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    Carmelics

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

    It is not the case that The worry about guaranteeing mutual exclusiveness and joint exhaustiveness of ontological categories can be met by defining categories in ways that logically guarantee these properties.

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

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Formal mutual exclusiveness requires categories to be defined over a fixed, well-determined domain of entities, but ontological inquiry cannot presuppose such a domain without circularity.
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    • 2.Quine's indeterminacy of ontological commitment shows that what counts as an 'entity' subject to categorical sorting is itself theory-relative, undermining the logical guarantee's scope.
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    • 3.A logical partition of a domain that is itself ontologically contested produces formal exhaustiveness without genuine ontological exhaustiveness.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Dependence relations used in Thomasson's scheme—e.g., dependence on mental states—are themselves ontologically loaded predicates requiring prior categorical distinctions to be well-defined.
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    • 2.If the binary presence-or-absence of a dependence relation admits of borderline cases or gradations, as Aristotle's analogical predication and contemporary truthmaker theorists like Lowe argue, the law of excluded middle does not straightforwardly apply to yield exhaustive disjoint categories.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.Thomasson (1999) distinguishes categories in terms of what relations of dependence a purported entity has or lacks on mental states.
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    • 2.A second dimension distinguishes categories in terms of what relations of dependence a purported entity has or lacks on spatio-temporally located objects.
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    • 3.The law of the excluded middle alone ensures mutual exclusiveness and exhaustiveness for categories defined by presence or absence of a relation.
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