Indeed, this is the first serious book-length study of the subject by a philosopher of science.

Ray Kurzweil and others have posited that the confluence of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and genetic engineering will soon produce posthuman beings that will far surpass us in power and intelligence. Just as black holes constitute a ldquo;singularityrdquo; from which no information can escape, posthumans will constitute a ldquo;singularity:rdquo; whose aims and capacities lie beyond our ken. I argue that technological posthumanists, whether wittingly or unwittingly, draw upon the long-standing Christian discourse of ldquo;theosis,rdquo; according to which humans are capable of (...) being God or god-like. From St. Paul and Luther to Hegel and Kurzweil, the idea of human self-deification plays a prominent role. Hegel in particular emphasizes that God becomes wholly actualized only in the process by which humanity achieves absolute consciousness. Kurzweil agrees that God becomes fully actual only through historical processes that illuminate and thus transform the entire universe. The difference is that for Kurzweil and many other posthumanists, our offspringmdash;the posthumansmdash;will carry out this extraordinary process. What will happen to Home sapiens in the meantime is a daunting question. (shrink)

A singular thought about an object o is one that is directly about o in a characteristic way—grasp of that thought requires having some special epistemic relation to the object o, and the thought is ontologically dependent on o. One account of the nature of singular thought exploits a Russellian Structured Account of Propositions, according to which contents are represented by means of structured n-tuples of objects, properties, and functions. A proposition is singular, according to this framework, if and only (...) if it contains an object as a constituent. One advantage of the framework of Russellian Structured propositions is that it promises to provide a metaphysical basis for the notion of a singular thought about an object, grounding it in terms of constituency. In this paper, we argue that the attempt to ground the peculiar features of singular thoughts in terms of metaphysical constituency fails, and draw some consequences of our discussion for other debates. (shrink)

It is widely supposed that if there is to be a plausible connection between the truth of a de re attitude report about a subject and that subject’s possession of a singular thought, then ‘acquaintance’-style requirements on singular thought must be rejected. I show that this belief rests on poorly motivated claims about how we talk about the attitudes. I offer a framework for propositional attitude reports which provides both attractive solutions to recalcitrant puzzle cases and the key to preserving (...) acquaintance constraints. The upshot is that there is an independently motivated response to the principal argument against acquaintance. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Armstrong and Stanley argue that despite being initially compelling, a Russellian account of singular thought has deep difficulties. I defend a certain sort of Russellian account of singular thought against their arguments. In the process, I spell out a notion of propositional constituency that is independently motivated and has many attractive features.

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.

This paper looks at emergence in physical theories and argues that an appropriate way to understand socalled “emergent protectorates” is via the explanatory apparatus of the renormalization group. It is argued that mathematical singularities play a crucial role in our understanding of at least some well-defined emergent features of the world.

The singularity hypothesis is a radical hypothesis about the future of artificial intelligence on which self-improving artificial agents will quickly become orders of magnitude more intelligent than the average human. Despite the ambitiousness of its claims, the singularity hypothesis has been defended at length by leading philosophers and artificial intelligence researchers. In this paper, I argue that the singularity hypothesis rests on scientifically implausible growth assumptions. I show how leading philosophical defenses of the singularity hypothesis (Chalmers 2010, Bostrom 2014) fail (...) to overcome the case for skepticism. I conclude by drawing out philosophical implications of this discussion for our understanding of consciousness, personal identity, digital minds, existential risk, and ethical longtermism. GPI Working Paper No . 19-2022. (shrink)

What happens when machines become more intelligent than humans? One view is that this event will be followed by an explosion to ever-greater levels of intelligence, as each generation of machines creates more intelligent machines in turn. This intelligence explosion is now often known as the “singularity”. The basic argument here was set out by the statistician I.J. Good in his 1965 article “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine”: Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far (...) surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion”, and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. The key idea is that a machine that is more intelligent than humans will be better than humans at designing machines. So it will be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than the most intelligent machine that humans can design. So if it is itself designed by humans, it will be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than itself. By similar reasoning, this next machine will also be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than itself. If every machine in turn does what it is capable of, we should expect a sequence of ever more intelligent machines. This intelligence explosion is sometimes combined with another idea, which we might call the “speed explosion”. The argument for a speed explosion starts from the familiar observation that computer processing speed doubles at regular intervals. Suppose that speed doubles every two years and will do so indefinitely. Now suppose that we have human-level artificial intelligence 1 designing new processors. Then faster processing will lead to faster designers and an ever-faster design cycle, leading to a limit point soon afterwards. The argument for a speed explosion was set out by the artificial intelligence researcher Ray Solomonoff in his 1985 article “The Time Scale of Artificial Intelligence”.1 Eliezer Yudkowsky gives a succinct version of the argument in his 1996 article “Staring at the Singularity”: “Computing speed doubles every two subjective years of work.. (shrink)

Neo-Fregeans take their argument for arithmetical realism to depend on the availability of certain, so-called broadly syntactic tests for whether a given expression functions as a singular term. The broadly syntactic tests proposed in the neo-Fregean tradition are the so-called inferential test and the Aristotelian test. If these tests are to subserve the neo-Fregean argument, they must be at least adequate, in the sense of correctly classifying paradigm cases of singular terms and non-singular terms. In this paper, I pursue two (...) main goals. On the one hand, I show that the tests’ current state-of-the-art formulations are inadequate and, hence, cannot subserve the neo-Fregean argument. On the other hand, I propose revisions that are adequate and, hence, can subserve this argument. (shrink)

The notion of singular (or de re) thought has become central in philosophy of mind and language, yet there is still little consensus concerning the best way to think about the nature of singular thought. Coinciding with recognition of the need for more clarity about the notion, there has been a surge of interest in the concept of a mental file as a way to understand what is distinctive about singular thought. What isn't always clear, however, is what mental files (...) are meant to be, and why we should believe that thoughts that employ them are singular as opposed to descriptive. This volume brings together original chapters by leading scholars which aim to examine and evaluate the viability of the mental files framework for theorizing about singular thought. (shrink)

According to many actualists, propositions, singular propositions in particular, are structurally complex, that is, roughly, (i) they have, in some sense, an internal structure that corresponds rather directly to the syntactic structure of the sentences that express them, and (ii) the metaphysical components, or constituents, of that structure are the semantic values — the meanings — of the corresponding syntactic components of those sentences. Given that reference is "direct", i.e., that the meaning of a name is its denotation, an apparent (...) consequence of this view is that any proposition expressed by a sentence containing a name that denotes a contingent being S is itself contingent — notably, the proposition [S does not exist]. Assuming that an entity must exist to have a property, necessarily, [S does not exist] must exist in order to be true. It seems to follow that, necessarily, [S does not exist] is not true and, hence, that S is not contingent after all. Past approaches to the problem — notably, those of Prior and Adams — lead to highly undesirable consequences for quantified modal logic. In this paper, several solutions to this puzzle are developed that preserve actualism, the structured view of propositions, the direct theory of reference, and the intuition that [S does not exist] is indeed possible without the adverse consequences for QML of previous solutions. (shrink)

De re or singular thoughts are, intuitively, those essentially or constitutively about a particular object or objects; any thought about different objects would be a different thought. How should a philosophical articulation or thematization of their nature look like? In spite of extended discussion of the issue since it was brought to the attention of the philosophical community in the late fifties by Quine (1956), we are far from having a plausible response. This is glaringly revealed by the contrasting recent (...) takes on the issue by writers such as Soames (2005) – who adopts the view by Donnellan (1979) to be outlined presently – and Jeshion (2001), otherwise sharing a similar direct-reference approach to the prototypical expression of those contents. Discussing the matter in connection with the status of the Kripkean category of the contingent a priori in the just mentioned article, Donnellan (1979) argued that what can be properly classified as knowable a priori about utterances like those involving ‘one meter’ or ‘Neptune’ famously proposed by Kripke (1980) cannot be the very same singular content that is contingent; he distinguished to that end between knowing a true proposition expressed by an utterance, and knowing that an utterance expresses a true proposition. (Thus, for instance, if, while listening to an utterance in a language that I do not know, I am told by a reliable person who knows the language and whom I trust that the utterance is true, I come thereby to know that the sentence expresses a truth, without knowing the truth that it expresses.) Evans (1979) replied that, for a very specific sort of cases involving “descriptive names”, a related proto-two-dimensionalist account should be preferred, on which it is not the singular contingent content, but rather a general descriptive one which is knowable a priori. In a series of papers, Robin Jeshion (2000, 2001) has recently attacked Donnellan's proposal, arguing in favour of the most straightforward interpretation of Kripke's claim: in the relevant cases, the very same singular content can be both contingent and knowable a priori. In this paper, I will appeal to a generalized version of two-dimensional semantics to advance an account of the Kripkean cases along the lines of Evans's, and I will argue that Jeshion's compelling arguments against Donnellan's view do not apply to this version. (shrink)

Like frege, I claim that any singular term (a name, A definite description, Or an indexical) has a sense, And it refers to what satisfies that sense. Unlike frege, I say that this referent is the real world entity that satisfies the said sense in some belief world, Usually, The utterer's. Reference is a function from senses to transworld heirlines. Thus, My token of 'plato' may have a different sense than your token of 'plato', Yet both may refer to plato. (...) My token of 'the f' may have the same sense as your token of 'the f', Yet they may have different referents. My semantics constitutes, I believe, A new argument for the tenability of metaphysical realism. (shrink)

Contemporary orthodoxy affirms that singular terms cannot be predicates and that, therefore, ‘is’ is ambiguous as between predication and identity. Recent attempts to treat names as predicates do not challenge this orthodoxy. The orthodoxy was built into the structure of modern formal logic by Frege. It is defended by arguments which I show to be unsound. I provide a semantical account of atomic sentences which draws upon Mill's account of predication, connotation and denotation. I show that singular terms may be (...) predicates, that it is highly implausible that there is an ‘is’ of identity in natural languages, and that modern formal logic is deficient in that it cannot recognize sentences, including singular existentials, in which singular terms are predicates, or inferences which depend upon the logical role rather than the logical category of expressions. (shrink)

This paper explains why spacetime singularities do not constitute a breakdown of physical laws, and points out that the difference between the metrics at singularities and those outside of singularities is factual, rather than nomological.

The aim is to uncover the foundations of quine's distinction between definite singular terms and general terms in predicative position, And hence of the general schema of predication, 'fx'. While each term in such a predication specifies its own item, The items so specified exhibit a typical difference exemplified in the basic case by the difference between spatio-Temporal particulars and properties of such particulars. A generally consequential difference of role is that while both terms are applied to the item of (...) lower type, Only the definite singular term has the function of identifying it. (shrink)

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 (...) seems to have thought? I suggest an alternative answer, also drawing on some empirical work on animal cognition. (shrink)

In philosophy, “singular thought” refers to our capacity to represent entities as individuals, rather than as possessors of properties. Philosophers who defend singularism argue that perception allows us to mentally latch onto objects and persons directly, without conceptualizing them as being of a certain sort. Singularists assume that singular thought forms a unified psychological kind, regardless of the nature of the individuals represented. Empirical findings on the special psychological role of persons as opposed to inanimates threaten singularism. They raise the (...) possibility that tracking individuals specifically as persons might require conceptualizing them in certain ways, for example, as persons. In this paper, we take such a possibility seriously but ultimately reject it. Instead, we propose to revise a prominent singularist theory, the theory of mental files, in order to accommodate data on the psychological distinctiveness of persons: We advocate the postulation of perceptual person-files. Perceptual tracking via person-files is different from object-tracking but also from descriptive classification under the sortal concept PERSON. (shrink)

The focus of this paper will be on singular thoughts. In the first section I will present Jeshion’s cognitivism; a view that holds that one should characterize singular thoughts by their cognitive roles. In the second section I will argue that, contrary to Jeshion’s claims, results from studies of object tracking in cognitive psychology do not support cognitivism. In the third section I will discuss Jeshion’s easy transmission of singular thought and argue that it ignores a relevant distinction between general (...) and specific understanding of names. Finally, the last section will argue that conscious attention should replace Jeshion’s significance condition as a necessary condition for one to have a singular thought. The paper will show that we need to take seriously the acquaintance requirement for singular thoughts, as even the easy transmission of singular thoughts with the use of names will be called into question. (shrink)

A singular thought can be characterized as a thought which is directed at just one object. The term ‘thought’ can apply to episodes of thinking, or to the content of the episode (what is thought). This paper argues that episodes of thinking can be just as singular, in the above sense, when they are directed at things that do not exist as when they are directed at things that do exist. In this sense, then, singular thoughts are not object-dependent.

One of the goals of a certain brand of philosopher has been to give an account of language and linguistic phenomena by means of showing how sentences are to be translated into a "logically perspicuous notation" (or an "ideal language"—to use passe terminology). The usual reason given by such philosophers for this activity is that such a notational system will somehow illustrate the "logical form" of these sentences. There are many candidates for this notational system: (almost) ordinary first-order predicate logic (...) (see Quine [1960]), higher-order predicate logic (see Parsons [1968, 1970]), intensional logic (see Montague [1969, 1970a, 1970b, 1971]), and transformational grammar (see Harrnan [1971]), to mention some of the more popular ones. I do not propose to discuss the general question of the correctness of this approach to the philosophy of language, nor do I wish to adjudicate among the notational systems mentioned here. Rather, I want to focus on one problem which must be faced by all such systems—a problem that must be discussed before one decides upon a notational system and tries to demontrate that it in fact can account for all linguistic phenomena. The general problem is to determine what we shall allow as linguistic data; in this paper I shall restrict my attention to this general problem as it appears when we try to account for certain words with non-singular reference, in particular, the words that are classified by the count/ mass and sortal/non-sortal distinctions. (shrink)

Kant's distinction between intuitive and discursive knowledge precludes his giving intuitions linguistic representation. Singular terms represent concepts given what kant calls a 'singular use' and are analyzable as definite descriptions. That the object described exists and that there is only one such object can be given linguistic representation only through an explicit assertion of existence and uniqueness. As an intuitionist in mathematics kant holds that mathematics proclaims the constructibility and not the existence of its objects.

Singular terms used in fictions for fictional characters raise well-known philosophical issues, explored in depth in the literature. But philosophers typically assume that names already in use to refer to “moderatesized specimens of dry goods” cause no special problem when occurring in fictions, behaving there as they ordinarily do in straightforward assertions. In this paper I continue a debate with Stacie Friend, arguing against this for the exceptionalist view that names of real entities in fictional discourse don’t work there as (...) they do in simple-sentence assertions, but rather as fictional names do. (shrink)

In this paper I challenge the widespread assumption that the conditions for singular reference are more or less the same as the conditions for singular thought. I claim that we refer singularly to things without thinking singularly about them more often than it is usually believed. I first argue that we should take the idea that singular thought is non-descriptive thought very seriously. If we do that, it seems that we cannot be so liberal about what counts as acquaintance; only (...) perception will do. I also briefly discuss and reject semantic instrumentalism. Finally, I argue that while singular reference is cheap, singular thought comes only at a price. (shrink)

É bem conhecida a divergência entre as posições de Gottlob Frege e Bertrand Russell com relação ao tratamento semântico dado a sentenças contendo termos singulares indefinidos, ou seja, termos singulares sem referência ou com referência ambígua, tais como ‘Papai Noel’ ou ‘o atual rei da França’ ou ‘1/0 ’ ou ‘√4’ ou ‘o autor de Principia Mathematica’. Para Frege, as sentenças da linguagem natural que contêm termos indefinidos não formam declarações e portanto não são nem verdadeiras nem falsas. Já para (...) as sentenças da matemática, Frege defende que elas precisam ser corrigidas através da convenção forçada de uma referência não ambígua. Russell, por outro lado, aceita os termos indefinidos e propõe, através de sua teoria das descrições definidas, uma maneira de avaliar as sentenças em que eles ocorrem; e Quine amplia a teoria de Russell para abranger também os nomes com problemas de referência. Na prática da matemática são comuns os termos singulares indefinidos, sem referência, tais como ‘1/0 ’, ou com referência ambígua, tais como ‘√4’. Apesar de não haver uma sistematização rigorosa desta situação entre os matemáticos, há, no entanto, um conjunto de regras convencionais que tradicionalmente costumam ser aplicadas no tratamento matemático dos termos indefinidos. Nossa proposta é tomar a convenção matemática como inspiração e modelo para apresentar uma interpretação semântica formal para as descrições definidas e os nomes e utilizá-la como um argumento que favorece a abordagem de Russell relativamente à de Frege. (shrink)

Although the view that sees proper names as referential singular terms is widely considered orthodoxy, there is a growing popularity to the view that proper names are predicates. This is partly because the orthodoxy faces two anomalies that Predicativism can solve: on the one hand, proper names can have multiple bearers. But multiple bearerhood is a problem to the idea that proper names have just one individual as referent. On the other hand, as Burge noted, proper names can have predicative (...) uses. But the view that proper names are singular terms arguably does not have the resources to deal with Burge’s cases. In this paper I argue that the Predicate View of proper names is mistaken. I first argue against the syntactic evidence used to support the view and against the predicativist’s methodology of inferring a semantic account for proper names based on incomplete syntactic data. I also show that Predicativism can neither explain the behaviour of proper names in full generality, nor claim the fundamentality of predicative names. In developing my own view, however, I accept the insight that proper names in some sense express generality. Hence I propose that proper names—albeit fundamentally singular referential terms—express generality in two senses. First, by being used as predicates, since then they are true of many individuals; and second, by being referentially related to many individuals. I respond to the problem of multiple bearerhood by proposing that proper names are polyreferential, and also explain the behaviour of proper names in light of the wider phenomenon I called category change, and show how Polyreferentialism can account for all uses of proper names. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the question of whether we will ever have an Artificial General Superintelligence (AGSI) and how it will affect our species if it does so. First, it explores various proposed definitions of AGSI and the potential implications of its emergence, including the possibility of collaboration or conflict with humans, its impact on our daily lives, and its potential for increased creativity and wisdom. The concept of the Singularity, which refers to the hypothetical future emergence of superintelligent machines that (...) will take control of the world, is also introduced and discussed, along with criticisms of this concept. Second, it is considered the possibility of mind uploading (MU) and whether such MU would be a suitable means to achieve (true) immortality in this world—the ultimate goal of the proponents of this approach. It is argued that the technological possibility of achieving something like this is very remote, and that, even if it were ever achieved, serious problems would remain, such as the preservation of personal identity. Third, the chapter concludes arguing that the future we create will depend largely on how well we manage the development of AI. It is essential to develop governance of AI to ensure that critical decisions are not left in the hands of automated decision systems or those who create them. The importance of such governance lies not only in avoiding the dystopian scenarios of a future AGSI but also in ensuring that AI is developed in a way that benefits humanity. (shrink)

Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment offers authoritative, jargon-free essays and critical commentaries on accelerating technological progress and the notion of technological singularity. It focuses on conjectures about the intelligence explosion, transhumanism, and whole brain emulation. Recent years have seen a plethora of forecasts about the profound, disruptive impact that is likely to result from further progress in these areas. Many commentators however doubt the scientific rigor of these forecasts, rejecting them as speculative and unfounded. We therefore invited prominent (...) computer scientists, physicists, philosophers, biologists, economists and other thinkers to assess the singularity hypotheses. Their contributions go beyond speculation, providing deep insights into the main issues and a balanced picture of the debate. (shrink)

This article explores and extends Levinas’s ideas of singularity and community as multiplicity and argues that his identification of language and discourse as the means to create ethical communities provides tangible possibilities for rebuilding genuine democracy in a humane world. These ideas help us reimagine school and classroom as communities open to differences. They also give education the opportunity to support the emergence of the singular and the irreducible—infinite human beings.

Ray Kurzweil and others have posited that the confluence of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and genetic engineering will soon produce posthuman beings that will far surpass us in power and intelligence. Just as black holes constitute a ldquo;singularityrdquo; from which no information can escape, posthumans will constitute a ldquo;singularity:rdquo; whose aims and capacities lie beyond our ken. I argue that technological posthumanists, whether wittingly or unwittingly, draw upon the long-standing Christian discourse of ldquo;theosis,rdquo; according to which humans are capable of (...) being God or god-like. From St. Paul and Luther to Hegel and Kurzweil, the idea of human self-deification plays a prominent role. Hegel in particular emphasizes that God becomes wholly actualized only in the process by which humanity achieves absolute consciousness. Kurzweil agrees that God becomes fully actual only through historical processes that illuminate and thus transform the entire universe. The difference is that for Kurzweil and many other posthumanists, our offspringmdash;the posthumansmdash;will carry out this extraordinary process. What will happen to Home sapiens in the meantime is a daunting question.br /br /. (shrink)

Here, we show that by accepting Fuzzy time-Particle interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, the singularities in the new Model are vanished.

This chapter provides a rich philosophical discussion of superintelligence, a widely discussed piece that has encouraged philosophers of mind to take transhumanism, mind uploading, and the singularity more seriously. It starts with the argument for a singularity: is there good reason to believe that there will be an intelligence explosion? Next, the chapter considers how to negotiate the singularity: if it is possible that there will be a singularity, how can we maximize the chances of a good outcome? Finally, it (...) considers the place of humans in a post‐singularity world, with special attention to questions about uploading: can an uploaded human be conscious, and will uploading preserve personal identity? The chapter also analyzes whether there are certain constraints on design of artificial intelligence (AI) and AI+ that we might impose, in order to increase the chances of a good outcome. (shrink)

A long-standing theme in discussion of perception and thought has been that our primary cognitive contact with individual objects and events in the world derives from our perceptual contact with them. When I look at a duck in front of me, I am not merely presented with the fact that there is at least one duck in the area, rather I seem to be presented withthisthing (as one might put it from my perspective) in front of me, which looks to (...) me to be a duck. Furthermore, such a perception would seem to put me in a position not merely to make the existential judgment that there is some duck or other present, but rather to make a singular, demonstrative judgment, that that is a duck. My grounds for an existential judgment in this case derives from my apprehension of the demonstrative thought and not vice versa. (shrink)

This paper is about the Descriptivism/Singularism debate, which has loomed large in 20-century philosophy of language and mind. My aim is to defend Singularism by showing, first, that it is a better and more promising view than even the most sophisticated versions of Descriptivism, and second, that the recent objections to Singularism (based on a dismissal of the acquaintance constraint on singular thought) miss their target.

What is involved in having a singular thought about an ordinary object? On the leading epistemic view, one has this capacity if and only if one has belief-forming dispositions which would reliably enable one to get its properties right (Dickie, 2015). I first argue that Dickie’s official view entails surprising and unpalatable claims about either rationality or singular thought, before offering a precisification. Once we have reached that level of abstraction, it becomes difficult to see what is distinctively epistemic about (...) the framework. If we are to tease out the delicate connection between singular thought and knowledge, we should suspend the assumption that there is a homogeneous core, present in all cases of such thought, and that it is from there that its (univocal) epistemic character derives. (shrink)

In discussing cruelty toward human beings, I argue that disregarding the singularity of any human being is necessary for treating her or him cruelly. The cruelty of Peter the Great, relying upon the intolerance of any human singular individuality, serves me as a paradigm-case to illustrate that. The cruelty of Procrustes and that of Stalin rely upon similar grounds. Relating to a person’s singularity is sufficient to prevent cruelty toward that person. In contrast, a liberal state of mind or solidarity (...) is insufficient to prevent cruelty and, under some circumstances, may even cause it. (shrink)

The authors challenge the reigning “causal power framework” as an explanation for whether a particular outcome was actually caused by a specific potential cause. They test a new measure of causal attribution in two experiments by embedding the measure within the Structure Induction model of Singular Causation (SISC, Stephan & Waldmann, 2016).

This essay develops the thesis that Frege’s notion of grasping does not refer to some special psychological relation between a subject and a proposition. Instead, the verb “to grasp” is a contextually defined technical term that, taken by itself, has no meaning. If that is right, then not only Frege’s resentment to the idea of grasping singular propositions is unfounded. The view that intentionality without representations is possible, championed by some advocates of the New Theory of Reference, is groundless as (...) well. (shrink)

One of the most important and most frequently discussed theological problems related to cosmology is the creation problem. Unfortunately, it is usually considered in a context of a rather simplistic understanding of the initial singularity (often referred to as the Big Bang). This review of the initial singularity problem considers its evolution in twentieth‐century cosmology and develops methodological rules of its theological (and philosophical) interpretations. The recent work on the “noncommutative structure of singularities” suggests that on the fundamental level (...) (below the Planck's scale) the concepts of space, time, and localization are meaningless and that there is no distinction between singular and nonsingular states of the universe. In spite of the fact that at this level there is no time, one can meaningfully speak about dynamics, albeit in a generalized sense. Space, time, and singularities appear only in the transition process to the macroscopic physics. This idea, explored here in more detail, clearly favors an atemporal understanding of creation. (shrink)

I would like to thank the authors of the 26 contributions to this symposium on my article “The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis”. I learned a great deal from the reading their commentaries. Some of the commentaries engaged my article in detail, while others developed ideas about the singularity in other directions. In this reply I will concentrate mainly on those in the first group, with occasional comments on those in the second. A singularity (or an intelligence explosion) is a rapid (...) increase in intelligence to superintelligence (intelligence of far greater than human levels), as each generation of intelligent systems creates more intelligent systems in turn. The target article argues that we should take the possibility of a singularity seriously, and argues that there will be superintelligent systems within centuries unless certain specific defeating conditions obtain. (shrink)

Thought about the singularity intersects the philosophy of mind in deep and important ways. However, thought about the singularity also intersects many other areas of philosophy, including the history of philosophy, metaphysics, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of religion. I point to some of those intersections. Singularitarian thought suggests that many of the objects and processes that once lay in the domain of revealed religion now lie in the domain of pure computer science.

Toward a theory of n-tuples of individuals and concepts as surrogates for Russellian singular propositions and singular concepts. Alonzo Church proposed a powerful and elegant theory of sequences of functions and their arguments as singular-concept surrogates. Church’s account accords with his Alternative (0), the strictest of his three competing criteria for strict synonymy. The currently popular objection to strict criteria like (0) on the basis of the Russell-Myhill paradox is misguided. Russell-Myhill is not a problem specifically for Alternative (0). Rather (...) it is a disproof of unrestricted concept comprehension. Unrestricted comprehension is also inconsistent with facts about sets of properties. It is demonstrated furthermore that the principal rival conception of propositions, as classes of possible worlds, is subject to a fatal philosophical collapse: It follows on that conception, given that each of us is fallible, that everyone believes everything. Although it is far superior to its principal rival conception, Church’s proposed theory is vulnerable under (0) to a version of Russell’s notorious Gray’s /Elegy/ objection. Some amendments to Church’s proposal are proffered that address Russell’s objection, including an amendment first proposed in the present author’s /Frege’s Puzzle/ (1986). Church’s response (personal correspondence) is considered. (shrink)

A tacit assumption in the literature devoted to singular thought is that singular thought constitutes a unitary phenomenon, and so a correct account of it must encompass all instances. In this essay, I argue against such a unitary account. The superficial feature of singularity might result from ver y different deep-level phenomena. Following Taylor (2010) and Crane (2013), I distinguish between the referential fitness and the referential success of a thought. I argue that facts responsible for referential fitness (e.g., mental (...) files or individual concepts), as well as facts responsible for referential success (e.g., acquaintance conditions on referential success), are relevant in explaining the data pertaining to a theory of singular thought. What makes this approach particularly attractive is that there are good independent reasons to introduce both kinds of facts in theorizing about thought. (shrink)

This paper deals with the mutations in Wittgenstein’s treatment of the notions of “generality” and of “singularity”, from his first philosophy, in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, to his later mature philosophy represented by the Philosophical Investigations. As we shall see, Wittgenstein’s philosophical handling of the notion of “visual perception” plays a key role in those conceptual transformations.

This paper contains two traditions of diagrammatic studies namely one, the Euler–Venn–Peirce diagram and the other, following tradition of Aristotle, the square of oppositions. We put together both the traditions to study representations of singular propositions, their negations and the inter relationship between the two. Along with classical negation we have incorporated negation of another kind viz. absence. We have also considered the changes that take place in the context of open universe.