- Ontological
- "Ontological" refers to questions about what actually exists or is real. It's concerned with the fundamental nature of being—asking "What kinds of things are there?" rather than "How do we know about them?" For example, an ontological question might be whether numbers, ideas, or God actually exist as real things, or if they're just human inventions.
- Putnam
- # Putnam
"Putnam" most commonly refers to **Hilary Putnam** (1926-2016), an influential American philosopher who made major contributions to philosophy of mind, language, and science. He is famous for thought experiments like the "brain in a vat" scenario, which explores questions about reality and how we know what's real. His work fundamentally changed how philosophers think about the relationship between our minds, language, and the external world.
- Stratification(in formal logic and set theory)
- In Quine's logic, a property of formulas where you can assign levels or ranks to variables in a way that respects the rules of the system—essentially, a formal way of keeping things organized and consistent.
- Underdetermine(in epistemology (theory of knowledge))
- When something doesn't give you enough information to figure out the complete answer—it leaves multiple possibilities still open.
- formal hierarchies(as systems that may have multiple interpretations)
- A structured system of levels or ranks defined purely by logical rules and symbols, without reference to real-world things—like how a mathematical system works on its own.
- intended interpretation(SQML and KQML semantics)
- An interpretation for an applied modal language comprising the actual and merely possible individuals and worlds the language is understood to be about
- metatheoretic(Used to characterize the role of logical semantics)
- Providing a framework for theorizing about the relationship between symbols (used externally in language and internally in thought) and the world, rather than positing cognitive entities for computational manipulation
- model-theoretic argument(Philosophy of language; challenge to theories that determine reference via truth-maximization)
- An argument, advanced by Hilary Putnam, showing that there exist many different assignments of reference to subsentential expressions of a language that make all utterances of that language true, thereby underdetermining reference.