back to logos

schedule

abstracts

Asunción Álvarez, (University of Barcelona) Fregean Senses vs. Intentional Aspects

In this talk, I will put forward a Fregean account of rational thought based on non-linguistic concepts and contents, which I equate respectively with Fregean senses and thoughts. Fregean senses, I will further argue, constitute the objects of rational thoughts, and so must be distinguished from what I will call intentional aspects, the objects of those thoughts which cannot enter into rational inference. I will try to motivate and expound this distinction, as well as the nature of rational inference assumed here.

Marta Campdelacreu (Barcelona) Relationalism

David Lewis, in (Lewis, 1986), presented the so-called ‘problem of temporary intrinsics’ or ‘problem of intrinsic change’: while writing this essay, I am sitting in front of my computer, I am bent. Before, I was looking out of the window, I was straight. How can I, one and the same object, instantiate two contrary intrinsic properties? Relationalism (compatibly with the endurance theory of persistence) has tried to solve the problem of intrinsic change defending that, in fact, intrinsic properties are relations to moments of time. In the talk, I would like to analyze and try to reject three criticisms that have been made to this position. First, David Lewis argued that relationalism eliminates intrinsic properties (Lewis 1986), or that, at best, it makes them a divided category (Lewis 2002). Secondly, Jim Stone has argued that relationalism cannot give an explanation of the intuition that, for example, if an object is bent at times t1, t2 …till t8, it seems to have a feature that remains the same from t1 to t8 and that the object could have had for a shorter or a longer span (Stone, 2003). Thirdly, Gonzalo Rodríguez-Pereyra has argued that relationalism cannot explain change (Rodriguez-Pereyra, 2003). To accomplish my purpose I shall defend (among other things) that even in the case of intrinsic properties which are had by objects during all their careers, we have a good enough reason to say that they are relations to times and that, if we accept this, intrinsic properties are not a divided category; moreover, to answer Stone and Rodríguez-Pereyra I shall introduce the notion of bearing (atemporally) a certain relation to time in virtue of bearing that relation to moments of time.

Ghislain Guigon (Geneva) Cycles in Paradise

Resemblance is indeterminate, and so are counterfactuals and our modal intuitions about an object’s essential properties. How much indeterminate resemblance should be to match the indeterminacy of counterfactuals and of our de re modal intuitions? In the present paper, it is argued that the notions of resemblance among possibilia that enter into resemblance-based accounts of the truth-conditions of counterfactuals and interpretations of counterpart relations have to be less indeterminate than the resemblance notions that enter into our everyday resemblance judgments. The context relativity of resemblance, Goodman and Lewis diagnose, consists in the variability in relevance and importance of the respects that combine into an evaluation of overall resemblance. Analysis reveals that overall resemblance is also relative to the way we combine these respects into an evaluation of resemblance. In the paper, it is shown that if we allow resemblance relations among possibilia to be fully context relative – as context relative as ordinary language notions of resemblance might be – (i) intuitively valid principles about counterfactuals may turn out fallacious, and (ii) the counterpart theorist cannot always account for the truth of our essentialist claims.

Matthew Kennedy (Nottingham)  Transparency and the Structure of Experience

Over the last twenty years, the experiential phenomenon of transparency has become a central topic in the philosophy of mind. It is at the centre of the debate between contemporary representationalism and the qualia theory. However, there is another movement in contemporary philosophy of mind that has also made use of transparency. This is the naïve-realist movement. Although Michael Martin has recently relied on a form of transparency to argue for naïve realism, I believe the naïve-realist movement has more to say in this connection. In this paper I attempt to provide an accurate description of the transparency phenomenon, to show how it supports naïve realism, and, correlatively, to show how it works against theories like representationalism and the qualia theory.

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (Nottingham)  Resemblance Nominalism and Truthmakers for Negative Truths

In this paper I propose a resemblance nominalist solution to the problem of the truthmakers for negative truths. According to this solution – based on things I argued for in my book "Resemblance Nominalism" – the resemblance nominalist can account for the truthmakers for negative truths without postulating negative entities.

Luc Schneider (Geneva)  Four-Category Ontology as a Formal System

An ontology of types and tokens, (unit) attributes (tropes) and attribute-bearers (substances) can be formalised in a variant of many-sorted second-order logic. In contrast to a previous proposal of D. W. Mertz, Kind-Instance Logic (KIL), the calculus presented in the talk, is close to standard second-order quantification theory, allowing for a straightforward model-theoretic semantics, with respect to which consistency and (weak) completeness proofs can be provided. The interest of such a formalisation is two-fold. First, the formal-ontological concepts of four-category ontology can be shown to be logical categories, side-stepping the realism-antirealism issue. Second, a variant of KIL, namely Situated Kind-Instance Ontology (SKIL), which allows for reasoning over attribute instances located in time and possibility space, constitutes a formal framework not only for an endurantist account of the persistence of substances through change, but also for the reconstruction of events in the spirit of Jaegwon Kim and Jon Barwise. Furthermore, SKIL provides an alternative to standard first-order logic as a formal language for an event-based semantics of natural language as well as for an extensional account of modalities.