Latest additions and updates across the argument database
Choice function variables can be bound existentially at any clausal level without movement, explaining island-insensitivity without invoking covert quantifier raising.
If indefinites lack the denotation type of genuine quantifiers, assimilating their readings to scopal ambiguity misclassifies the semantic mechanism at work.
Fodor and Sag (1982) demonstrated that indefinites have a referential reading absent from other quantifiers, producing apparent wide scope without syntactic movement.
Purely scopal accounts predict that indefinites should exhibit the same island sensitivity as 'every' and 'most', but this prediction is systematically falsified by cross-linguistic data.
A uniform scopal treatment thus generates incorrect empirical predictions, whereas a hybrid referential-existential analysis of indefinites avoids this overgeneration.
The multiple readings of 'Every man who read a book by Chomsky is happy' should not be treated as a scopal ambiguity akin to other quantifier scope ambiguities.
Kratzer's (1998) analysis shows indefinites introduce choice functions, not generalized quantifiers, making their 'scope' a misnomer for a fundamentally different semantic operation.
The multiple readings of 'Every man who read a book by Chomsky is happy' should not be treated as a scopal ambiguity akin to other quantifier scope ambiguities.
Quine's naturalism establishes that philosophy and science are continuous, with philosophy clarifying conceptual frameworks rather than legislating empirical content.
When philosophy imposes a priori constraints on empirical domains, it risks the fate of Kant's Newtonian mechanics claim—falsified by relativity and quantum theory.
The proper role of philosophy is to analyze the logical structure of scientific theories, not to determine which empirical outcomes those theories may produce.
Logical empiricists like Carnap distinguished sharply between analytic framework-questions and synthetic empirical questions, reserving the latter for scientific investigation.
Davidson's own anomalous monism respects this boundary: it argues from logical features of mental discourse without prescribing what neuroscience or physics must discover empirically.
Philosophy should not dictate to science on empirical matters
Philosophy should not dictate to science on empirical matters
Ruth Chang's 'on a par' relation demonstrates that items can be evaluatively comparable without being equal, better, or worse than each other.
Practical wisdom, as Aristotle conceived it, operates precisely by discerning fitting responses within a structured field of commensurable values, not by abandoning comparison.
If incomparability were genuine, rational agents would face systematic paralysis, yet deliberative experience consistently yields resoluble choices, suggesting comparability is operative.
John Broome's arguments establish that if two options are not incomparable, then small improvements to one must tip rational preference, a constraint incomparability violates and thus generates inconsistent choice behavior.
The 'small improvement argument' shows that genuine incomparability entails violations of transitivity, which undermines the coherence of any preference structure claimed to constitute practical wisdom.
Incomparability of value should be rejected
Incomparability of value should be rejected
If somatic markers are replaceable, the distinctive phenomenal character that James-Lange assigns to felt bodily change is demoted from constitutive to merely contingent.
James-Lange theory grounds emotional content in proprioceptive and interoceptive bodily feedback loops, not in abstract functional correlations.
Teleosemantics, as developed by Millikan, defines representational content via selection history, which is indifferent to the somatic substrate carrying that history.
When content is decoupled from somatic substrate, the James-Lange explanatory priority of body-over-feeling is dissolved into mere implementation detail.
Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis demonstrates that bodily states are constitutively, not merely causally, involved in generating emotional meaning.
A teleosemantic account that permits disembodied vehicles to carry identical representational content entails that somatic markers are replaceable without loss of emotional content, directly contradicting Damasio.
A teleosemantic approach threatens the truly embodied character of a James-Lange style theory of emotions.
A teleosemantic approach threatens the truly embodied character of a James-Lange style theory of emotions.
Contradiction in genuine dialectics (as in Plato's Parmenides) functions as a spiritual discipline exposing the soul's attachments to appearance.
Materialist dialectics reframes contradiction as a driver of historical-economic necessity, collapsing the epistemic into the causal-mechanical.
This conflation makes the dialectical movement explanatorily redundant—material causation already does the work, rendering 'dialectics' mere rhetorical ornament.
Marx errs in coupling the dialectical movement with materialism
Dialectical movement, traced from Plato through Hegel, is inherently teleological—oriented toward Geist or the Good, not brute matter.
Marx's inversion of Hegel replaces this normative telos with productive forces, severing dialectics from its constitutive upward orientation.
A method stripped of its telos is not a reformed dialectics but a category error masquerading as one.
Marx errs in coupling the dialectical movement with materialism
On temporalism, propositional attitude verbs like 'believes' are implicitly indexed to the time of the attitude's tokening, not the time of evaluation.
Retaining a belief across time on temporalism means the stored cognitive state remains anchored to its original temporal context, so 'Violet is a child' as believed in 2014 carries that index forward.
This entails that the retained belief is not the false 2054-proposition but the true 2014-proposition, dissolving the charge that retention commits one to obvious falsehood.
Kaplan's distinction between character and content shows that a sentence's propositional content is fixed at the context of utterance, not re-evaluated at each moment of use.
If belief content is fixed at the context of original formation, then a belief formed in 2014 that 'Violet is a child' retains the 2014-content indefinitely, just as a demonstrative fixes its referent at context.
The apparent counterintuitive result described in Objection 1 relies on conflating the time of belief formation with the time of belief evaluation, a conflation temporalism is not committed to making.
Temporalism cannot adequately account for the retention of propositional attitudes over time.
Temporalism cannot adequately account for the retention of propositional attitudes over time.
Recognition, as Hegel theorizes in the Phenomenology, is a reciprocal relation requiring that the recognized entity can return the recognitive act.
Institutions lack the reflexive self-consciousness necessary to receive, internalize, or be altered in their self-understanding by another's recognitive stance.
Therefore, what institutions receive is at most Anerkennung in its bare acknowledgment sense, not the identity-constituting recognition Honneth terms Anerkennung as esteem or love.
Axel Honneth's tripartite framework grounds misrecognition specifically in the withholding of conditions necessary for subjects to achieve successful self-realization.
Institutions, as Rawlsian 'basic structures' or Searlean systems of deontic status functions, have no self-realization to be impaired—their functional integrity is disrupted, not their dignity.
Conflating institutional dysfunction with misrecognition category-errors the moral harm at stake, obscuring that the injured party remains always the persons the institution fails to serve.
Institutions themselves cannot properly be (mis)recognized, only acknowledged or not.
Institutions themselves cannot properly be (mis)recognized, only acknowledged or not.
If mind-body interaction is incoherent, then Descartes' account of sensation—where material stimuli causally produce mental states—cannot be sustained.
Without a coherent mechanism for bodily stimuli to produce mental states, the mind cannot be said to genuinely sense in Descartes' own terms.
Malebranche argued that what Descartes calls sensation is actually God occasioning ideas in the mind, not the mind receiving impressions from matter.
If sensation is God's causal activity producing ideas rather than the mind's passive reception of material information, then the mind does not itself sense but merely has ideas occasioned in it.
Descartes' own principles about the incompatibility of mental and material substances entail that sensing, as he defines it, is not something the mind can coherently perform.
Descartes is wrong that the mind can sense.
Spinoza demonstrated that mind and body are two attributes of one substance, making causal interaction between them conceptually incoherent.
Descartes is wrong that the mind can sense.
Von Neumann's spectral theorem requires rigged Hilbert spaces (Gel'fand triples) to handle continuous spectra rigorously, revealing separable Hilbert space as insufficient.
Dirac's bra-ket formalism—indispensable to quantum mechanics practice—is formally inconsistent within separable Hilbert space, requiring distributional extensions beyond it.
The mathematical framework physicists actually use presupposes structures (delta functions, plane waves) that only become rigorous in the larger rigged Hilbert space setting.
Superselection rules partition quantum state spaces into inequivalent sectors that cannot be represented within any single separable Hilbert space, as Haag's theorem demonstrates.
Algebraic quantum field theory, following Haag and Kastler, shows that inequivalent representations of the CCRs are physically distinct, making the separable Hilbert space choice underdetermined and arbitrary.
The separable Hilbert space formulation of quantum mechanics is unsatisfactory.
The separable Hilbert space formulation of quantum mechanics is unsatisfactory.
Joseph Raz's perfectionism holds that the state may promote autonomy while recognizing that autonomous lives take genuinely plural, incommensurable forms.
Promoting the conditions for autonomous choice—like education and opportunity—is compatible with remaining agnostic about which plural valuable life is chosen.
State neutrality is not entailed by value pluralism; Berlin himself distinguished between pluralism and liberalism, denying the logical inference between them.
Value pluralism, as articulated by Isaiah Berlin, asserts that multiple goods are real and irreducible, not that all state action endorsing goods is illegitimate.
A non-neutral state can coherently favor plural-goods-enabling conditions—like civic education or cultural preservation—without collapsing into monism.
George Crowder argues that pluralism generates a 'pluralist perfectionism' precisely because navigating plural values requires cultivating specific liberal virtues the state may promote.
Rejecting state neutrality is compatible with value pluralism
Rejecting state neutrality is compatible with value pluralism
Therefore, something beyond meaning—the stated content fixed by context—is required to determine truth-conditions, vindicating Austin's locutionary/illocutionary distinction.
Recanati's 'Truth-Conditional Pragmatics' demonstrates that unarticulated constituents—elements absent from logical form—routinely contribute to truth-conditions of utterances.
Stanley and Szabo's debate over quantifier domain restriction shows that even logically complete sentences require pragmatic narrowing before truth-conditions are determinable.