. Sobre el primer tema, estoy totalmente convencido que Gómez-Torrente, al igual que Kripke, pertenece de lleno a una tradición – la así-llamada “filosofía analítica” – donde la representación, en general, y el lenguaje en particular, no determina su contenido referencial. Esto significa que los fenómenos lingüísticos son menos fundamentales que los ontológicos. Por lo tanto, la necesidad de enunciados como “los gatos son animales” no puede derivarse de ningún conjunto de hechos lógicos y/o lingüísticos. Sin embargo, sabemos que es posible derivar del hecho de que los términos ordinario típicos para clases naturales son rígidos, co...

In Yablo’s diagnosis, a seemingly fatal combination for the Millians is the existence of sentences where empty-names,  occur in standard use , and express evaluable propositions , especially true propositions . The most recalcitrant candidates for such a kind of sentences are negative existentials like “Sherlock Holmes does not exist”. As is well known, Millian proposals to deal with these sentences are a dime a dozen. In particular, Yablo is interested in Kripke’s puzzling proposal, according to which, in Nathan Salmon’s reconstruction, “…the sentences involving the name ‘Sherlock Holmes’ that were written in creating the fiction express no propositions, about the fictional character or anything else. They are all part of the pretence…” (1998: 294). This means they are props. Therefore, “…the name ‘Sherlock Holmes’ is ambiguous. In its original use as a name for a human being – its use by Conan Doyle in writing the fiction, and presumably by the reader reading the fiction –...