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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
    See Original
    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The dispute between fictionalism and paraphrase nominalism is an empirical dispute about ordinary-language semantics, not a purely metaphysical one.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Ordinary speakers lack stable, theoretically consistent intuitions about whether abstract-object talk is literal or figurative.
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    • 2.When linguistic data is too indeterminate to settle a question, the dispute reverts to a metaphysical one about what ontology best systematizes our practices.
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    • 3.Quine's criterion of ontological commitment shows that what a theory 'says there is' depends on regimentation, not ordinary-language meaning.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Field's fictionalism and Burgess-Rosen's paraphrase nominalism disagree not about what sentences mean but about which truths we are obligated to assert sincerely.
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    • 2.A dispute about norms of sincere assertion and ontological obligation is a normative-metaphysical dispute, not an empirical-semantic one.
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.The question at issue is whether utterances of (P) literally say the same thing as the corresponding sentence (N).
      ?

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    • 2.Whether two sentences say the same thing in ordinary language is a question of empirical semantics.
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