Impure reference: A way around the concept horse paradox

Philosophical Perspectives 25 (1):297-312 (2011)
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Abstract

This paper provides a new solution to the concept horse paradox. Frege argued no name co-refers with a predicate because no name can be inter-substituted with a predicate. This led Frege to embrace the paradox of the concept horse. But Frege got it wrong because predicates are impurely referring expressions and we shouldn’t expect impurely referring expressions to be intersubstitutable even if they co-refer, because the contexts in which they occur are sensitive to the extra information they carry about their referents.

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Fraser MacBride
University of Manchester

Citations of this work

Against Cumulative Type Theory.Tim Button & Robert Trueman - 2022 - Review of Symbolic Logic 15 (4):907-49.
A fictionalist theory of universals.Tim Button & Robert Trueman - forthcoming - In Peter Fritz & Nicholas K. Jones (eds.), Higher-order Metaphysics. Oxford University Press.
A Higher-Order Solution to the Problem of the Concept Horse.Nicholas K. Jones - 2016 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 3.
The concept horse with no name.Robert Trueman - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (7):1889-1906.
Substitution in a sense.Robert Trueman - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (12):3069-3098.

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