Philosophers and theorists have long been puzzled by humans' ability to talk about things that do not exist, or to talk about things that they think exist but, in fact, do not. _Empty Names, Fiction, and the Puzzles of Non-Existence_ is a collection of 13 new works concerning the semantic and metaphysical issues arising from empty names, non-existence, and the nature of fiction. The contributors include some of the most important researchers working in these fields. Some of the papers develop (...) and defend new positions on these matters, while others offer important new perspectives and criticisms of the existing approaches. The volume contains a comprehensive introductory essay by the editors, which provides a survey of the philosophical issues concerning empty names, the various responses to these issues, and the literature on the subject to date. (shrink)

Anthony Everett gives a philosophical defence of the common-sense view that there are no such things as fictional people, places, and things. He argues that our talk and thought about such fictional objects takes place within the scope of a pretense, and that we gain little but lose much by accepting fictional realism.

As the title says, this is a book review of Azzouni’s book. I complain that Azzouni proposes an answer to a question, but it is unclear what question he is trying to answer.

Many significant problems in metaphysics are tied to ontological questions, but ontology and its relation to larger questions in metaphysics give rise to a series of puzzles that suggest that we don't fully understand what ontology is supposed to do, nor what ambitions metaphysics can have for finding out about what the world is like. Thomas Hofweber aims to solve these puzzles about ontology and consequently to make progress on four metaphysical debates tied to ontology: the philosophy of arithmetic, (...) the metaphysics of ordinary objects, the problem of universals, and the question of whether the fact-like aspect of reality is independent of us. Crucial parts of the proposed solution involve considerations about quantification and its relationship to ontology, the place of reference in natural languages, the relationship between syntactic form and focus, whether there could be any ineffable facts, and others. (shrink)

There is a long history of worrying about whether or not metaphysics is a legitimate philosophical discipline. Traditionally such worries center around issues of meaning and epistemological concerns. Do the metaphysical questions have any meaning? Can metaphysical methodology lead to knowledge? But these questions are, in my opinion, not as serious as they have sometimes (historically) been taken to be. What is much more concerning is another set of worries about metaphysics, which I take to the greatest threat to metaphysics (...) as a philosophical discipline. These worries, in effect, hold that the questions that metaphysics tries to answer have long been answered in other parts of inquiry, ones that have much greater authority. And if they haven’t been answered yet then one should not look to philosophy for an answer. What metaphysics tries to do has been or will be done by the sciences. There is nothing left to do for philosophy, or so the worry. Let me illustrate this with two examples, one of which is our main concern here. (shrink)

Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics By HofweberThomasOxford University Press, 2016. xvi + 366 pp. £50.00.

In recent years a number of authors sympathetic to Referentialistaccounts of proper names have argued that utterances containingempty names express `gappy,' or incomplete, propositions. In this paper I want to take issue with this suggestion.In particular, I argue versions of this approach developedby David Braun, Nathan Salmon, Ken Taylor, and by Fred Adams,Gary Fuller, and Robert Stecker.

A key source of support for the view that challenging people’s beliefs about free will may undermine moral behavior is two classic studies by Vohs and Schooler (2008). These authors reported that exposure to certain prompts suggesting that free will is an illusion increased cheating behavior. In the present paper, we report several attempts to replicate this influential and widely cited work. Over a series of five studies (sample sizes of N = 162, N = 283, N = 268, N (...) = 804, N = 982) (four preregistered) we tested the relationship between (1) anti-free-will prompts and free will beliefs and (2) free will beliefs and immoral behavior. Our primary task was to closely replicate the findings from Vohs and Schooler (2008) using the same or highly similar manipulations and measurements as the ones used in their original studies. Our efforts were largely unsuccessful. We suggest that manipulating free will beliefs in a robust way is more difficult than has been implied by prior work, and that the proposed link with immoral behavior may not be as consistent as previous work suggests. (shrink)

The terms `endurance' and `perdurance' are commonly thought to denote distinct ways for an object to persist, but it is surprisingly hard to say what these are. The common approach, defining them in terms of temporal parts, is mistaken, because it does not lead to two coherent philosophical alternatives: endurance so understood becomes conceptually incoherent, while perdurance becomes not just true but a conceptual truth. Instead, we propose a different way to articulate the distinction, in terms of identity rather than (...) temporal parts: an object endures if its identity is determined at every moment at which it exists. We make precise what it means for the identity of an object to be determined at a moment. We also discuss what role the endurance / perdurance distinction, so understood, should play in the debates about time, material objects and personal identity. (shrink)

I argue for the existence of intrinsic Finks, Masks, and Mimics, and argue that these undermine certain recent attempts to revive simple conditional analyses of dispositions. I present some examples of intrinsic Finks, Masks, and Mimics, and argue that the example of an intrinsic fink I present has certain advantages over the examples of intrinsic finks recently suggested by Randolph Clarke. I conclude that the existence of such Finks, Masks, and Mimics, undermine a recent attempt by Sungho Choi to distinguish (...) dispositional properties from categorical properties. (shrink)

There has recently been considerable interest in accounts of fiction which treat fictional characters as abstract objects. In this paper I argue against this view. More precisely I argue that such accounts are unable to accommodate our intuitions that fictional negative existentials such as “Raskolnikov doesn’t exist” are true. I offer a general argument to this effect and then consider, but reject, some of the accounts of fictional negative existentials offered by abstract object theorists. I then note that some of (...) the sort of data invoked by the abstract object theorist in fact cuts against her position. I concludle that we should not regard fictional characters as abstract objects but rather should adopt a make-believe theoretic account of fictional characters along the lines of those developed by Ken Walton and others. (shrink)

Although idealism was widely defended in the history of philosophy, it is nowadays almost universally considered a non-starter. This holds in particular for a strong form of idealism, which asserts that not just minds or the mental in general, but our human minds in particular are metaphysically central to reality. Such a view seems to be excessively anthropocentric and contrary to what we by now know about our place in the universe. Nonetheless, there is reason to think that such a (...) strong form of idealism is indeed correct. In this paper, I will present an argument for idealism of this kind through considerations about a harmony between our thought and reality. The central argument in favour of idealism will come from a possibly unexpected source: we can see that a strong form of idealism is true simply from considerations about our language alone. I shall argue that thinking about how we represent reality allows us to conclude that idealism is true, and thus that reality must be a certain way. But no argument of this kind seems to allow for a metaphysical conclusion like idealism, since considerations about our language alone only show how we represent reality, not how reality is. And thus idealism can’t possibly follow, since it concerns how reality is, not just how we represent it to be. A good part of the second half of the paper is devoted to showing how such an argument is possible after all, and that it really does establish idealism. (shrink)

In his groundbreaking Grundlagen, Frege (1884) pointed out that number words like ‘four’ occur in ordinary language in two quite different ways and that this gives rise to a philosophical puzzle. On the one hand ‘four’ occurs as an adjective, which is to say that it occurs grammatically in sentences in a position that is commonly occupied by adjectives. Frege’s example was (1) Jupiter has four moons, where the occurrence of ‘four’ seems to be just like that of ‘green’ in (...) (2) Jupiter has green moons. On the other hand, ‘four’ occurs as a singular term, which is to say that it occurs in a position that is commonly occupied by paradigmatic cases of singular terms, like proper names: (3) The number of moons of Jupiter is four. Here ‘four’ seems to be just like ‘Wagner’ in (4) The composer of Tannhäuser is Wagner, and both of these statements seem to be identity statements, ones with which we claim that what two singular terms stand for is identical. But that number words can occur both as singular terms and as adjectives is puzzling. Usually adjectives cannot occur in a position occupied by a singular term, and the other way round, without resulting in ungrammaticality and nonsense. To give just one example, it would be ungrammatical to replace ‘four’ with ‘the number of moons of Jupiter’ in (1): (5) *Jupiter has the number of moons of Jupiter moons. This ungrammaticality results even though ‘four’ and ‘the number of moons of Jupiter’ are both apparently singular terms standing for the same object in (3). So, how can it be that number words can occur both as singular terms and as adjectives, while other adjectives cannot occur as singular terms, and other singular terms cannot occur as adjectives? (shrink)

David Sosa, Michael Nelson, and Jason Stanley have recently offered a series of interesting and provocative challenges to Kripke's modal arguments against Descriptivism. In this paper I explore these challenges and some of the issues to which they give rise. I argue that, in the end, all three challenges fail.

Ontology is the philosophical discipline that tries to find out what there is: what entities make up reality, what is the stuff the world is made from? Thus, ontology is part of metaphysics, and in fact it seems to be about half of all of metaphysics. It tries to establish what (kinds of) things there are, the other half tries to find out what the (general) properties of these things are and what (general) relations they have to each other. Settling (...) questions in ontology would bring with it major progress in metaphysics. And it would bring with it major progress in a variety of areas in philosophy outside of metaphysics as well. Many philosophical debates outside of metaphysics are quite directly influenced by how things turn out in ontology. Whether or not there are certain entities will give rise to quite different answers in various philosophical debates. I would like to very briefly describe three debates where ontological questions play a central role. These debates are either directly from metaphysics or from other areas of philosophy and they will be of central importance throughout this paper. (shrink)

One puzzling feature of talk about properties, propositions and natural numbers is that statements that are explicitly about them can be introduced apparently without change of truth conditions from statements that don't mention them at all. Thus it seems that the existence of numbers, properties and propositions can be established`from nothing'. This metaphysical puzzle is tied to a series of syntactic and semantic puzzles about the relationship between ordinary, metaphysically innocent statements and their metaphysically loaded counterparts, statements that explicitly mention (...) numbers, properties and propositions, but nonetheless appear to be equivalent to the former. I argue that the standard solutions to the metaphysical puzzles make a mistaken assumption about the semantics of the loaded counterparts. Instead I propose a solution to the syntactic and semantic puzzles, and argue that this solution also gives us a new solution to the metaphysical puzzle. I argue that instead of containing more semantically singular terms that aim to refer to extra entities, the loaded counterparts are focus constructions. Their syntactic structure is in the service of presenting information with a focus, but not to refer to new entities. This will allow us to spell out Frege's metaphor of content carving. (shrink)

Eleven original essays discuss a range of puzzling philosophical questions about fictional characters, and more generally about fictional objects. For example, they ask questions like the following: Do they really exist? What would fictional objects be like if they existed? Do they exist eternally? Are they created? Who by? When and how? Can they be destroyed? If so, how? Are they abstract or concrete? Are they actual? Are they complete objects? Are they possible objects? How many fictional objects are there? (...) What are their identity conditions? What kinds of attitudes can we have towards them? This volume will be a landmark in the philosophical debate about fictional objects, and will influence higher-level debates within metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

In “Tense and Reality”, Kit Fine () proposed a novel way to think about realism about tense in the metaphysics of time. In particular, he explored two non-standard forms of realism about tense, arguing that they are to be preferred over standard forms of realism. In the process of defending his own preferred view, fragmentalism, he proposed a fragmentalist interpretation of the special theory of relativity, which will be our focus in this paper. After presenting Fine's position, we will raise (...) a problem for his fragmentalist interpretation of STR. We will argue that Fine's view is in tension with the proper explanation of why various facts obtain. We will then consider whether similar considerations also speak against fragmentalism in domains other than STR, notably fragmentalism about tense. (shrink)

Although higher-order metaphysics seems prima facie to be a promising new approach to metaphysics, it is nonetheless based on a mistake. This mistake is tied to a misuse of formal languages in metaphysics in general, not just to the use of higher-order rather than lower-order languages. I hope to highlight the mistake by discussing a popular recent example of higher- order metaphysics: the argument that reality is not structured using reasoning inspired by the Russell-Myhill paradox. A key issue will be (...) the relationship between higher-order quantification in formal languages and quantification in English, in particular the questions whether such quantifiers are already to be found in English, and whether they could simply be added to English if not in order to gain expressive strength. I will conclude that little of metaphysical significance follows from this Russell-Myhill inspired argument against structure. The reason why the results of higher-order logic show little of metaphysical significance generalizes to other uses of higher-order logic in metaphysical theorizing, and with it supports that higher-order metaphysics is a flawed research program. I end with some reflections on what positive role formal tools like higher-order logic can have in metaphysics, and what the fundamental mistake is on which higher-order metaphysics is based. (shrink)

What makes us conscious? Many theories that attempt to answer this question have appeared recently in the context of widespread interest about consciousness in the cognitive neurosciences. Most of these proposals are formulated in terms of the information processing conducted by the brain. In this overview, we survey and contrast these models. We first delineate several notions of consciousness, addressing what it is that the various models are attempting to explain. Next, we describe a conceptual landscape that addresses how the (...) theories attempt to explain consciousness. We then situate each of several representative models in this landscape and indicate which aspect of consciousness they try to explain. We conclude that the search for the neural correlates of consciousness should be usefully complemented by a search for the computational correlates of consciousness. (shrink)

It is natural to think that questions in the metaphysics of chance are independent of the mathematical representation of chance in probability theory. After all, chance is a feature of events that comes in degrees and the mathematical representation of chance concerns these degrees but leaves the nature of chance open. The mathematical representation of chance could thus, un-controversially, be taken to be what it is commonly taken to be: a probability measure satisfying Kolmogorov’s axioms. The metaphysical questions about chance (...) seem to be left open by all this. I argue that this is a mistake. The employment of real numbers as measures of chance in standard probability theory brings with it commitments in the metaphysics of (objective) chance that are not only substantial but also mistaken. To measure chance properly we need to employ extensions of the real numbers that contain infinitesimals: positive numbers that are infinitely small. But simply using infinitesimals alone is not enough, as a number of arguments show. Instead we need to put three ideas together: infinitesimals, the non-locality of chance and flexibility in measurement. Only those three together give us a coherent picture of chance and its mathematical representation. (shrink)

The problem of change plays a central role in the metaphysics of time and material objects, and whoever does best in solving this problem has a leg up when it comes to choosing a metaphysics of time and material objects. But whether this central role of the problem of change in metaphysics is legitimate is not at all clear. This is so in part since it is not clear what the problem of change is, and why it is a problem (...) in metaphysics. We will investigate what metaphysical problem the problem of change might be, and how it relates to various other problems related to change that are studied in the empirical sciences. The problem of change can thus be a case study of what makes a problem a metaphysical one and how metaphysics relates to other parts of inquiry. We conclude that the central role the problem of change is given in the contemporary metaphysics of time is not justified. (shrink)

A number of important philosophical problems are problems in the overlap of logic and ontology. Both logic and ontology are diverse fields within philosophy, and partly because of this there is not one single philosophical problem about the relation between logic and ontology. In this survey article we will first discuss what different philosophical projects are carried out under the headings of "logic" and "ontology" and then we will look at several areas where logic and ontology overlap.

Everyone working on metaphysical questions about properties or propositions knows the reaction that many non-philosophers, even nonmetaphysicians, have to such questions. Even though they agree that Fido is a dog and thus has the property (or feature or characteristic) of being a dog, it seems weird, suspicious, or confused to them to now ask what that thing, the property of being a dog, is. The same reservations do not carry over to asking what this thing, Fido, is. There is a (...) substantial and legitimate project to find out more about Fido, but is there a similar substantial and legitimate project to find out more about the property of being a dog? Metaphysicians know that there is a straightforward way to motivate such a project, and much of the contemporary debate in the metaphysics of properties is in the ballpark of carrying it out. If we agree that Fido has the property of being a dog, then there is something that is a property and that Fido has. Thus we can ask about what this thing is that he has. How does it relate to Fido? Is it concrete or abstract? Is it fully present in each object that has it? And so on and so forth. Maybe the nonphilosophers are merely not used to asking such questions about unusual entities such as properties, but they are equally legitimate for them as they are for any other thing. However, even metaphysicians sometimes have the nagging feeling that something has gone wrong in the metaphysics of properties, and that a substantial metaphysical investigation into their.. (shrink)

I argue that the semantic thesis of direct reference and the meta- physical thesis of the supervenience of the non-physical on the physical cannot both be true. The argument first develops a necessary condition for supervenience, a so-called conditional locality requirement, which is then shown to be incompatible with some physical object having object dependent properties, which in turn is required for the thesis of direct reference to be true. We apply this argument to formulate a new argument against the (...) claim that a thisness is analyzable in purely general terms, one that does not rely on complete symmetry nor the falsity of the identity of indiscernibles. I outline a strategy at the end how the conclusion could be avoided, at a price. (shrink)

Although higher-order metaphysics seems prima facie to be a promising new approach to metaphysics, it is nonetheless based on a mistake. This mistake is tied to a misuse of formal languages in metaphysics in general, not just to the use of higher-order rather than lower-order languages. I hope to highlight the mistake by discussing a popular recent example of higher- order metaphysics: the argument that reality is not structured using reasoning inspired by the Russell-Myhill paradox. A key issue will be (...) the relationship between higher-order quantification in formal languages and quantification in English, in particular the questions whether such quantifiers are already to be found in English, and whether they could simply be added to English if not in order to gain expressive strength. I will conclude that little of metaphysical significance follows from this Russell-Myhill inspired argument against structure. The reason why the results of higher-order logic show little of metaphysical significance generalizes to other uses of higher-order logic in metaphysical theorizing, and with it supports that higher-order metaphysics is a flawed research program. I end with some reflections on what positive role formal tools like higher-order logic can have in metaphysics, and what the fundamental mistake is on which higher-order metaphysics is based. (shrink)

In their recent article ‘Resolving Frege’s other Puzzle’ Eric Snyder, Richard Samuels, and Stewart Shapiro defend a semantic type-shifting solution to Frege’s other Puzzle and criticize my own cognitive type-shifting solution. In this article I respond to their criticism and in turn point to several problems with their preferred solution. In particular, I argue that they conflate semantic function and semantic value, and that their proposal is neither based on general semantic type-shifting principles nor adequate to the data.

Can it ever be rational to revise one's own logic by one's own lights? In this paper I argue that logic is never rationally revisable, even if one's own logic gives rise to paradoxes and allows one to derive any conclusion whatsoever. Instead of revising logic, we need to revise a certain widely held position in the philosophy of logic, one tied to the standard conception of validity and to the alleged monotonicity of deductive reasoning. I develop the alternative conception (...) of validity and of deductive reasoning, which explains why we are generally entitled to the conclusions of deductive reasoning, even though we rationally do not accept them in certain circumstances tied to paradoxes. (shrink)

The relevant alternatives approach in epistemology1 arose some years ago partly out of the hope to be able to reconcile our ordinary claims of knowledge with our inability to answer the skeptic. It was supposed to give rise to an account of knowledge according to which our ordinary claims of knowledge are true, even though the claims about our lack of knowledge that the skeptics make in one of their more persuasive moments are also true. To know, according to such (...) an account, is to have evidence sufficient to rule out all the relevant alternatives. In ordinary life few alternatives are relevant. For example, whether or not we are brains in a vat is not a relevant alternative that we have to be able to rule out. In the debate with the skeptic it may become relevant, and accordingly we might not know something any more then, even though we have the same evidence as in ordinary life. The skeptics cleverly make more and more alternatives relevant, and that is how they succeed. But their success in the philosophy seminar is no threat to our ordinary claims of knowledge, or so the theory goes. (shrink)

In this paper I present two arguments against the thesis that we experience qualia. I argue that if we experienced qualia then these qualia would have to be essentially vague entities. And I then offer two arguments, one a reworking of Gareth Evans' argument against the possibility of vague objects, the other a reworking of the Sorites argument, to show that no such essentially vague entities can exist. I consider various objections but argue that ultimately they all fail. In particular (...) I claim that the stock responses to the Sorites argument fail against my reworking of the argument because they require us to make a distinction between a determinate reality and how that reality appears to us, whereas in the case of qualia we can make no such distinction. I conclude that there can be no such things as qualia. (shrink)

Although there is a prima facie strong case for a close connection between the meaning and inferential role of certain expressions, this connection seems seriously threatened by the semantic and logical paradoxes which rely on these inferential roles. Some philosophers have drawn radical conclusions from the paradoxes for the theory of meaning in general, and for which sentences in our language are true. I criticize these overreactions, and instead propose to distinguish two conceptions of inferential role. This distinction is closely (...) tied to two conceptions of deductive logic, and it is the key, I argue, for understanding first the connection between meaning and inferential role, and second what the paradoxes show more generally. (shrink)

My thanks to Matti Eklund and Gabriel Uzquiano for their thoughtful and challenging critical essays. In these replies I hope to respond to what I took to be their main points. The focus of their essays is different for the most part, but there is overlap in their discussion of the ineffable. I will thus largely reply to their essays separately, with the exception of the discussion of the ineffable, where I will reply to their points jointly. Let’s start, alphabetically, (...) with Eklund. (shrink)

We give a direct and elementary proof of the fact that every real-valued probability measure can be approximated—up to an infinitesimal—by a hyperreal-valued one which is regular and defined on the whole powerset of the sample space.

An under-explored intermediate position between traditional materialism and traditional idealism is the view that although the spatiotemporal world is purely material, minds nonetheless have a metaphysically special place in it. One way this can be is via a special role that subjects have in the metaphysics of material objects. Some metaphysical aspect of material objects might require the existence of subjects. This would support that minds must exist if material objects exist and thus that a mindless material world is impossible. (...) This view, labeled the subjectivity thesis by Anton Friedrich Koch, was defended by him with an intriguing, purely metaphysical argument connected to the individuation of material objects in space and time. The present paper hopes to make progress on assessing the viability of such a position. It starts by critically examining Koch's argument for the subjectivity thesis, as well as similar arguments that give minds a central place in the metaphysics of material objects via considerations about identity and difference. It then compares these ideas to similar ones in the philosophy of time, and concludes with an outlook on whether such a position is viable and what needs to be done to fill the gaps unearthed along the way. (shrink)

On the one hand they seem to be quite obviously truth conditionally equivalent, but on the other hand they seem to be about different things. Whereas (1) is about Jupiter and its moons, (2) is about numbers. In particular, the word ‘four’ appears in (1) in the position of an adjective or determiner, whereas it seems to be a name for a number in (2). Furthermore, (2) appears to be an identity statement claiming that what two number terms stand for (...) is the same thing. Several authors have proposed answers to this puzzle, including Frege, by either pinning the issue on the nature of numbers, pretense, fictionalism, or the nature of reference, but all these proposals agreed that (2) is an identity statement and that in it ‘four’ is a name for an object. In [Hofweber, 2007] I argued that (2) is not an identity statement and that ‘four’ in (2) is not a name for an object. The argument for it was this: When we look at what role (2) has in actual communication we can see that (2) has a focus effect on a discourse that arises from the syntax without special intonation. (shrink)

Cardinality arguments against regular probability measures aim to show that no matter which ordered field ℍ we select as the measures for probability, we can find some event space F of sufficiently large cardinality such that there can be no regular probability measure from F into ℍ. In particular, taking ℍ to be hyperreal numbers won't help to guarantee that probability measures can always be regular. I argue that such cardinality arguments fail, since they rely on the wrong conception of (...) the role of numbers as measures of probability. With the proper conception of their role we can see that for any event space F, of any cardinality, there are regular hyperreal-valued probability measures. (shrink)