an epistemically responsible, spare ontology

10 March 2006

outline 0.2

I shaped up the outline 0.1 in preparation for today's meeting. Here it is. The gist is that I propose to fill out the view that conceptual necessity is the primary form of necessity (I call this position CNF) by considering some objections to the view and possible responses to those objections. The objections are (1) technical: (a) Are there enough names for properties? (b) Formal first order languages of arithmetic admit of more than one model, and so something may be analytic (following from axioms of these languages and the rule of inference) and be about more than one thing, but we think of necessity as holding for relations between the individuals so named -- so there's a gulf between "analyticity" and necessity; does the same phenomenon occur in natural languages? (2) to do with "description names". (a) Description names are directly referring but involve enough conceptual content to make every modally relevant property apparent to one who's competent with them. It seems there must be names which are directly referring and involve conceptual content, but do not involve enough conceptual content to make available every modally relevant property to one who's competent with these sort of names. I call them 'c-names'. It seems like we can investigate CNF by probing the differences between c-names and proper description names. We can also learn more about how both might work, and how CNF could be more fully developed and applied to philosophical problems if we use Fine's notion of a context (in term of uniformity of semantical roles for referring terms and contexts).
I wonder how much will survive in outline 1.0?

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