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Thoughts
In these twelve essays Stephen Yablo presents a modern-day examination of Cartesian themes in the metaphysics of mind, including mental/physical dualism, the possibility of disembodied existence, conceivability as a guide to possibility, the nature of solipsistic content, and how the mind affects the course of physical events.
Aboutness
Aboutness has been studied from any number of angles. Brentano made it the defining feature of the mental. Phenomenologists try to pin down the aboutness-features of particular mental states. Materialists sometimes claim to have grounded aboutness in natural regularities. Attempts have even been made, in library science and information theory, to operationalize the notion. But it has played no real role in philosophical semantics. This is surprising; sentences have aboutness-properties if anything does. Aboutness is the first book to examine through a philosophical lens the role of subject matter in meaning. A long-standing tradition sees meaning as truth-conditions, to be specified by listi...
Thoughts
Thoughts is a collection of twelve essays by Stephen Yablo which together constitute a modern-day examination of Cartesian themes in the metaphysics of mind. Yablo offers penetrating discussions of such topics as the relation between the mental and the physical, mental causation, the possibility of disembodied existence, the relation between conceivability and possibility, varieties of necessity, and issues in the theory of content arising out of the foregoing. The collection represents almost all of Yablo's work on these topics, and features one previously unpublished piece.
The Yablo Paradox
Roy T. Cook examines the Yablo paradox--a paradoxical, infinite sequence of sentences, each of which entails the falsity of all others later than it in the sequence--with special attention paid to the idea that this paradox provides us with a semantic paradox that involves no circularity. The three main chapters of the book focus, respectively, on three questions that can be (and have been) asked about the Yablo construction. First we have the Characterization Problem, which asks what patterns of sentential reference (circular or not) generate semantic paradoxes. Addressing this problem requires an interesting and fruitful detour through the theory of directed graphs, allowing us to draw int...
Things
Things is a collection of twelve essays by Stephen Yablo on identity, essence, causation, properties, ontology, and metaontology, with an emphasis on the metaontology of abstract objects. Almost all of Yablo's published work on these topics is collected here, along with the previously unpublished "Carving Content at the Joints."
Limited Inc
Signature event context -- Summary of "Reiterating the differences"--Limited Inc a b c -- Afterword : toward an ethic of discussion.
The Logical Structure of Kinds
Eric Funkhouser uncovers a logical structure that is common to many, if not all, classificatory systems or taxonomies. Every conceptual scheme--including the sciences, mathematics, and ethics--classifies things into kinds. Given their ubiquity across theoretical contexts, we would benefit from understanding the nature of such kinds. Significantly, most conceptual schemes posit kinds that vary in their degree of specificity. Species-genus taxonomiesprovide us with familiar examples, with the species classification being more specific than the genus classification. This book instead focuses on adjectival kinds--classifications picked out by kind-terms like'mass', 'shape', or 'belief', to give ...
Mathematics and Reality
Mary Leng offers a defense of mathematical fictionalism, according to which we have no reason to believe that there are any mathematical objects. Perhaps the most pressing challenge to mathematical fictionalism is the indispensability argument for the truth of our mathematical theories (and therefore for the existence of the mathematical objects posited by those theories). According to this argument, if we have reason to believe anything, we have reason to believe that the claims of our best empirical theories are (at least approximately) true. But since claims whose truth would require the existence of mathematical objects are indispensable in formulating our best empirical theories, it fol...
Individuals, Essence and Identity
Andrea Bottani Massimiliano Carrara Pierdaniele Giaretta What do we do when we do metaphysics? The aim of this introduction is to give a provisional answer to this question, and then to explain the subtitle of the volume. It is easy to observe that when we do meta physics we engage in a linguistic activity, mainly consisting of uttering declarative sentences that are not very clear to most people. That is true, but, of course, it is not very informative. What do we speak of when we do metaphysics? A traditional answer could be: we speak of what things really are, so suggesting that things can appear in a way that is different from the way they really are. So understood, meta physics is about...
Constructing the World
David Chalmers develops a picture of reality on which all truths can be derived from a limited class of basic truths. The picture is inspired by Rudolf Carnap's construction of the world in Der Logische Aufbau Der Welt. Carnap's Aufbau is often seen as a noble failure, but Chalmers argues that a version of the project can succeed. With the right basic elements and the right derivation relation, we can indeed construct the world. The focal point of Chalmers' project is scrutability: the thesis that ideal reasoning from a limited class of basic truths yields all truths about the world. Chalmers first argues for the scrutability thesis and then considers how small the base can be. The result is...
