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Singular Terms and Ontological Seriousness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2022

ARTHUR SCHIPPER Open the ORCID record for ARTHUR SCHIPPER [Opens in a new window]
ARTHUR SCHIPPER*
Affiliation:
INSTITUTE OF FOREIGN PHILOSOPHY, PEKING UNIVERSITY [email protected]
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Abstract

Linguistic ontologists and antilinguistic, ‘serious’ ontologists both accept the inference from ‘Fido is a dog’ to ‘Fido has the property of being a dog’ but disagree about its ontological consequences. In arguing that we are committed to properties on the basis of these transformations, linguistic ontologists employ a neo-Fregean meta-ontological principle, on which the function of singular terms is to refer. To reject this, serious ontologists must defend an alternative. This paper defends an alternative on which the function of singular terms is not generally to refer and on which they are generally ontologically noncommittal. This is the best way to reject linguistic, ‘easy’ arguments for the existence of properties. The account recommends neutralism about quantification (drawing on Barcan Marcus and Meinongianism), coherently bringing together two important yet uncombined meta-ontological movements. Moreover, it employs Ramseyan insights about the transformations to provide a nonreductionist, non-error-theoretic redundancy approach to explicit talk about properties.

Keywords

nominalizationpropertiessingular termsontological seriousnessneutral quantification
Type
Article
Information
Journal of the American Philosophical Association , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , September 2023 , pp. 574 - 595
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Philosophical Association

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Footnotes

I am especially grateful to Paul Snowdon for his constant support and valuable comments on this paper. Robert Schipper and the anonymous reviewers provided helpful feedback on the paper. I also thank: Tim Crane, Peter Unger, and Francesco Berto for their support and encouragement; Christian Skirke, Chuang Ye, Julius Schönherr, Arvid Båve, Thomas Schindler, Julian Dodd, and Stacie Friend for helpful discussions on directly related ideas; and audiences at Huaqiao, Sun Yat-sen, and Peking Universities and in London, especially Kevin Lynch, George Hull, and Ivan Ivanov.

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