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 the Geometry of Variably Polyadic Relations
Building on “Beyond Substitution”, I propose a new account of the geometry of variably polyadic relations, and use this to treat substitution itself as a variably polyadic relation
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.