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History/traditions: Singular Terms

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69 found
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  1. Linguistic Luck beyond Loar Cases.Axel Barceló - manuscript
  2. Engrams as mental files.Nikola Andonovski - 2024 - Synthese 204 (6):1-36.
    Engrams—physical memory traces resulting from specific experiences—are the central posits of modern memory science. In this paper, I examine engrams through the lens of the theory of mental files. Integrating evidence from a variety of research programs, I argue that engrams exhibit the core functional properties of mental files. I characterize them as discrete informational structures, formed upon individual experiences of events and causally involved in their subsequent recall. Engrams are plausibly structurally complex in a file-like way, consisting of a (...)
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  3. Skill-based acquaintance : a non-causal account of reference.Jean Gové - 2024 - Dissertation, University of St. Andrews
    This thesis provides an account of acquaintance with abstract objects. The notion of acquaintance is integral to theorising on reference and singular thought, since it is generally taken to be the relation that must exist between a subject and an object, in order for the subject to refer to, and entertain singular thoughts about the object. The most common way of understanding acquaintance is as a form of causal connection. However, this implies a problem. We seem to be able to (...)
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  4. Singular thought without temporal representation?Christoph Hoerl - 2024 - Synthese 203 (5):1-17.
    What is required for an individual to entertain a singular thought about an object they have encountered before but that is currently no longer within their perceptual range? More specifically, does the individual have to think about the object as having been encountered in the past? I consider this question against the background of the assumption that non-human animals are cognitively ‘stuck in the present’. Does this mean that, for them, ‘out of sight is out of mind’, as, e.g., Schopenhauer (...)
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  5. A modified Kripkean theory of negative existentials.Chaoan He - 2023 - Analysis 83 (2):243-248.
    In a 2019 paper, Hausmann raised a new and interesting problem for Kripke’s account of negative existentials. He argued that Kripke’s account leads to the absurd consequence that anybody who has good reasons to believe that there are no propositions also has good reasons to believe that he or she does not exist. In this paper I propose a modified Kripkean theory, which is invulnerable to a Hausmann-like argument. As will be seen, the modified theory can be squarely justified in (...)
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  6. Reference to singular kinds in Germanic and Romance.Samuel Jambrović - 2023 - Proceedings of the 2023 Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association.
    The need for the definite article to express a singular kind ("the cat") in the Germanic languages is predicted by Borer's (2005) structural approach to the mass-count distinction. Chierchia's (1998) "down" operator can apply to nPs to derive mass kinds ("rice") and to DivPs to derive plural kinds ("cats"), but there is no determinerless structure that exclusively denotes properties of atomic individuals to which this same operator can apply to derive singular kinds. The only alternative is the process that Chierchia (...)
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  7. Singular Terms and Ontological Seriousness.Arthur Schipper - 2023 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 9 (3):574-595.
    Linguistic ontologists and antilinguistic, ‘serious’ ontologists both accept the inference from ‘Fido is a dog’ to ‘Fido has the property of being a dog’ but disagree about its ontological consequences. In arguing that we are committed to properties on the basis of these transformations, linguistic ontologists employ a neo-Fregean meta-ontological principle, on which the function of singular terms is to refer. To reject this, serious ontologists must defend an alternative. This paper defends an alternative on which the function of singular (...)
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  8. Mathematical structures, universals, and singular terms.Bahram Assadian - 2022 - In B. Assadian N. Kürbis (ed.), Knowledge, Number, and Reality; Encounters with the Work of Keith Hossack. pp. 203-216.
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  9. Substitutional Accounting for Singular Terms: Some Problems and a Slightly More Kantian Solution for Brandom.Micah Lewin - 2022 - Journal of Transcendental Philosophy 3 (1):3-32.
    This article grapples with Robert Brandom’s account of singular terms. I argue that neither Brandom’s answer to the question “What are singular terms?” nor his answer to the question “Why are there any singular terms?” works as they currently stand. Brandom’s substitution-inferential semantic account of what singular terms are fails to distinguish between the semantic role of singular terms and indefinite descriptions, and Brandom’s “expressive transcendental deduction” for why there are any singular terms fails to deciseively show that singular terms (...)
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  10. Levels of Ontology and Natural Language: the Case of the Ontology of Parts and Wholes.Friederike Moltmann - 2021 - In James Miller (ed.), The Language of Ontology. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
    It is common in contemporary metaphysics to distinguish two levels of ontology: the ontology of ordinary objects and the ontology of fundamental reality. This papers argues that natural language reflects not only the ontology of ordinary objects, but also a language-driven ontology, which is involved in the mass-count distinction and part-structure-sensitive semantic selection, as well as perhaps the light ontology of pleonastic entities. The paper recasts my older theory of situated part structures without situations, making use of a primitive notion (...)
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  11. A linguistic account of singular terms.Ana Clara Polakof - 2021 - Aufklärung 8.
    Vendler discusses how we may linguistically recognize a singular term. Even though singular terms are relevant to Philosophy and not necessarily to Linguistics, it may be enriching to know what we can do to disambiguate such a term. Philosophically, singular terms are seen as singular definite descriptions which may be used to refer to a unique entity in the world. Vendler tried to provide a syntactic account of singular terms, and was not taken into account by philosophers. Linguistically speaking, a (...)
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  12. Loar’s Puzzle, Similarity, and Knowledge of Reference.Andrea Onofri - 2019 - Manuscrito 42 (2):1-45.
    In ‘The Semantics of Singular Terms’ (1976) Brian Loar proposed a famous case where a hearer seems to misunderstand an utterance even though he has correctly identified its referent. Loar’s case has been used to defend a model of communication where speaker and hearer must think of the referent in similar ways in order for communication to succeed. This ‘Similar Ways of Thinking’ (SW) theory is extremely popular, both in the literature on Loar cases and in other philosophical discussions. My (...)
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  13. Singular Terms for Numbers?Robert Schwartzkopff - 2019 - Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Science 12:371 - 383.
    In natural language, number-words can be used in two different syntactic ways: adjectivally, i.e., with the syntactic status of an adjective, as in (1) ‘Mars has two moons,’ and nominally, i.e., with the syntactic status of a noun phrase, as in (2) ‘Two is even.’ This syntactic difference is often taken to correspond to a difference in semantic function: adjectival number-words function as predicables, whereas nominal number-words function as singular terms. The view that nominal number-words function as singular terms is (...)
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  14. On the Cognitive Role of Singular Thoughts.Bartłomiej Czajka & Jędrzej Piotr Grodniewicz - 2017 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (3):573-594.
    This paper offers a critical review of the notion of a “singular cognitive role”, which is central to some recent theories of singular thought. According to those theories, whether a thought is singular depends on the role it plays in the subject’s cognitive activity. We compare the two most developed accounts of this type: Crane’s :21–43 2011, The Objects of Thought2013) and Jeshion’s. Both theories aim to capture the notion of a singular cognitive role in terms of mental files. We (...)
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  15. Descriptions which have grown capital letters.Brian Rabern - 2015 - Mind and Language 30 (3):292-319.
    Almost entirely ignored in the linguistic theorising on names and descriptions is a hybrid form of expression which, like definite descriptions, begin with 'the' but which, like proper names, are capitalised and seem to lack descriptive content. These are expressions such as the following, 'the Holy Roman Empire', 'the Mississippi River', or 'the Space Needle'. Such capitalised descriptions are ubiquitous in natural language, but to which linguistic categories do they belong? Are they simply proper names? Or are they definite descriptions (...)
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  16. Response.John Hawthorne & David Manley - 2014 - Mind and Language 29 (4):499-510.
    We are very grateful to our critics for their kind words and thoughtful engagementwith The Reference Book (hereafter TRB), and also to the editors of Mind & Language for the opportunity to respond. We’ll start our reply by sketching the book’s positive thesis about specific noun phrases and names. In §2 we’ll relate the traditional semantic category we call ‘reference’ to semantic taxonomies given in terms of mechanisms of denotation. In §3, we’ll turn to acquaintance constraints on reference and singular (...)
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  17. (1 other version)Talking about Nothing. Numbers, Hallucinations, and Fictions.István Aranyosi - 2012 - Philosophy 87 (1):145-150.
    If everything exists, then it looks, prima facie, as if talking about nothing is equivalent to not talking about anything. However, we appear as talking or thinking about particular nothings, that is, about particular items that are not among the existents. How to explain this phenomenon? One way is to deny that everything exists, and consequently to be ontologically committed to nonexistent “objects”. Another way is to deny that the process of thinking about such nonexistents is a genuine singular thought. (...)
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  18. Terms, Properties of.Egbert Bos - 2011 - In H. Lagerlund (ed.), Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy. Springer. pp. 1250--1258.
  19. (2 other versions)The Gray's Elegy Argument: Denoting Concepts, Singular Terms, and Truth-Value Dependence.Andrew P. Rebera - 2009 - Prolegomena 8 (2):207-232.
    In the notoriously obscure “Gray’s Elegy Argument” (GEA) of “On Denoting”, Russell argues against the theory of denoting concepts which he had set out in his earlier work The Principles of Mathematics (PoM). Nathan Salmon has argued that the GEA is intended to demonstrate the falsity of the thesis that definite descriptions are singular terms, a view which he attributes to the Russell of PoM. In a similar vein, Peter Hylton has argued that we can make sense of the GEA (...)
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  20. Bogus singular terms and substitution salva denotatione.Rafal Urbaniak - 2009 - The Reasoner 3.
    This is the third installment of a paper which deals with comparison and evaluation of the standard slingshot argument (for the claim that all true sentences, if they refer, refer to the same object) with the doxastic formulation.
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  21. Russell vs. Frege on definite descriptions as singular terms.Francis Jeffry Pelletier & Bernard Linsky - 2008 - In Nicholas Griffin & Dale Jacquette (eds.), Russell Vs. Meinong: The Legacy of "on Denoting". London and New York: Routledge.
    In ‘On Denoting’ and to some extent in ‘Review of Meinong and Others, Untersuchungen zur Gegenstandstheorie und Psychologie’, published in the same issue of Mind (Russell, 1905a,b), Russell presents not only his famous elimination (or contextual defi nition) of defi nite descriptions, but also a series of considerations against understanding defi nite descriptions as singular terms. At the end of ‘On Denoting’, Russell believes he has shown that all the theories that do treat defi nite descriptions as singular terms fall (...)
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  22. Innocent statements and their metaphysically loaded counterparts.Thomas Hofweber - 2007 - Philosophers' Imprint 7:1-33.
    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 (...)
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  23. Unified semantics of singular terms.John Justice - 2007 - Philosophical Quarterly 57 (228):363–373.
    Singular-term semantics has been intractable. Frege took the referents of singular terms to be their semantic values. On his account, vacuous terms lacked values. Russell separated the semantics of definite descriptions from the semantics of proper names, which caused truth-values to be composed in two different ways and still left vacuous names without values. Montague gave all noun phrases sets of verb-phrase extensions for values, which created type mismatches when noun phrases were objects and still left vacuous names without values. (...)
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  24. On the semantic indecision of vague singular terms.Dan López de Sa - 2007 - Sorites 19:88-91.
    Donald Smith (2006) argues that if ‘I’ is indeed vague, and the view of vagueness as semantic indecision correct after all, then ‘I’ cannot refer to a composite material object. But his considerations would, if sound, also establish that ‘Tibbles,’ ‘Everest,’ or ‘Toronto,’ do not refer to composite material objects either—nor hence, presumably, to cats, mountains, or cities. And they can be resisted, anyway. Or so I argue.
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  25. Singular terms, reference and methodology in semantics.Jeffrey C. King - 2006 - Philosophical Issues 16 (1):141–161.
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  26. Complex demonstratives qua singular terms.Eros Corazza - 2003 - Erkenntnis 59 (2):263 - 283.
    In a recent book, Jeffrey King (King 2001) argues that complexdemonstratives, i.e., noun phrases of the form `this/that F, are not singular terms. As such,they are not devices of direct reference contributing the referent to the proposition expressed.In this essay I challenge King's position and show how a direct reference view can handle the datahe proposes in favor of the quantificational account. I argue that when a complex demonstrativecannot be interpreted as a singular term, it is best understood as a (...)
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  27. Singular terms and arithmetical logicism.Ian Rumfitt - 2003 - Philosophical Books 44 (3):193--219.
    This article is a critical notice of Bob Hale and Crispin Wright's *The Reason's Proper Study* (OUP). It focuses particularly on their attempts (crucial to their neo-logicist project) to say what a singular term is. I identify problems for their account but include some constructive suggestions about how it might be improved.
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  28. The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Singular Terms.Emma Borg - 2001 - Philosophical Papers 30 (1):1-30.
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  29. The Simple Sentence Puzzle and Ambiguous Co-referential Names.Tora Koyama & Yasuo Nakayama - 2001 - Annals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science 10 (3):127-138.
  30. Brandom on singular terms.Peter J. Graham - 1999 - Philosophical Studies 93 (3):247-264.
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  31. Singular Terms and Reference: Evans and "Julius".Ronald Chrisley - 1998 - Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy 6.
    "Let us call whoever invented the zip "Julius"." With this stipulation, Gareth Evans introduced "Julius" into the language as one of a category of terms that seem to lie somewhere between definite descriptions (such as "whoever invented the zip") and proper names (such as "John", or "Julius" as usually used) (Evans 1982: 31). He dubbed these terms "descriptive names"1, and used them as a foil against which to test several theories of reference: Frege's, Russell's, and his own. I want to (...)
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  32. The proper treatment of singular terms in ordinary English.M. B. Kac - 1997 - Mind 106 (424):661-696.
    A free logical analysis of singular terms couched in terms of the semantic theory of Keenan and Faltz is shown to avoid problems with both Frege's and Russell's treatments. At its heart is the proposal of Keenan and Faltz to reverse the usual mode-theoretic conception of individuals and properties, taking the latter as primitive and the former as derived therefrom. A simple extension of the notion 'property' is then shown to enable a parallel treatment of definite generics.
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  33. Walter Burley on the simple supposition of singular terms.Paul Vincent Spade - 1997 - Topoi 16 (1):7-13.
    This paper argues that Burley's theory of simple supposition is not as it has usually been presented. The prevailing view is that Burley and other authors agreed that simple supposition was in every case supposition for a universal, and that the disagreement over simple supposition between, say, Ockham and Burley was merely a disagreement over what a universal was (a piece of the ontology? a concept?), combined with a separate disagreement over what terms signify (the speaker's thoughts? the objects the (...)
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  34. (1 other version)Vacuous Singular Terms.Fred Adams & Robert Stecker - 1994 - Mind and Language 9 (4):387-401.
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  35. Singular terms.Bob Hale - 1994 - In Brian F. McGuinness & Gianluigi Oliveri (eds.), The Philosophy of Michael Dummett. Dordrecht, Netherland: Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 17--44.
  36. Singular terms, quantification, and ontology I.James E. Tomberlin - 1993 - Philosophical Issues 4:297-309.
  37. Singular Terms.Nathan Salmón - 1991 - In Hans Burkhardt & Barry Smith (eds.), Handbook of metaphysics and ontology. Munich: Philosophia Verlag. pp. 835-837.
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  38. Dummett's criteria for singular terms.Linda Wetzel - 1990 - Mind 99 (394):239-254.
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  39. Singular Terms and Sentential Sign Designs.Robert B. Brandom - 1987 - Philosophical Topics 15 (1):125-167.
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  40. (1 other version)Aspects of a Theory of Singular Reference: Prolegomena to a Dialectical Logic of Singular Terms.William J. Greenberg - 1985 - New York: Routledge.
    Originally published in 1985. This study concerns the problem of treating identity as a relation between an object and itself. It addresses the Russellian and Fregean solutions and goes on to present in the first part a surfacist account of belief-context ambiguity requiring neither differences in relative scope nor distinctions between sense and reference. The second part offers an account of negative existentials, necessity and identity-statements which resolves problems unlike the Russell-Frege analyses. This is a detailed work in linguistics and (...)
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  41. Are singular terms needed for describing the world?Toomas Karmo - 1985 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 63 (4):419 – 427.
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  42. How Not To Talk About What Does Not Exist.Barry Smith - 1984 - In Rudolf Haller (ed.), Aesthetics. Hingham, Mass., U.S.A.: D. Reidel [distributor]. pp. 194-196.
    Defends a view of intentional directedness according to which those seemingly object-directed acts – involved for example in reading works of fiction – which lack existing objects as targets, are not intentional (thus: not directed towards any object). Rather, each such act seems to its subject as if it were so directed because it is associated with a belief of a certain special sort, whose intentional directedness is not towards any putative external object but rather towards the very act itself (...)
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  43. Existence, reference, and definite singular terms.Lauchlan Chipman - 1982 - Mind 91 (361):96-101.
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  44. What is a singular term?W. S. Croddy - 1982 - Logique Et Analyse 25 (98):191.
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  45. (1 other version)Aspects of a theory of singular reference: prolegomena to a dialectical logic of singular terms.William J. Greenberg - 1982 - Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles
    The difficulties encountered by attempts to treat identity as a relation between an object and itself are well-known: "...the sentence 'The morning star is...the morning star' is analytic and a truism, while...'The morning star is the evening star' is synthetic and represents a 'valuable extension of our knowledge'... But if {the morning star} and {the evening star} are the same object, and identity is taken as a relation holding between this object and itself, then it is impossible to explain how (...)
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  46. Truth, correspondence, and non-denoting singular terms.Ermanno Bencivenga - 1980 - Philosophia 9 (2):219-229.
    The correspondence theory of truth provides standard semantics with a simple scheme for evaluating sentences. This scheme however depends on the existence of basic correspondences between singular terms and objects, And thus breaks down in the case of non-Denoting singular terms. An alternative to the correspondence theory is thus called for in dealing with such terms. The author criticizes various positions discussed in the literature in this regard, And then presents a solution of his own.
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  47. Brian Loar on singular terms.Michael Devitt - 1980 - Philosophical Studies 37 (3):271 - 280.
    In "the semantics of singular terms," brian loar described and criticized a "causal" theory of reference and offered a new "description" theory. It is argued that the particular causal theory described is not to be found in the papers by donnellan and kripke cited as evidence for it, And is a straw man. Further "prima facie", Loar's new description theory fails to meet kripke's noncircularity condition. Should loar attempt to meet it, His theory is likely to run foul of kripke's (...)
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  48. Singular Terms and the Syllogistic.George Englebretsen - 1980 - New Scholasticism 54 (1):68-74.
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  49. Singular Terms and Rigid Designators.Monte Cook - 1979 - Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 10 (1):157-162.
  50. Strawson, Geach and Dummett on singular terms and predicates.Bob Hale - 1979 - Synthese 42 (2):275 - 295.
    In the opening chapter of Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar, [1] Professor Strawson develops an explanation of the subjectpredicate distinction on the basis of a supposedly more fundamental distinction or contrast between, on the one hand, spatio-temporal particulars and, on the other, general concepts applicable to such particulars. At a basic level, he argues, these contrasted items occupy a central position in our thought about the world. They form the constituents of a fundamental type of judgment about the (...)
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