Comments on Fifth
Books to check: Plantinga's Nature of Necessity and Armstrong's A World of States of affairs. From a fairly
cursory look at Plantinga's The Nature of Necessity, it doesn't look like Plantinga gives as analysis of
necessity, but rather circumscribes necessary propositions; he takes necessity to be a property of
propositions, but does not analyze these in terms of possible worlds. Plantinga deploys a non-actualist
notion of possible worlds, which he takes to be maximal state of affairs (a notion he appears to define by
ostension, e.g., Socrates being married to Xantippe), to shed light on modality de dicto and de re, his
essentialism, transworld identity, the free will defense against the problem of evil and the ontological
argument.
George references sententialism vis-à-vis taking propositions as the relata of logical consequence. I wasn't
able to find much on this except that it seems to be related to LOT. Can you tell me more here George.
See Lycan for LOT.
George mentions non-factualist paraphrasing vis-à-vis Chisholm's three conditions for countenancing an
entity on p. 5, but I wasn't able to find much on this. I take it that a non-facutalist paraphrase of a sentence
that seems to commit us to an object would be a paraphrase that explains the sentence in a way that does
not require the object or fact to exist. Does non-factualist paraphrasing have Quine's indeterminacy of
reference (ontological relativity) as one of its background assumptions?
At this point I'm willing to (provisionally) give up the subject aspect of STATE OF AFFAIRS's, but I
would like to know how George would symbolize "It's raining". Would it be x (Rx)? Here x looks to be
playing the subject role. Could we paraphrase this: The event of raining is occurring at time t and location
l? Really, I would like more argument for this. This leaves me with saying that states of affairs's involve
the exemplification of one or more abstract entities, e.g., properties, relations, numbers, etc. While many,
perhaps most states of affairs will be expressed in subject-predicate form, this isn't a necessary condition. I
will set aside the sticky issue of substance and what account of this I might take. While there may not be
a subject ontologically speaking, it may be necessary as a matter of the syntax of English to always state a
nominalized gerundive in subject-predicate form. If Frege's discovery of quantification an illustration of
how the logical form of some sentences in natural language like "It's raining" do not have the subjectattribute distinction?
On page 6, I quote Kim as noting that we get our initial grasp of states of affairs through the gerundial
nominalization of sentences. George mentions that there are other nominalizations. I can think of thatclauses, but what others might there be. Can we nominalize a sentence into an infinitive phrase? For
example, nominalize Santa is fat to For Santa to be fat. This seems right, but are there others?
Check Plantinga's use of the genitive case in stating states of affairs.
Looks like you need a noun or a noun phrase to denote something, but a sentence doesn't denote a
proposition, but expresses it because a sentence isn't a noun/noun-phrase; correct?
By intentional object of a belief, I take it that you mean some object that a belief is about, e.g., if I believe
that the Eiffel Tower exists, the intentional object of this belief would be the Eiffel Tower. Yes, this is the
case from his comments on p. 8. Kim seems to use 'object of belief' as the content of belief. There seems
to be some confusion in the literature over this terminology. Check Armstrong on this. Come back to this
after checking; see p. 8.
You ask about propositions with vacuous sub expressions vis-à-vis the position that propositions
necessarily have truth value. Can you give examples of this? Do you mean propositions that purport to be
about non-existent objects, e.g., Santa is jolly? If so, this proposition would seem false since Santa doesn't
exist.
I'm cutting the discussion of Lemos' distinction between nominative and predicative content.
Removing the necessary/contingent aspect of states of affairs as a reason for distinguishing between states
of affairs and propositions. This can simply be part of my analysis of states of affairs.
On p. 14 you say, "Doesn't (5) alone do the job?" Is this in reference to excluding (6)?
You ask regarding (6), Couldn't there be unthinkables? But it would seem that an all states of affairs would
be potential mental conent for an omniscient and omnipotent being capable, e.g, of entertaining states of
affairs with infinite content.
On p. 17 you say I need more context. Can you elaborate?
On p. 18, you suggest that an anti-existentialist view of states of affairs can avoid the pontentially counterintuitive position that a state of affairs only involves those necessarily existing abstracta that would be
exemplified were the state of affairs in question to obtain. But, it seems like our anti-existentialism will
need an analysis which will end up looking like the one I have given.
P. 19 Where does Kripke talk about unicorns?
You take infinitives to be intensional abstracts; what sorts of entities do these denote?
If gerunds are intensional abstracts that denote properties, what distinguishes nominalized (gerundive)
sentences from gerunds that denote properties, e.g., what distinguishes There being rain from being rain.
Is there a supposed instanstion of a property/relation here?
Collect notes from articles I've recently read.
Finish going through Lemarque's encyclopedia.
Check out Armstrong on intentional objects.
Check out Plantinga on necessity.
Check out Barwise and Perry's Situations and Attitudes
Look up George's article on the autonomy and authority of philosophy
It seems like Armstrong is trying to give an exentensional account of propositions, but won't this suffer
from Frege's puzzle and the like?
Out of curiosity, what would be your chief objections to Armstrong's combinatorialism?
"Sentences, or sentences in context, or particular assertions of sentences, or thoughts, can derivatively be
called true; buy only when they succeed in expressing determinate (r near enough determinate)
propositions. A sentence (or …) might fail to express a proposition because it is ambiguous; or because it
is vague; or because it is paradoxical or ungrounded; or because it is not decarative; or because it is a mere
expression of feeling in the syntactic guise of a declarative sentece. Such a sentence (or …) is not a
candidate for the status of truth simpliciter. But it might be a candidate for a realated status scuch as truth
on some or all of its disambiguations, or truth on some or all or most or few of its precisifications, or truth
on some or all of a class of arbitrary and ungrounded assignments of truth values, or make-believe truth."
Lewis 276.
What's your view on the redundancy theory of truth vis-à-vis the correspondence theory.
Can also call states of affairs states as George does in the Routledge Encyclodedia article of intensional
entities.