conceptual

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...