conceptual

  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...