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    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Pluralism about linguistic ontology is defensible because 'the linguistic' is a complex phenomenon whose parts belong to distinct ontological categories.

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    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Ontological pluralism about a domain is explanatorily idle unless it specifies principled unity conditions that make the domain one domain at all.
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    • 2.The mathematical analogy undermines rather than supports linguistic pluralism: philosophers like Benacerraf argue mathematics's cross-category span generates serious epistemic access problems, not vindication.
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    • 3.A pluralism that cannot explain why phonology, syntax, and speech acts constitute 'the linguistic' rather than three unrelated domains collapses into eliminativism about the category itself.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Chomsky's internalist program, and Fodor's representationalist successor, demonstrate that apparently heterogeneous linguistic phenomena reduce to a single natural kind: I-language as a biological-computational state.
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    • 2.If a serious research program successfully unifies allegedly disparate linguistic phenomena under one ontological category, the pluralist bears the burden of showing why parsimony should be sacrificed.
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    • 3.Quine's criterion of ontological commitment entails that multiplying ontological categories is legitimate only when no single-category paraphrase preserves all explanatory work, a standard linguistic pluralism has not met.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.'The linguistic' is a complex phenomenon with parts that belong to distinct ontological categories.
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    • 2.Even 'the mathematical' spans multiple ontological categories without this being problematic: physical dogs instantiate arithmetic truths, mental operations of multiplication exist, and mental states about mathematical objects exist.
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    • 3.If a domain as well-established as mathematics can span multiple ontological categories, then spanning multiple categories is not a mark against pluralism about that domain.
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