Theory and History of Ontology

by Raul Corazzon - e-mail: raul.corazzon[at]formalontology.it

For an overview see the Index of the Pages, the SITE MAP or the Alphabetical Index of the Philosophers: A-F - G-O - P-Z; You can also download this page as

Table of Contemporary Ontologists (click on the image to see the PDF file)

Living Ontologists - A Bibliographical Guide: C - H

Index of the Section "The Rediscovery of Ontology in Contemporary Thought"

• Table of Formal and Descriptivists Ontologists (PDF - from Bernard Bolzano to present time)

  Ontologists of the 19th and 20th Centuries (a selection of critical judgments about some of the greatest philosophers of the recent past)

  Living Ontologists (a list of authors with an interest in ontology, with synthetic bibliographies)

   

The Authors to which I devoted an entire page are marked with an asterisk (*)

INDEX

• Keith Campbell
• Richard Cartwright
• Arindam Chakrabarti
• Arkadiusz Chrudzimski
• Nino Cocchiarella (*)
• Jan Dejnozka
• George Englebretsen (*)
• Kit Fine (*)
• Reinhardt Grossmann
• Jorge J. E. Gracia
• Horace Romano (Rom) Harré
• John Heil
• Jaakko Hintikka
• Herbert Hochberg
• Joshua Hoffman
• Thomas Hofweber

Keith Campbell

Australian Philosopher

INDEX

Books

1. Campbell Keith. Metaphysics. An introduction. Encino: Dickenson Publisher 1976.
   Contents: Preface III-IV; Part I. Metaphysics. Its program and problems; 1. A sketch of the background 1; 2. Metaphysics in recent years 13; Part II. One branch of cosmology. The philosophy of matter; 3. The framework of concrete particularism 25; 4. Classical atomism 44; 5. Primary and secondary qualities 59; 6. Alternative particularist systems 75; 7. Atomism and modern physics 95; Part II. A first survey of ontology; 8. The task of ontology 107; 9. Quine's canonical notation 125; 10. Regimentation or paraphrase 137; Constructions which have no paraphrase 162; 12. Ontic commitment and reduction to a minimum domain 174; 13. Events and sets 194; 14. Universals and tropes 206; Glossary 220, Bibliography 235 Index 243.

    

2. Campbell Keith. Abstract particulars. Oxford: Blackwell 1990.
   Contents: Preface XI-XII; 1. A one-category ontology 1; 2. The Problem of Universals 27; 3. Some general objections to Trope theory 53; 4. The pattern of the properties 81; 5. Relations, causation, space-time and compresence 97; 6. Fields: dealing with the boundary problem 135; 7. The human and social worlds 157; Notes 175; References 181; Index 185.
   
   "Many philosophers have held, explicitly or implicitly, that any comprehensive survey of the world's constituents would include the cases of qualities and relations that occur at particular places and times as the qualities and relations of particular objects. It is not so common to affirm that such cases are themselves particulars in their own right, rather than deriving their particularity from their association with a substance, but this was G. F. Stout's distinctive claim (Stout, 1905).
   D. C. Williams took another step: these cases, or tropes as he called them, not only form a distinct and independent category of existent, they are the very alphabet of being, the simple, basic, primal items from which all else is built or otherwise derives (Williams, 1966). In presenting his view, Williams acknowledged that it 'calls for completion in a dozen directions at once'. This work is my attempt to press ahead towards that completion. The great, liberating insight which Stout and Williams offer us is this: properties can be particulars, so the denial of universals need not be the denial of properties. In other words, Particularism (which is economical, plausible and appealing) does not have to take the form of Nominalism (which is economical, but neither plausible nor appealing).
   While the principal inspiration for this book is Williams' work, I have also gained a great deal from discussions with David Armstrong, who remains a Realist about Universals, but whose successive publications in this area provide sympathetic treatments of the trope or abstract particularist view (Armstrong, 1978, 1989).
   Another colleague, John Bacon, has pursued the trope idea in a more formal way (Bacon, 1988, 1989), while David Lewis treats it as a serious option for dealing with certain intractable problems facing Realism over universals (Lewis, 1983, 1986). Wilfrid Sellars recognized tropes by another name, although not, I think, as the sole fundamental category.
   Frank Ramsey counselled that when a philosophical dispute presents itself as an irresolvable oscillation between two alternatives, the likelihood is that both alternatives are false and share a common false presupposition. It is my contention that Realism and Nominalism in the problem of universals exhibit precisely this pattern, their common, false presupposition being that any quality or relation must be a universal.
   This book explores the implications of this position. It also argues for theses about relations (Foundationism) and basic physical properties (field theory), which are particularly congenial to a trope philosophy, but are in large measure independent of it. They have merits irrespective of the truth about properties in general." (From the Preface)
   
   The manifest world is a world of things rather than fields. It is dominated by concrete, medium-sized specimens of dry goods, limited to small parts of space and time, distinct from one another, highly complex. It is there familiar objects, such as toothbrushes and loaves of bread, which make life liveable. Their salients is responsible for substance ontologies, and for the natural impulse to take as the paradigms of tropes characteristics which seems to be confined to a specific local existence.
   The world of fields dethrones such tropes, of course. But it cannot simply dismiss them. They must be given their due; they are not illusions, and they are not fabrications; they are well-founded appearances (at least), and must be treated as such. So, if they are not to be accorded straightforward reality, we must be able to explain, on the basis of what truly is, why the manifest world seems to be as it is.
   (...)
   The co-location of a complex concrete object's properties is a supervenient fact. It arises from the location, i.e. the specific coincidence with a region of space-time, of a region of relatively high value of several field quantities.
   That there are such complex objects, which entourage a substance philosophy of many independent bodies, I take to be entirely contingent. Indeed, Big-Bang speculation takes us back to a time when space-time and all its fields yielded just an almost smooth, hot putty. That, nowadays, there seem to be no charged objects without mass (i.e. no zones of high charge intensity but low matter intensity) is a contingent matter of how the fields are causally coupled. It is patterns of causal Linksage like that which give rise to bodies with the complex, localized, physics and chemistry which make up the familiar material and living realms.
   The ontological reality underlying substance thinking is the compresence of tropes one with another. A substance, traditionally concerned, was a complete, even if finite and local, and self-subsistent or independent entity. What the field view endorses is the completeness; it repudiates the self-subsistent independence. For tables or apples consist in dependent quasi-parts of real tropes. A genuine substance is a total set of coincident tropes, and on the field view, each of these tropes is a field. Since they are all coextensive with space-time, they all coincide with one another always and everywhere.
   Thus if we wish to continue with the concept of substance in our metaphysics, we would reach Spinoza's conclusion, that there is just one genuine substance, the cosmos itself, with the fields as its modes.
   Our ordinary causal judgements, judgements about particular changes brought about, or particular states maintained, in the familiar world, are expressed in terms of quasi-tropes. For example, the gas flame boiled the kettle. Such judgements are true or false depending on whether the underlying causal relations within and among fields would in fact give rise to just such a quasi-trope sequence. They differ from mere sequence judgements, such as: first the gas lit, then the television programme carne to an end, which have no deep order of connections to sustain them.
   The stuffs the world is made of - gold, copper and tin, for example - are local, derivative, peculiar combinations in the strengths of the underlying fields. To put it more familiarly, different kinds of stuff occur where there are different patterns of electrons and nucleons. Our interest in such chemical substances is in the ways the constituent quasi-tropes resemble and differ from others in other places. We are not intent on singling out bounded individuals, and any occurrence of the appropriate quasi-trope complex is as important as any other. Nevertheless, very much as bodies do, the chemical elements exist in bounded samples. They are spread through the world like a shifting archipelago. They are natural] kinds, even if not ultimate natural kinds. And specimens of them, local chunks of the archipelago, are one sort of familiar object in the manifest world.
   It is a wise philosophy that can arrange to avoid answering such questions as: at what point, exactly, in converting a metal into a plasma, has the metal ceased to exist? Or: are two isotopes of an element two different stuffs really, or not? Although categorizations like metal/plasma or element/isotope are not arbitrary, there is an element of human purpose and of salience for humans in these and many other or our everyday, technological and even scientific distinctions. On the field version or the trope theory, what such categorizations yield is not the deep fully objective real tropes, but a world of appearances. Where categorization is well done, the appearances are well-founded and the quasi-tropes deserve their place in our cosmology. They constitute the manifest world." pp. 153-155.

Articles

1. Campbell Keith, "Definitions of entailment," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 43: 353-359 (1965).
   "The article sets out five definitions of entailment, (Moore, Duncan-Jones, Strawson, von Wright, and Geach). It shows the equivalence of the more important of these, and argues that as direct definitions they involve circularity in application. Recursive versions of the definitions also fail unless they involve the concept of conjunctive-contradiction (the sort of contradictoriness a conjunction can have in view of the relations between the conjuncts), and the concept of conjunctive-contradiction is too close to the concept of entailment to be illuminating in a definition."

    

2. Campbell Keith, "Family resemblance predicates," American Philosophical Quarterly 2: 238-244 (1965).

    

3. Campbell Keith, "Primary and secondary qualities," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2: 219-232 (1972).
   "The paper distinguishes between epistemic and ontic divisions of qualities into primary and secondary. It identifies two functions which ontic division has been called upon to fulfill - setting the limits on what a realist philosophy of science must achieve, and providing a means of judging between rival realist philosophies of science. It argues for an interaction pattern criterion of primacy, and concludes that while this enables the first function to be achieved, no primary/secondary distinction can fulfill the second."

    

4. Campbell Keith, "The metaphysic of abstract particulars," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 6: 477-488 (1981).
   "This paper argues that instances or cases of properties (abstract particulars) can be individuals in their own right, and that to take them as the basic category of entities leads to attractive analyses of causation, perception, and evaluation. A first philosophy based on abstract particulars can give an elegant account of concrete individuals, and can make some progress with the classic problem of universals. The role of space in this metaphysic is discussed, a philosophy of change sketched out, and the system recommended on the ground of its affinity with contemporary cosmology."

    

5. Campbell Keith, "Abstract particulars and the philosophy of mind," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 61: 129-141 (1983).
   "This paper takes up the ontological proposal of D. C. Williams, that the basic elements consist in cases, or examples, of kinds. Such elements, called "tropes", are abstract in that they do not exhaust the reality where they exist (as concrete particulars do), and they are particular in having a reality restricted to a single space-time location (unlike universals). The system of tropes is applied to three important issues in the functionalist philosophy of mind; the question of type-type vs token-token identification, the problem of the existence of qualia and the issue of reductive vs eliminative materialism. The paper argues that token-token identification must give way to a realization relation between specific types. It agrees with Jackson that qualia cannot be dissolved away into function, as Lycan attempts, nor into opaquely grasped constitution, as urged by the Churchlands, but that this result is not embarrassing on a trope philosophy. Finally, it argues that the reduction/elimination controversy is untroublesome from the trope perspective."

Links

Richard Cartwright

Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Massachusets Institute of Technology (MIT)

INDEX

Books

1. Cartwright Richard. Philosophical essays. Cambridge: MIT Press 1987.
   Contents: Introduction IX-XXIII; Ontology and the theory of meaning (1954) 1; Macbeth' dagger (1957) 13; Negative existentials (1960) 21; Propositions (1962) 33; Proposition again (1968) 55; A neglected theory of truth (1987) 71; On the origin of Russell's theory of descriptions (1987) 95; Identity and susbstitutivity (1971) 135; Some remarks on essentialism (1968) 149; Classes and attributes (1967) 161; Scattered objects (1975) 171; On the logical problem of the Trinity (1987) 187; Indiscernibility principles (1979) 201; Propositions of pure logic (1987) 217; Implications and entailments (1987) 237; Appendix: Two problem sets (1987) 257; Index 259-266.

1. On being and saying. Essays for Richard Cartwright. Edited by Thomson Judith Jarvis. Cambridge: The MIT Press 1987.

Articles

1. Cartwright Richard, "Speaking of everything," Noûs: 1-20 (1994).

    

2. Cartwright Richard, "Singular propositions," Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary volume 23: 67-84 (1997).

Links

List of publications

Arindam Chakrabarti

Professor of Philosophy, Director, Center for South Asian Studies

INDEX

Books

1. Chakrabarti Arindam. Denying existence. The logic, epistemology, and pragmatics of negative existentials and fictional discourse. Dordrecht: Kluwe 1997.

    

2. Universals, concepts and qualities. New essays on the meaning of predicates. Edited by Chakrabarti Arindam and Strawson Peter Frederick. Aldershot: Ashgate 2006.

Articles

Links

Arindam Chakrabarti

Arkadiusz Chrudzimski

Polish Philosopher, University of Salzburg

INDEX

Books

1. Chrudzimski Arkadiusz. Die Erkenntnistheorie von Roman Ingarden. Dordrecht: Kluwer 1999.

    

2. Chrudzimski Arkadiusz. Die Ontologie Franz Brentanos. Dordrecht: Kluwer 2004.

Articles

1. Chrudzimski Arkadiusz, "Are meaning in the head? Ingarden's theory of meaning," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 30: 306-326 (1999).

    

2. Chrudzimski Arkadiusz, "Quine, Meinong und Aristoteles: Zwei Dimensionen der ontologischen Verpflichtung," Metaphysica.International Journal for Ontology and Metaphysics 4: 39-68 (2003).
   "Quine claimed that to be is to be a value of a bound variable. In the paper we assume that this claim contains an important philosophical insight and investigate its background. It is argued that there are two dimensions involved in Quine's slogan: (i) the distinction between existing and non-existing objects and (ii) the question of the systematic ambiguity of being that can be traced back to Aristotle. At the first sight it is tempting to construe Quine's criterion according to the first dimension. In this light it appears as an anti-Meinongian device and the Russellian roots of Quine's philosophy make this interpretation prima facie plausible. However, it is argued that it is the anti-Aristotelian line which is dominant in Quine's philosophy, and which is ontologically much more interesting."

    

Links

Arkadiusz Chrudzimski

Jan Dejnozka

American Philosopher

INDEX

Books

1. Dejnozka Jan. The ontology of the Analytic tradition and Its origins. Realism and identity in Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Quine. Lanham: Littlefiels Adams Books 1996.
   Paperback edition reprinted with corrections, 2002; reprinted with further corrections, 2003.
   
   "While many books discuss the individual achievements of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Quine, few books consider how the thought of all four thinkers bears on the fundamental questions of twentieth century philosophy. This book is about existence-identity connections in Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Quine. The thesis of the book is that there is a general form of ontology, modified realism, which these great analysts share not only with each other, but with most great philosophers in the Western tradition. Modified realism is the view that in some sense there are both real identities and conceptual (or linguistic) identities. In more familiar language, it is the view that there are both real distinctions and distinctions in reason (or in language). Thus in modified realism, there are some real beings which can serve as a basis for accommodating possibly huge amounts of conceptual or linguistic relativity, or objectual identities' 'shifting' as sortal concepts or sortal terms 'shift.' Therefore, on the fundamental level of ontology, the linguistic turn was not a radical break from traditional substance theory. Dejnozka also holds that the conflict in all four analysts between private language arguments (which imply various kinds of realism) and conceptual "shifting" (which suggests conceptual relativism) is best resolved by, and is in fact implicitly resolved by, their respective kinds of modified realism. Frege and Russell, not Wittgenstein and Quine, emerge as the true analytic progenitors of 'no entity without identity,' offering between them at least twenty-nine private language arguments and fifty-eight 'no entity without identity' theories."

    

2. Dejnozka Jan. Bertrand Russell on modality and logical relevance. Aldershot: Ashgate 1999.

Articles

Links

Jan Dejnozka's Home Page

Jorge J. E. Gracia

Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, State University of New York at Buffalo

INDEX

Books

1. Gracia Jorge J.E. Individuality. An essay on the foundations of metaphysics. Albany: State University of New York Press 1988.

    

2. Gracia Jorge J.E. Metaphysics and its task. The search for the Categorial foundation of knowledge. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.

Articles

1. Gracia Jorge J.E., "The Transcendentals in the Middle Ages: an introduction," Topoi.An International Journal of Philosophy 11: 113-120 (1992).

    

2. Gracia Jorge J.E., "Hispanic philosophy: its beginning and Golden Age," Review of Metaphysics 46: 475-502 (1993).

Studies

1. What are we to understand Gracia to mean? Realist challenges to metaphysical neutralism. Edited by Delfino Robert A. Amsterdam: Rodopi 2006.

Links

The Home Page of Jorge J. E. Gracia

Reinhardt Grossmann

Professor Emeritus at Indiana University

INDEX

Books

1. Grossmann Reinhardt. The structure of mind. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press 1965.

    

2. Grossmann Reinhardt. Reflections on Frege's philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1969.

    

3. Grossmann Reinhardt. Ontological reduction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1973.

    

4. Grossmann Reinhardt. The categorial structure of the world. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1983.

    

5. Grossmann Reinhardt. Phenomenology and existentialism: an introduction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1984.

    

6. Grossmann Reinhardt. The fourth way: a theory of knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1990.

    

7. Grossmann Reinhardt. The existence of the world. An introduction to ontology. New York: Routledge 1992.

    

Articles

1. Grossmann Reinhardt, "Russells's Paradox and complex predicates," Noûs 6: 153-164 (1972).

    

2. Grossmann Reinhardt, "Nonexistent objects versus definite descriptions," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 62 (4): 363-377 (1984).
   "Some years ago, I published an article about Meinong's theory of objects. (1) I listed there four main theses of Meinong's view:
   (1) The golden mountain (and other nonexistents) has no being at all.
   (2) Nevertheless, it is a constituent of the fact that the golden mountain does not exist.
   (3) Furthermore, it has such ordinary properties as being made from gold.
   (4) Existence is not a constituent of any object.
   And I argued in that paper that only thesis (1) is true. In particular, I insisted that (3), which I consider to be the most characteristic feature of Meinong's view, is false.
   Since then, there have been quite a few discussions of Meinong's view. I would like, in response to some of these works, to reiterate my earlier criticism of Meinong. My purpose is threefold. Firstly, I would like to state once more my own view, which is a version of Russell's theory of definite descriptions, as clearly as possible. Secondly, I shall defend my past contention that the golden mountain is not golden against some recent objections. And thirdly and most importantly, I want to describe the dialectic of the philosophical problem as I perceive it. It seems to me to be an exasperating shortcoming of the discussion that most participants do not clearly state the basic options and their reasons for preferring some to others."
   
   (1) Meinong's Doctrine of the Aussersein of the Pure Object', Noüs, 8 (1974, pp. 67-81. See also my Meinong (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1974).

    

3. Grossmann Reinhardt, "Thoughts, objectives and States of Affairs," Grazer Philosophische Studien 49: 163-169 (1995).
   "The notion of state of affairs was introduced as the complexly signifiable in the Late Scholasticism and rediscovered by Logicians like Bolzano and Frege. While Bolzano and Frege were primarily interested in the nature of objective truths students of Brentano, among others Meinong, Twardowski and Husserl, developed similar concepts starting out with an interest in the nature of mental acts and judgement. Both Frege's and Meinong's conceptions face similar problems concerning complex referents which are diagnosed to stem from confusions of complexes of properties with complex properties."

Links

Horace Romano Harré

Professor at Oxford University, England and Georgetown University, USA

INDEX

Books

1. Harré Rom. Theories and things. London: Sheed and Ward 1961.

    

2. Harré Rom. Varieties of realism. A rationale for the natural sciences. Oxford: Blackwell 1986.

    

3. Harré Rom. Realism rescued: how scientific progress is possible. london: Duckworth 1994.
   With Jerrold L. Aronson and Eileen Cornell Way

    

4. Harré Rom and Krausz Michael. Varieties of Relativism. Oxford: Blackwell 1996.

    

5. Harré Rom. One thousand years of philosophy. From Ramanuja to Wittgenstein. Oxford: Blackwell 2000.

    

1. Harré Rom. Cognitive science: a philosophical introduction. London: SAGE Publishers 2002.

1. Harré and his critics. Essays in honour of Rom Harre with his commentary on them. Edited by Bhaskar Roy. Oxford: Blackwell 1990.

    

2. The Scientific Realism of Rom Harré. Edited by Derksen Anthony A. Tilburg: Tilburg University Press 1994.

Articles

1. Harré Rom, "Realism and ontology," Philosophia Naturalis 25: 386-398 (1988).

Links

Rom Harré by Caroline New

John Heil

Professor of Philosophy, Washington University in St. Louis

INDEX

Books

1. Heil John. From an ontological point of view. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2003.

Articles

Links

John Heil (page at Washington University in St. Louis)

Jaakko Hintikka

Professor of Philosophy, Boston University

INDEX

Books

1.  

2. Hintikka Jaakko. The principles of mathematics revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996.

    

3. Hintikka Jaakko. Lingua universalis vs. calculus ratiocinator. An ultimate presupposition of twentieth-century philosophy. Dordecht: Kluwer 1997.

    

Articles

1. Hintikka Jaakko. Semantics: a revolt against Frege. In Contemporary philosophy. A new survey. Volume I: Philosophy of language. Edited by Fløistad Guttorm. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff 1981. pp. 57-82

    

2. Hintikka Jaakko, "Contemporary philosophy and the problem of truth," Acta Philosophica Fennica 61: 23-39 (1996).
   Reprinted in: Leila Haaparanta and Ilkka Niiniluoto (eds.) - Analytic philosophy in Finland - Amsterdam. Rodopi, 2003, pp. 89-106.

Links

Jaakko Hintikka

Herbert Hochberg

Professor of Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin

INDEX

Books

1. Hochberg Herbert. Thought, fact, and reference. The origins and ontology of Logical Atomism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1978.

    

2. Hochberg Herbert. Logic, ontology, and language. Essays on truth and reality. München: Philosophia Verlag 1984.

    

3. Hochberg Herbert. The positivist and the ontologist. Bergmann, Carnap and logical realism. Amsterdam: Rodopi 1991.

    

4. Hochberg Herbert. Introducing analytic philosophy: its sense and its nonsense, 1879-2002. Frankfurt a.M.: Hänsel-Hohenhausen 2003.

    

Articles

1. Hochberg Herbert, "Existence, non-existence, and predication," Grazer Philosophische Studien 25/26: 235-268 (1986).
   "Two connected themes have been at the core of the old perplexity regarding thinking and speaking about non-existent objects. One involves a question of reference. Can we refer to non-existent objects without, thereby, recognizing, in some sense, non-existent entities as objects of reference? The other involves a question about existence. Is existence a property representable by a predicate in a logically adequate symbolism? It is argued (1) that existence is not to be construed as an attribute represented by a predicate, (2) that non-naming names introduce problems, not solutions to problems, (3) that purported properties such as self-identical are specious, and (4) that the Russell property is also seen to be specious by our consideration of predication."

    

2. Hochberg Herbert, "A refutation of moderate nominalism," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 66: 188-207 (1988).

    

3. Hochberg Herbert, "Facts, truths and the ontology of Logical Realism," Grazer Philosophische Studien 58/59: 23-92 (2000).
   "The paper sets out a version of a correspondence theory of truth that deals with a number of problems such theories traditionally face problems associated with the names of Bradley, Meinong, Camap, Russell, Wittgenstein and Moore and that arise in connection with attempts to analyze facts of various logical forms. The line of argument employs a somewhat novel application of Russell's theory of definite descriptions. In developing a form of "logical realism" the paper takes up various ontological issues regarding classes, causal laws, modality, predication, negation and relations. It does so in connection with critical discussions of alternative views recently proposed by Armstrong, Bergmann, Lewis and Putnam."

    

4. Hochberg Herbert. From logic to ontology: some problems of predication, negation and possibility. In A companion to philosophical logic. Edited by Jacquette Dale. Malden: Blackwell 2002. pp. 281-292
   "2. Designation and Existence
   Carnap (Introduction to semantics, 1942: 24, 50-2) considered the issues of truth and reference in terms of the semantics of 'designation'. Consider (1) 'a' designates Theaetetus: (2) 'F' designates the property of flying; (3) 'Fa' designates the state of affairs that Theaetetus is flying. Carnap took (1)-(3) as semantical 'rules' for a schema. With designates as a semantical relation, (3) is true even if 'Fa' is false. (1)-(3), as semantical rules, do not express matters of fact. That such rules are rules of a particular schema is a matter of fact. The same sort of distinction applies to ordinary language variants of (1)-(3) - 'Theaetetus' designates Theaetetus, etc. Considered as statements about the usage of terms, they express matters of fact, but, properly understood, they are semantic rules. Taking the signs as interpreted signs - symbols, in the sense of Wittgenstein's Tractarian distinction between a sign and a symbol, there is, in a clear sense, an internal or logical relation involved in such rules. (1)-(3) express formal or logical truths, since the symbols, not signs, would not be the symbols they are without representing what they represent. This incorporates a 'direct reference' account of proper names and the direct representation of properties and relations by primitive predicates. This was involved in Russell's notion of a "logically proper name" or label that functioned like a demonstrative, as opposed to a definite description that 'denoted' indirectly, via the predicates in the descriptive phrase. In the last decades of the century, with the decline of interest in and knowledge of the work of major early twentieth-century figures, petty debates have erupted about priority. One of the most absurd concerns whether Barcan or Kripke originated Russell's account, which was set out in the first decade of the century and adopted by many since. The absurdity has been compounded by the misleading Linksing of Russell with Frege in what some speak of as the 'Frege-Russell' account of proper names, which ignores Russell's attack on Frege's account in the classic "On Denoting" (1905; Hochberg Russell's attack on Frege's theory of meaning (*), 1984). The direct reference account was ontologically significant for Russell and others who took the primitive nonlogical constants (logically proper names and predicates), representing particulars and properties (relations) respectively, to provide the ontological commitments of the schema (**). This contrasted with Quine's taking quantification as the key to ontological commitment - "to be is to be the value of a variable" - which allows a schema limited to first order logic to contain primitive predicates while avoiding properties, by fiat. That fits Quine's replacing proper names by definite descriptions, involving either primitive or defined predicates. For one only then makes ontological claims by means of variables and quantifiers, and predicates retain ontological innocence (Quine, 1939, 1953). If primitive predicates involve ontological commitments, as in Carnap's (2), attempting to eliminate all directly referring signs via descriptions faces an obvious vicious regress, aside from employing an ad hoc and arbitrary criterion.
   Wittgenstein simply ignored the problem about (3) by giving (1) and (2) the role of (3), as Russell was to do in the 1920s under his influence. This was covered over by his speaking of the 'possibilities' of combination being 'internal' or 'essential' properties of the 'objects' that were combined. Carnap's (3), which articulates Moore's view, makes explicit reference to a possible fact or situation. Russell had suggested using his theory of descriptions to avoid reference to possible facts, as well as to nonexistent objects (Russell 1905)." pp. 284-285.
   
   (*) in: H. Hochberg, Logic, ontology and language, pp. 60-85 (original work published in 1976).
   (**) G. Bergmann, Undefined descriptive predicates - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 8, 1947, pp. 55-82.

    

5. Hochberg Herbert, "Russell and Ramsey on distinguishing between universals and particulars," Grazer Philosophische Studien 67: 195-207 (2004).

Links

Herbert Hochberg

Joshua Hoffman

Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro

INDEX

Books

1. Hoffman Joshua. Substance among other categories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994.
   With Gary Rosenkrantz

    

2. Hoffman Joshua. Substance: its nature and existence. New York: Routledge 1997.
   With Gary Rosenkrantz

Articles

Links

Curriculum vitae

Thomas Hofweber

Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

INDEX

Books

1. Hofweber Thomas. Empty names, fiction, and the puzzles of non-existence. Edited by Everett Anthony and Hofweber Thomas. Stanford: CSLI Publications 2000.

    

Articles

1. Hofweber Thomas, "A puzzle about ontology," Noûs 39: 256-283 (2005).

    

2. Hofweber Thomas. Inexpressible properties and propositions. In Oxford studies in metaphysics - Vol. 2. Edited by Zimmerman Dean. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006. pp. 155-206

Links

Thomas Hofweber

Last modified: Tuesday, March 09, 2010