Beyond Necessity

"What she said" in the vernacular is a way of expressing or agreeing with what the speaker just said. We can extend this useful...

A nice companion to my 2010 post : For the simple truth is that truth is often hard to come by, and that once found it may easily be lost...

Every departmental science has a subject, and its literature talks about or refers to that subject. Physics talks about heavy bodies and m...

We don’t have to buy everything that Frege says about concepts to agree that using a concept expression F we can say things like ‘There are...

Is number a property of an aggregate of things? But what is an aggregate? Can the very same things have the same number once disaggregated...

The Maverick Philosopher is agonising about number and existence in this post . It would be simpler if we returned to the original text of ...

I have been looking at ‘Van Inwagen on Fiction, Existence, Properties, Particulars, and Method’, by Bill Vallicella ( Studia Neoaristotelic...

Peter Geach (“Intentional Identity.” Journal of Philosophy 64, 627-32, reprinted in Logic Matters . Oxford: Blackwell, 1972) argues that t...

This handout clearly explains Kripke’s argument in his seminal paper ‘ A Puzzle about Belief ’. Kripke derives a puzzle from just two assum...

When I utter ‘I am happy’ to myself while alone and having been silent for some while, do I mean that the content of my statement could hav...

Discussions of linguistic reference rarely define what reference is. An example is the SEP article here , which as far as I can see does no...

What does the pronoun ‘I’ refer to? Wittgenstein ( Philosophical Remarks , §64). ‘I have a pain’ is a sign of a completely different kind...

A while ago I discussed the Bunuel film where different actresses play the same character, and I discussed later how we try to identif...

Beyond Necessity is 10 years old today ! The first post was remarkably accurate. “But this being London, the plumber will not be there.” ...

Hume, Treatise Book I Part iii, section 2 (my emphasis): We readily suppose an object may continue individually the same, though several...

According to Fred Sommers ( The Logic of Natural Language , chapter 3) in traditional formal logic (TFL) as opposed to modern predicate log...

14:51 And there followed him [Jesus] a certain young man (νεανίσκος) , having a linen cloth (σινδόνα) cast about his naked body; and the ...

Successful reference: You must not only hit something; you must hit the right thing. And what makes a thing the right thing is the intenti...

Bill Vallicella argues here that a pronoun inherits its referent from the noun of which it is the antecedent. I say ‘John left the party ...

The Maverick Philosopher agrees that the Quran contains tokens of 'Moses' (or its Arabic equivalent). He is still not sure whethe...