Work in Progress and Manuscripts (Titles redacted for blind review; e-mail for the paper)
A paper about the subject matter of general propositions
In truthmaker semantics the subject matter of a proposition is taken to be a single state – the fusion of all the truthmakers and falsemakers of the proposition. This account works beautifully for the truth-functional operations but breaks down for quantified propositions. The account incorrectly predicts that the proposition that someone is wise is partly about Socrates. In this talk I develop a novel account of subject matter that can account for the subject matter of quantified propositions. The basic idea is that the subject matter of a proposition is taken to a collection of states – the subject matter of the proposition should be thought of as what is common to those states
A paper on how propositional constituents are defined in terms of how they are grounded
A paper on sequences
Following the seminal work of Fine there has recently been a lot of interest in generative or constructional ontologies. In such ontologies all objects are generated from the given objects by iterated application of generative operations. This paper raises and solves a novel problem for such ontologies. Existing accounts of generative operations -like the one in Fine’s “Towards a Theory of Part” – cannot account for ordered objects like sequences.
A paper on variably polyadic relations
Existing accounts of variably polyadic relations are incomplete: they cannot characterize the relationship between completions of single relation by different numbers of relata. For instance, they cannot characterize the relationship between the state of a,b,c,d,e being seated counterclockwise around the table and the state of a,b,c,d being seated counterclockwise around the table. I develop an antipositionalist account of such relations by characterizing the notion of subtracting an object from a state. Along the way I provide a new argument for antipositionalism; defend antipositionalism from a common objection; and defend some strong principles about the notion of an occurrence of an object.
Potentialist modality
Potentialism about the set theoretic hierarchy is a popular view. But how to understand the potentialist modality? We argue against the “interpretational account of the modality” and propose that the modality can be defined in essentialist terms.