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Ontology Without Borders
A new approach to the metaphysics, background logic, and semantics of ontological debate, Ontology Without Borders offers new solutions to perennial philosophical puzzles about constitution and the nonexistent. Book jacket.
Ontology Without Borders
Our experience of objects (and consequently our theorizing about them) is very rich. We perceive objects as possessing individuation conditions. They appear to have boundaries in space and time, for example, and they appear to move independently of a background of other objects or a landscape. In Ontology Without Boundaries Jody Azzouni undertakes an analysis of our concept of object, and shows what about that notion is truly due to the world and what about it is a projection onto the world of our senses and thinking. Location and individuation conditions are our product: there is no echo of them in the world. Features, the ways that objects seem to be, aren't projections. Azzouni shows how ...
Attributing Knowledge
"The word "know" is revealed as vague, applicable to fallible agents, factive and criterion transcendent. It is invariant in its meaning across contexts and invariant relative to different agents. Only purely epistemic properties affect its correct application-not the interests of agents or those who attribute the word to agents. These properties enable "know" to be applied correctly-as it routinely is-to cognitive agents ranging from sophisticated human knowers, who engage in substantial metacognition, to various animals, who know much less and do much less, if any, metacognition, to nonconscious mechanical devices such as drones, robots, and the like. These properties of the word "know" su...
Deflating Existential Consequence
If we take mathematical statements to be true, must we also believe in the existence of abstract invisible mathematical objects? This text claims that the way to escape such a commitment is to accept true statements which are about objects that don't exist in any sense at all.
Semantic Perception
Humans involuntarily experience physical items as having meaning-properties. Semantic Perception explores this experience--the phenomenology of the understanding of language--in depth. Jody Azzouni shows the many ways that we experience the meaning-properties of language artifacts as independent of the intentions of their makers.
Talking About Nothing
Ordinary language and scientific language enable us to speak about, in a singular way (using demonstratives and names), what we recognize not to exist: fictions, the contents of our hallucinations, abstract objects, and various idealized but nonexistent objects that our scientific theories are often couched in terms of. Indeed, references to such nonexistent items-especially in the case of the application of mathematics to the sciences-are indispensable. We cannot avoid talking about such things. Scientific and ordinary languages thus enable us to say things about Pegasus or about hallucinated objects that are true (or false), such as "Pegasus was believed by the ancient Greeks to be a flyin...
Talking About Nothing
Ordinary language and scientific language enable us to speak about, in a singular way (using demonstratives and names), what we recognize not to exist: fictions, the contents of our hallucinations, abstract objects, and various idealized but nonexistent objects that our scientific theories are often couched in terms of. Indeed, references to such nonexistent items-especially in the case of the application of mathematics to the sciences-are indispensable. We cannot avoid talking about such things. Scientific and ordinary languages thus enable us to say things about Pegasus or about hallucinated objects that are true (or false), such as "Pegasus was believed by the ancient Greeks to be a flyin...
Metaphysical Myths, Mathematical Practice
This original and exciting study offers a completely new perspective on the philosophy of mathematics. Most philosophers of mathematics try to show either that the sort of knowledge mathematicians have is similar to the sort of knowledge specialists in the empirical sciences have or that the kind of knowledge mathematicians have, although apparently about objects such as numbers, sets, and so on, isn't really about those sorts of things at all. Jody Azzouni argues that mathematical knowledge is a special kind of knowledge that must be gathered in its own unique way. He analyzes the linguistic pitfalls and misperceptions philosophers in this field are often prone to, and explores the misapplications of epistemic principles from the empirical sciences to the exact sciences. What emerges is a picture of mathematics sensitive both to mathematical practice and to the ontological and epistemological issues that concern philosophers. The book will be of special interest to philosophers of science, mathematics, logic, and language. It should also interest mathematicians themselves.
Deflating Existential Consequence
If we must take mathematical statements to be true, must we also believe in the existence of abstracta eternal invisible mathematical objects accessible only by the power of pure thought? Jody Azzouni says no, and he claims that the way to escape such commitments is to accept (as an essential part of scientific doctrine) true statements which are about objects that don't exist in any sense at all. Azzouni illustrates what the metaphysical landscape looks like once we avoid a militant Realism which forces our commitment to anything that our theories quantify. Escaping metaphysical straitjackets (such as the correspondence theory of truth), while retaining the insight that some truths are about objects that do exist, Azzouni says that we can sort scientifically-given objects into two categories: ones which exist, and to which we forge instrumental access in order to learn their properties, and ones which do not, that is, which are made up in exactly the same sense that fictional objects are. He offers as a case study a small portion of Newtonian physics, and one result of his classification of its ontological commitments, is that it does not commit us to absolute space and time.
The Rule-Following Paradox and its Implications for Metaphysics
This monograph presents Azzouni’s new approach to the rule-following paradox. His solution leaves intact an isolated individual’s capacity to follow rules, and it simultaneously avoids replacing the truth conditions for meaning-talk with mere assertability conditions for that talk. Kripke’s influential version of Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox—and Wittgenstein’s views more generally—on the contrary, make rule-following practices and assertions about those practices subject to community norms without which they lose their cogency. Azzouni summarizes and develops Kripke’s original version of Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox to make salient the linchpin assumptions...
