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Publications (37)
Modern logicians hold that traditional logic makes a serious error by accepting the subalternation thesis, the thesis that universal affirmatives imply matching particular affirmatives. But some traditional logicians (e.g., Al-Fārābī, Abelard, Ockham) presented doctrines of existential import of categorical propositions that include subalternation,...
This article examines the traditional and modern doctrines of categorical propositions and argues that both doctrines have serious problems. While the doctrines disagree about existential imports of categorical propositions, they share a fundamental assumption: matching categorical propositions of the same kind (e.g. universal affirmatives, particu...
Say that some things compose something, if the latter is a whole, fusion, or mereological sum of the former. Then the thesis that composition is identity holds that the composition relation is a kind of identity relation, a plural cousin of singular identity. On this thesis, any things that compose a whole (taken together) are identical with the wh...
This article examines two syllogistic arguments contrasted in an ancient Chinese book, the Mozi , which expounds doctrines of the Mohist school of philosophers. While the arguments seem to have the same form, one of them (the one-horse argument ) is valid but the other (the two-horse argument ) is not. To explain this difference, the article uses E...
Nominalism about attributes has serious difficulties in accounting for truths involving abstract nouns. Prominent among such truths are statements of comparative similarity among attributes (e.g., ‘Carmine resembles vermillion more than it resembles French blue’). This paper argues that one cannot account for the truth of such statements without in...
This paper presents an interpretation of Gongsun Long's white horse paradox. The Chinese sentence he uses to state his main thesis (Bai ma fei ma) has two potential readings: (a) The white horses are not horses. (b) The white horses are not the horses. Although (a) gives the usual and correct reading of the sentence, according to the interpretation...
In developing resemblance nominalism, Rodriguez-Pereyra attempts to meet the challenge that truths involving abstract nouns
pose to the doctrine. He holds that one can render sentences containing abstract nouns without invoking attributes and defends
this view by giving nominalistic sentences that express the truthmakers of two such sentences: ‘Sca...
This article examines Moltmann’s analysis of intensional transitive verbs (e.g. need, search for), and argues that the analysis fails because the key notion it employs, ‘variable satisfier’, is inconsistent.
In developing modern logic, Frege aims to substantiate the logicist view of arithmetic. In this view, arithmetic is reducible to logic: one can define all arithmetical notions using only logical notions, and prove all arithmetic truths using only logical truths together with definitions of arithmetical notions. A key component of his attempt to sho...
This paper discusses two important results about expressive limitations of elementary languages due to David Kaplan, and clarifies how they relate to the expressive power of plural constructions of natural languages. Kaplan proved that such plural quantifications as the following cannot be paraphrased into elementary languages:
Most things are funn...
Many linguists, philosophers, and anthropologists hold that classifier languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai, have no count nouns, and that all their common nouns are mass nouns. This paper argues that Chinese draws a syntactic, as well as semantic, distinction between mass and count nouns, and suggests how the approach taken to...
In this sequel to “The logic and meaning of plurals. Part I”, I continue to present an account of logic and language that
acknowledges limitations of singular constructions of natural languages and recognizes plural constructions as their peers.
To this end, I present a non-reductive account of plural constructions that results from the conception...
Contemporary accounts of logic and language cannot give proper treatments of plural constructions of natural languages. They
assume that plural constructions are redundant devices used to abbreviate singular constructions. This paper and its sequel,
“The logic and meaning of plurals, II”, aim to develop an account of logic and language that acknowl...
G. Priest [ibid. 62, 11–16 (2002; Zbl 0991.03501)] gives an intriguing analysis of Newcomb’s paradox. He argues that the Newcomb situations, situations described to present the paradox, are rational dilemmas – namely, situations in which rationality requires you to do two incompatible things. In this paper, I aim to show that the argument fails bec...
Plausible principles on truth seem to yield contradictory conclusions about paradoxical sentences such as the Strengthened Liar. Those who take the contextualist approach, such as Parsons and Burge, attempt to justify the seemingly contradictory conclusions by arguing that the natural reasoning that leads to them involves some kind of contextual sh...
In this paper, I criticize John Bigelow's account of number and present my own account that results from the criticism. In doing so, I argue that proper understanding of the nature of number requires a radical departure from the standard conception of language and reality and outline the alternative conception that underlies my account of number. I...
L'A. critique la caracterisation formelle de l'explication scientifique par C. Glymour, selon laquelle une theorie explique un phenomene comme resultat d'un autre phenomene, ne s'appliquant qu'aux theories exprimees dans la logique predicative de premier ordre et qui n'admettent que le remplacement d'une proposition par une subtheorie ou une subfor...
Jaegwon Kim and Penelope Maddy have made an important contribution to the epistemology of mathematics. They argue "numerical properties do not differ in respect of perceptual accessibility from sundry physical properties such as colors, shapes [etc.]" (Kim 1981). But they go a step further to argue that we can see some sets because we can have nume...
Classifier languages, which include Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, (i) have no grammatical number system, and (ii) make prominent use of classifiers, special expressions without counterparts in non-classifiers languages (e.g., English), in numeral noun phrases (e.g., their counterparts of 'three cows'). Many linguists, philosophers, and anthropolog...
