Concept tag
#nominalism
-
Species are drawn, not discovered: biology has already chosen nominalism
I study kelp forests along the Chilean coast. Within my working life, the species boundaries in some of the kelp groups I study have been argued over and redrawn on the basis of genetic data, and colleagues still disagree about how many…
Started by Ignacio Fuenzalida5 replies278 views -
What is apoha, and how can a word mean something by excluding everything else?
I'm a poet and new to formal philosophy, so please be gentle. In a seminar on translation someone mentioned that the Buddhist philosopher Dignāga held that the word “cow” means something like “not non-cow”. Everyone nodded. I laughed, because it sounded like…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies202 views -
How is apoha supposed to work? ‘Cow’ means ‘not non-cow’ sounds circular to me
I teach mathematics, and when I read that Dignāga's theory of meaning says a word like "cow" works by exclusion, meaning roughly "not non-cow", my first reaction was the one I would have to a student's proof: this is circular. To exclude…
Started by Vikram Sethi5 replies194 views -
The indispensability argument is the best case for numbers, and it still does not work
The argument usually called Quine–Putnam goes like this: We should believe in the entities our best scientific theories quantify over. Our best scientific theories quantify over mathematical objects, ineliminably. So we should believe mathematical objects exist. It is the best argument for…
Started by Emeka Nwosu5 replies228 views -
Reading group: Quine’s ‘On What There Is’, slowly, in three sittings
"On What There Is" first appeared in the Review of Metaphysics in 1948 and opens From a Logical Point of View (1953). It is short, funny in places, and much quoted by people who have not read it. I propose we read…
Started by Tomasz Wójcik6 replies186 views