conceptual

 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...

Arguments in favor of the existence of mathematical entities like numbers can be divided into two broad kinds: on the one hand, we have those that start from mathematical practice as a given and postulate the existence of mathematical objects as part of the best explanation for mathematical practice being as its, usually, either because of its success as a scientific enterprise or because of its importance for other successful scientific and technological practices. On the other hand, there are those that, instead, take everyday linguistic practice as starting point and postulate the existence of mathematical objects as part of the best explanation of our usual linguistic practices being as they are. The overall general strategy in both cases is to argue that without numbers, it would be very hard to explain why things that we accept to be true – or at least, to be successful as claims about the world, like simple arithmetical truths like seventeen being prime, complex physical laws li...

This Friday, after a long chat with Christian Romero (and some participation of Andrés Villamil), I think I got convinced that there constant-variable distinction leaves room for a third semantic option. The context is the discussion on the nature of propositional terms, but the morals apply to any referential domain. In classic bivalent propositional logic, it is customary to distinguish between propositional constants that have a fixed truth value and propositional variables that can take either. This is just the application of a general distinction between constants that have a fixed value and variables whose reference can range over the whole domain of possible values. It just happens that because the domain in classical logic has only two possible values, there is no room for a third option. However, any even slighter larger domain immediately would suggest at least a third option: referential terms that have neither a fixed semantic value, nor can take any semantic value in ...

Recent work in analytic epistemology, philosophy of language and of science has brought back forward the distinction between the objective and the subjective (MacFarlane forthcoming), ( Gallison  &  Daston  2007), (Wright 2003),   ( Kölbel  2003, 2000), ( Daston 2001), (Searle 1995). As Searle (1995, 8) has clearly stated, the distinction works at different levels and as ( Daston  2001) has also stressed, these senses have historically evolved. In the following section, I will offer a taxonomy of senses and applications of the distinction, trying to make justice to the contemporary literature on the topic, but also necessarily diverging from all previous accounts of this  polysemy .   My starting point is  Daston’s  claim that our current understanding of the distinction is based on the identification of particular subjective  factors , like perspectives, linguistic conventions, psychological architecture, etc. These facts...