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If there is such a thing as essential reading in metaphysics or in philosophy of language, this is it. |
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The paper looks at the semantics and ontology of dispositions in the light of recent work on the subject. Objections to the simple conditionals apparently entailed by disposition statements are met by replacing them with so-called 'reduction sentences' and some implications of this are explored. The usual distinction between categorical and dispositional properties is criticised and the relation between dispositions and their bases examined. Applying this discussion to two typical cases leads to the conclusion that fragility is not a real (...) |
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Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truth which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as (...) |
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Dispositions may be identical to their categorical bases but should we say, with Quine, that all properties are categorical or, with Popper, that all properties are dispositional? Both positions make implicit claims of ontological reduction but if this consists in nothing more than identity then, identity being a symmetrical relation, neither categorical nor dispositional monism is provided. A supervenience relation may be thought decisive, but if the identities are token- token, reduction is ruled out; if the identities are type- type (...) |
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I came to the topic of the title in connection with my logical investigations of the Is-Ought problem in multimodal logics . There are infinitely many mathematically possible modal logics. Are they all philosophically serious candidates? Which modal logic the “right” one — does such a question make sense? A similar question can be raised for the infinite variety of propositional logics weaker than classical logics. The Vienna Circle concept of logic was that logic holds merely by form, independently from (...) |