2024-03-15 06:11
Failing to capture stuff is not being wrong, so for e.g. indicative conditionals not being material conditionals does not mean that classical logic is wrong, only that it doesn’t by it… Read More
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sprachlogik.blogspot.com
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A philosophy blog with a focus on logic and language.
2022-09-10 05:26
Cross-posted here.A true sentence like ‘John is here in this room’, and its Twin Earth counterpart, express different propositions, since they are about distinct people. And that… Read More
2022-06-29 05:06
My book Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity is now out with Routledge. I began seriously developing the ideas in it in 2011 when I began my PhD, which is also the year this blog started. Many… Read More
2021-12-04 00:27
Platonism is the default, almost obviously correct view about mathematical objects. One of the major things that puts pressure on Platonism is the question 'How do we know about mathematical… Read More
2021-11-21 01:19
Let us use 'ONE' as an abbreviation of 'This sentence token contains more than one word token'. Now consider whether the following is true: ONE Read More
2021-11-05 08:36
In the Times Literary Supplement there is a review of a new biography of Gödel biography by philosopher Cheryl Misak. The review is called 'What are the limits of logic? How a groundbre… Read More
2021-10-22 02:04
Final draft available on PhilPapers.Abstract: Gillian Russell has recently proposed counterexamples to such elementary argument forms as Conjunction Introduction (e.g. ‘Snow is wh… Read More
2021-08-29 02:54
Forthcoming in Analytic Philosophy and available on PhilPapers.Abstract:According to a standard story, part of what we have in mind when we say that an argument is valid is that it is n… Read More
2021-06-19 02:55
Here Read More
2021-06-07 03:50
I've been thinking recently about an argument given by Graham Priest for the view that, when you're on your way out of a room, there's a point in time at which you're both in the room and no… Read More
2021-04-16 04:41
After wrestling inconclusively with this topic a couple of years ago on this blog, I came to a much clearer view about rigidity, which I set forth in this paper:A Simple Theory of RigidityTh… Read More
2020-10-18 02:36
In this post I reflect on the failures of nonsense-policing and ordinary language philosophy, and the fact that notwithstanding these failures, paying critical attention to semantic issues i… Read More
2020-09-18 06:31
In one of my favourite papers about modal metaphysics, Rosen's 'The Limits of Contingency', Rosen develops the idea that there are two sets of modal notions which are apt to be conflated und… Read More
2020-05-15 06:16
I want to clarify some aspects of the celebrated Wittgensteinian idea of a family resemblance concept.Are all family resemblance concepts such that no single feature is shared by all the thi… Read More
2020-03-21 04:06
Many, probably most, intelligent speakers and thinkers are linguistic opportunists. They treat words and phrases as tools to convey things that they are already thinking in proto-linguistic… Read More
2020-01-11 04:36
The Accident of Logical ConstantsWork on the nature and scope of formal logic has focused unduly on the distinction between logical and extra-logical vocabulary; which argument forms a logic… Read More
2019-12-14 05:54
This is a sequel to the previous post, in which I continue to react to interesting recent "cognitive act theories" of propositions championed by Soames and Hanks, and work out my own views i… Read More
2019-12-09 01:52
Soames, in his fascinating recent work Rethinking Language, Mind, and Meaning, begins by posing a problem for the study of meaning and language as developed by philosophers and logicians in… Read More
2019-11-02 23:17
The tide is beginning to turn against counterintuitive theories of indicative conditionals which either deny them truth-values or give them apparently wrong ones, but a deductive argument i… Read More
2019-08-18 02:48
Recently published work by Wolfgang Schwarz, to an extent I'd thought impossible, offers an explanation of why there seem to be facts of phenomenal consciousness that we can know for sure. '… Read More
2019-05-26 03:46
In this series of posts, I will raise some issues for the logical pluralism of Beall & Restall (hereafter 'B&R') - a much-discussed, topic-revivifying view in the philosophy of logic… Read More
2019-04-26 02:41
Timothy Williamson has argued that our capacity for metaphysical modal judgement comes along with our capacity for counterfactual judgement. This passage gives a flavour of his view:Humans e… Read More
2019-04-08 01:13
When evaluating arguments in philosophy, it can be tempting to call an argument 'invalid' if you determine that it has contradictory premises. For example, in an introductory philosophy cour… Read More
2019-02-06 08:15
Source 1: We want to know the vocabulary and syntax of being, or as Rosen puts it in 'The Limits of Contingency', 'the combinatorial essence of the world'. What are the basic elements and ho… Read More
2019-01-11 03:14
This post wrestles with and begins to settle on a view about the confusing issue of how Kripke's notion of rigidity may apply to general terms. One analogue of rigidity for general term… Read More
2018-12-27 04:20
Here is a metaethical idea which I find appealing and under-explored. What if what makes metaethics and the cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism debate so difficult is that we have failed to cons… Read More
2018-12-07 06:13
What makes a question or a statement meaningful as opposed to nonsensical? This is a hard question, and perhaps not a very fruitful one in philosophy since the falling out of favour of verif… Read More
2018-11-28 04:20
New draft available here. Here is the abstract:In this paper I introduce a logical treatment of adverbs based on first-order logic with identity (FOL). The guiding idea is that an adverb can… Read More
2018-10-05 07:00
I want to explore a 'no clear best deserver' view of the - very inchoate - role that the distinction between (metaphysically) necessary vs. contingent truths is supposed to play.The idea is… Read More
2018-08-11 04:55
Some notes from my post-PhD attempts to get back to the really deep problems surrounding modality.The truth-conditions framing of the puzzle of modality makes it vividly felt. In the case of… Read More
2018-06-20 09:14
My paper 'Propositions, Meaning and Names' is forthcoming in the Winter 2018 edition of The Philosophical Forum. It derives from a chapter of my PhD thesis and sketches an approach to the to… Read More
2018-05-06 04:45
Around 2011 I began to develop a view about epistemic modals which I have always wanted to return to. Motivated by dissatisfaction with the rival approaches of contextualism and relativism… Read More
2018-03-28 01:31
My paper 'Linking Necessity to Apriority' is forthcoming in Acta Analytica. It grew out of this blog post, although the proposal in the post is slightly different and, if not false, seems to… Read More
2018-03-09 01:32
I have recently been thinking about verbal disputes, a topic which has seen an increase in philosophical attention over the last few years. I began to think more about them when confronted w… Read More
2018-01-30 10:50
In some recent posts here I have discussed propositions like 'Air is airy' (due to Jens Kipper) which we know to be necessarily true, but only because we know empirically that air is not a n… Read More
2018-01-09 23:45
I recently posted criticisms of Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler's excellent new social science book The Elephant in the Brain. Hanson responds here. The response is short so I will reproduce i… Read More
2018-01-04 05:27
The Elephant in the Brain, the new book by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler, is a fantastic synthesis of subversive social scientific insight into hidden (or less apparent) motives of human beh… Read More
2017-12-11 23:23
Zylstra's work shows that, if we are going to try to analyze essence in terms of necessity and intrinsicality and deliver the goods on Fine's celebrated Socrates/{Socrates} example (Socrates… Read More
2017-12-10 06:36
An interesting new paper by Justin Zylstra attempts to cast doubt on the project of analyzing essence in terms of necessity plus something else. As Fine famously pointed out, it is plausible… Read More
2017-11-09 14:25
For a long time I have wondered, with an uneasy feeling that there was something I couldn't see, about the relationship between two-dimensional semantics and my approach to analysing subjunc… Read More
2017-11-07 04:04
Last Thursday I gave a talk at Sydney University's philosophy department about Kipper's bombshell, my old account of necessity, and my new account involving counterfactual invariance decider… Read More
2017-09-22 13:23
I wrote the following dialogue as an antidote to the dogmatism I felt myself falling into when trying to write a paper about a priori propositions. The characters A and B are prese… Read More
2017-09-12 04:17
The previous posts were quite raw and had me wrestling with new data. In this post, I try to be clearer and more accessible, and give a first outline of a new account of necessity that has e… Read More
2017-09-06 07:33
This post contains my efforts to fix my account of subjunctive necessity de dicto in the wake of troublesome examples from Kipper, Strohminger, and Yli-Vakkuri. Further work is needed before… Read More
2017-09-05 02:17
This post is quite compressed and relies on things explained in the previous posts on the task of linking necessity to apriority, as well as alluding to my account of necessit… Read More
2017-08-31 02:58
In a recent post (and an article I am working on), I arrived at the view that if a proposition can be known to be necessary (i.e. necessarily true or false) then either it or its negation is… Read More
2017-08-24 06:21
One interesting thing about my account of subjunctive necessity is the way it separates two kinds of things that we could be wrong or confused about in our judgements of subjunctive modality… Read More
2017-08-19 00:28
It recently came to my attention that the first ever post here, from back in 2011, is the subject of a journal article by Matheus Silva, a Brazilian philosopher and logician.Silva has also r… Read More
2017-08-02 00:41
There is an important link between necessity and apriority which can shed light on our knowledge of the former, but initially plausible attempts to spell out what it is fall victim to counte… Read More
2017-07-09 07:40
Here is what I have to say in response to the schmidentity challenge as posed to the sui generis view of identity statements. (See also these two related posts from several years ago.)OK, so… Read More
2017-06-11 06:52
In my (2016) I defended the idea that identity statements are sui generis. More precisely, I defended the idea that identity statements involving proper names (e.g. 'Hesperus is Phosphorus')… Read More
2017-05-07 03:47
Yes, but does Nature have no say at all here?! Yes.It is just that she makes herself heard in a different way.Wittgenstein (MS 137).Modality was already puzzling before Kripke - there’… Read More
2017-05-03 13:10
Last night I read Jared Warren's 'The Possibility of Truth by Convention', and it's really good. Sometimes when I read a paper, I strongly suspect I will end up finding it wrong-headed, and… Read More
2017-04-22 04:39
It wasn't just the positivists who thought there was a tight connection between meaning and truth in the case of a priori propositions:However, it seems to me that nevertheless one ingredien… Read More
2017-04-21 13:36
It seems to be a received view about the relationship of traditional Aristotelian logic to modern quantificational logic that the inferences codified in the old-fashioned syllogisms - All me… Read More
2017-04-04 06:33
This post presupposes knowledge of my account of subjunctive necessity de dicto as expressed in my thesis and in a paper derived from it which I have been working on. (I hope my self-cr… Read More
2017-03-14 23:02
(The following is a companion piece to this offsite post.)In a fascinating new paper entitled 'Truth via Satisfaction?', N.J.J. Smith argues that the Tarskian style of semantics fo… Read More
2017-03-09 09:59
In 2014 I began a series of posts on how semantic granularity is flexible, using (a linguistic analogue of) Kripke's puzzle about belief as the initial motivator.I recently noted with intere… Read More
2017-02-16 01:25
Reading Jessica Wilson's interesting new SEP entry on Determinables and Determinates, the following speculation occurred to me: the oft-remarked-upon resurgence of metaphysics heralded by th… Read More
2017-01-21 07:07
Lewis would have liked to be able to say that a counterfactual A > C is true iff the corresponding material conditional is true at all closest worlds. But his example of the inch long lin… Read More
2016-12-24 09:15
This is a follow-up to What Was My Problem?.1. The Basis of Puzzlement about ModalityOne line of investigation I would like to pursue now is into what might be called the basis of the puzzle… Read More
2016-12-22 05:19
The crudest conceptual analyses in philosophy are often the most enlightening - in metaethics, for example. It would certainly be wrong to thing that these enlightening analyses are only inc… Read More
2016-12-18 06:49
From notes made early in my PhD research:The central flaw in much of what I have written is that it has the unintended appearance of giving a kind of unexpected grounding for modal discourse… Read More
2016-11-15 13:59
Below are some notes on the first two sections Carnap's classic paper 'Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology'. (Carnap's ideas in this paper have been very influential, and there has been a re… Read More
2016-10-27 04:17
One of the big questions surrounding Kripke's innovations in Naming and Necessity is the extent to which, with his doctrines about necessity and the necessary a posteriori, Kripke corre… Read More
2016-10-15 08:45
Woodward in 'Reference and Deference' writes:Linguistic deference and conceptual deference are widespread phenomena. However, some philosophers say that deferring has to stop at some point… Read More
2016-10-01 12:03
Here is a draft of my PhD thesis Necessity and Propositions. It contains my best treatments so far of some of the topics covered on this blog over the last five or so years. I have a bit mor… Read More
2016-09-30 09:16
I have recently been enjoying some of Lycan's papers, as well as his Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction. In Chapter 5 of the latter he writes:In stating the foregoing meanin… Read More
2016-08-01 07:01
(This is a more focused re-write of a post from a couple of years ago, with better coverage of the literature.)1. IntroductionMuch ink has been spilled on skeptical arguments like the follow… Read More
2016-07-08 05:01
My recent Logos & Episteme paper, 'Two New Counterexamples to the Truth-Tracking Theory of Knowledge', has come in for criticism by Fred Adams and Murray Clarke. (Here is… Read More
2016-06-21 02:44
My paper 'On Identity Statements: In Defense of a Sui Generis View' is forthcoming in Disputatio. The final draft is available at PhilPapers. It's the longest, most substantial paper I've go… Read More
2016-06-17 01:15
David Lewis held that possible worlds are worlds as concrete as our own (cf. Lewis (1986)). He also held, in his work on counterfactuals (cf. Lewis (1973)), that all counterfactuals with imp… Read More
2016-05-17 09:45
This is a continuation of the last post, which was a continuation of this article. The following three theorems show that, given a plausible assumption about the semantics of conditionals:(1… Read More
2016-03-14 03:10
My paper 'Against the Brogaard-Salerno Stricture' is forthcoming in The Reasoner. It is about the logic of conditionals, and derives from this blog post. The final draft is available at… Read More
2016-03-12 07:59
Let us assume that a conditional A > C is true iff in all relevant scenarios the corresponding material conditional is true.Let's leave it completely open here what makes a scenario relev… Read More
2016-03-10 03:29
In a recent post I described Sider's quasi-conventionalism about modality, which in my view takes an important step forward with respsect to necessity de dicto but is mistaken in other ways… Read More
2016-03-02 02:24
My paper 'A Counterexample to the Breckenridge-Magidor Account of Instantial Reasoning' is forthcoming in the Journal of Philosophical Research. It derives from this blog post. The fina… Read More
2016-02-27 02:50
Starting in his (2003), and in an unpublished draft from around the same time which is not to be cited, Theodore Sider has proposed a theory of necessity de dicto called quasi-conventionalis… Read More
2016-02-27 02:46
February 24 this year marks the fifth anniversary of the first Sprachlogik post.Thanks to everyone who has been supportive of the blog! Read More
2016-02-14 01:39
I hope to say more about this in future, making the account more perspicuous and better defending it, but it is high time I made a blog post about it. My view that this account is correct ha… Read More
2016-01-27 05:33
Philosophers today frequently identify indicative modality with apriority, or at least identify it as an epistemic notion.For instance, the abstract for a recent talk by Greg Restall (curren… Read More
2016-01-19 06:53
Philosophers, in the wake of Naming and Necessity, have distinguished the main Kripkean notion of rigid designation, which applies to an expression when it designates the same object in all… Read More
2016-01-03 07:03
The Humphrey objection to modal realism, due to Kripke, centres on counterpart theory, and alleges that this assigns counterintuitive truth-conditions to modal statements about individuals… Read More
2015-12-26 07:26
I have recently come back to the argument in section 31 of Quine's Word and Object. In a post just over four years ago I criticized the argument for a use-mention shift with regard to a prin… Read More
2015-12-22 07:03
This is just an expository post, but I hope to make some original points in subsequent posts which will consider objections to modal realism.Central to modal realism are the Liebnizian bicon… Read More
2015-11-21 02:42
Some philosophers are skeptical of the notion of metaphysical or subjunctive modality isolated by Kripke. They may think for instance that the notion of necessity de dicto is coherent but no… Read More
2015-11-02 12:39
My paper 'Two New Counterexamples to the Truth-Tracking Theory of Knowledge' is forthcoming in Logos & Episteme. It derives from this blog post. The final draft is available at Phil… Read More
2015-11-02 12:39
My paper 'Two New Counterexamples to the Truth-Tracking Theory of Knowledge' is forthcoming in Logos & Episteme. It derives from this blog post. The final draft is available at Phil… Read More
2015-11-02 12:33
I recently posted an account of necessity de dicto. The purpose of this post is to pin down exactly what this topic is. The notion in question of course looms large in contemporary analytic… Read More
2015-10-02 05:49
This is the first in a series of posts about these issues, the plan for which is given below.Followup postsOn Kripke's Intuitive Anti-Quinean Defence of De Re ModalityToward an Acc… Read More
2015-10-02 01:18
This is the third post in a series on de re modality and quantification into modal contexts. This one is quite exploratory and anything but final. The first two posts are here and here.Let u… Read More
2015-10-02 01:15
What does it even mean to ask whether the formulae of quantified modal logic can be given a coherent interpretation? Obviously we can in a sense interpret all of them to mean, say, 'Snow is… Read More
2015-10-02 01:14
This is the second post in a series on de re modality and quantification into modal contexts. The first is here.Immediately after the passage quoted at the beginning of the last post wh… Read More
2015-09-25 02:55
My paper 'A Problem for Hofweber's Ontological Project' is forthcoming in Philosophia. It grew out of this blog post. The final draft is available at PhilPapers.My preoccupation with arguing… Read More
2015-09-24 12:46
This post is an attempt at stating and evaluating an approach to analyzing the concept of apriority as it applies to propositions. Follow-up: An Account of the Analytic/Synthetic Distin… Read More
2015-09-19 09:30
This is another post in my series on semantic granularity. The others so far, in chronological order, are:Kripke's Puzzle and Semantic GranularityFacts and GranularityGranularity and QuineMe… Read More
2015-09-14 05:06
This is another post in my series on semantic granularity. The others so far, in chronological order, are:Kripke's Puzzle and Semantic GranularityFacts and GranularityGranularity and QuineMe… Read More
2015-08-20 14:01
This post was prompted by a recent blog post of Wolfgang Schwarz's. See also a recent post of Alexander Pruss's.“The difficult thing here is not, to dig down to the ground; no, it… Read More
2015-07-14 04:53
Some of the intuitive characterisations given, in the last post, of the notion of internality of truth-value – such as 'internal meaning determines truth-value' - sound a lot like a co… Read More
2015-06-11 04:22
Welcome to the 176th edition of the Philosophers' Carnival!- Fallacies and the Appearance Condition at Siris.- Edward Armitage's 'Retribution': A Dilemma for Ethicism at Go Grue!.- "Obj… Read More
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