Semantics for monists

Mind 115 (460):1023-1058 (2006)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Assume that the only thing before you is a statue made of some alloy. Call those who think that there is one thing before you in such a case monists. Call those who think there are at least two things before you in such a case pluralists. The most common arguments for pluralism run as follows. The statue is claimed to have some property P that the piece of alloy lacks (or vice versa), and hence it is concluded that they are distinct. Most often, the predicates employed in such arguments to express the crucial property are predicates expressing ‘temporal properties’, such as existing at a certain time; or ‘modal properties’, such as possibly being spherical; or ‘constitution properties’, such as being made of a certain sort of material. In a recent paper, Kit Fine has noted that such predicates suffer from various defects that make it possible for the monist to plausibly resist the relevant versions of the pluralist's arguments. For this reason, Fine considers a number of predicates that do not suffer from these defects, and constructs new versions of the above argument using them. Fine argues that any attempt on the monist's part to resist his versions of the argument force the monist to adopt implausible positions in the philosophy of language. As against this, I argue that the monist has perfectly plausible responses to Fine's arguments that require the monist to adopt only quite reasonable positions in the philosophy of language.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,593

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-01-28

Downloads
145 (#119,503)

6 months
22 (#99,563)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Jeffrey C. King
Rutgers University - New Brunswick

Citations of this work

Mereology.Achille C. Varzi - 2016 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Ordinary objects.Daniel Z. Korman - 2011 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Natural Language Ontology.Friederike Moltmann - 2017 - Oxford Encyclopedia of Linguistics.
Material constitution.Ryan Wasserman - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
A grounding solution to the grounding problem.Noël B. Saenz - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (8):2193-2214.

View all 24 citations / Add more citations

References found in this work

The Frege reader.Gottlob Frege & Michael Beaney (eds.) - 1997 - Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.
On Sinn and Bedeutung.Gottlob Frege - 1892 - In Michael Beaney (ed.), The Frege Reader. Blackwell. pp. 151-172.
Objectual attitudes.Graeme Forbes - 2000 - Linguistics and Philosophy 23 (2):141-183.

Add more references