A Defence of Arbitrary Objects

Indeterminacy and Failure of Grounding

“…The analogy with arbitrary reference we mentioned above can be useful here: the mere utterance of (L) fails to fix the reference of the terms involved to a particular sphere, unless we 10 Thanks to an anonymous referee of this journal for prompting us to think about this question. 11 For the first view, see Breckenridge and Magidor (2012), and for the second, see Fine (1983). think that reference can be fixed merely arbitrarily; that is, unless we think that facts about singular reference do not need to be grounded in facts about how we use singular terms. However, in our view, the claim that reference is primitive is far from defensible.…”

A Meinongian Way out of the Polish Proofs Against General Objects

“…On the basis of the above, the 'general object' o g does not possess the property P k (I). 8 The 'individual' object o k possessing the property P k does not possess the property of not possessing the property P k . It is so because if it possessed the property of not possessing the property P k , i.e.…”

“…24 Unfortunately this is not the end of the story. As formulated in (8), the principle of generic attribution is indeed still threatened by inconsistency. Some years after the publication of Leśniewski's first proof, Kotarbiński developed another proof purporting to show that a contradiction could be deduced from the principle of generic attribution.…”

“…27 The rest of the proof is quite straightforward. The solution to this argument lies in the principle of generic attribution (8). It can be accepted but in a limited form: it should apply only to some kinds of properties 26 The first part of Kotarbiński's argument that I formalized here would work with the principle (7).…”

SNePS Considered as a Fully Intensional Propositional Semantic Network

“…Nodes that only have arcs pointing to them are considered to be unstructured or at omit. They include: (1) sensory nodes, which-when SNePS is being used to model a mind-represent interfaces with the external world (in the examples that follow, they represent utterances); (2) base nodes, which represent individual concepts and properties; and (3) variable nodes, which represent arbitrary individuals (Fine 1983) (Shapiro 1978;Shapiro & McKay 1980;Mchav & Shapiro 1981;Shapiro, Martins, CEr McKay 1982). For each of the three categories of molecular nodes (structured individuals, atomic propositions, and rules), there are constant nodes of that category and pattern nodes of that category representmg arbitrary entities of that category.…”