Comments on Ted Sider: <i>Four Dimensionalism</i>

Gallois, André

doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2004.tb00372.x

Cited by 32 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…For what it is worth, I do not think Sider's defence here is compelling—one can agree with his claims about logical terms, unrestricted quantification, and his claims about vagueness in language, and still resist the ultimate conclusion that there is no vagueness in composition (see Nolan, in preparation. Andre Gallois has also pointed to trouble in Sider's argument for P3, in Gallois 2004). But for present purposes, I propose to grant P3 to Sider, if only to avoid the suspicion that our difference turns on a contention about the nature of vagueness.…”

Section: Sider's Argument For Unrestricted Compositionmentioning

confidence: 88%

Vagueness, Multiplicity and Parts

Nolan

2006

Nous

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When do objects form a whole? Pre-theoretically we are inclined to think that sometimes objects are parts of a larger object-pages are parts of a book, fingers are parts of a hand, and also parts of people. Other sets of objects we are somewhat inclined to think do not form a whole-your fingers and my palm do not make up an object in the way that my fingers and my palm do. Some dust in the Andromeda galaxy and some rock from the centre of Mt Everest do not present themselves as part of a whole in the way that, for example, the cells of an individual redwood tree do.So much for how things seem on first blush. We can try to improve our grasp of which things make up objects and which do not in various ways-we can assemble a range of judgements about what is part of what and see if there are interesting underlying generalisations, we can see how questions of what is part of what fit into other questions we are concerned about (what a person or an artifact is, for example, or theories of creation and destruction). We can take into account unexpected empirical discoveries (when we discovered the atomic nature of objects like trees or rocks or ourselves, with atoms being separated from each other by many atom's diameters, we became less inclined to think objects must be in contact in order for them to make up a whole). We can think about how to apply the concepts of part and whole outside the main areas they were initially applied-we can see what happens when we try to apply them to space, or time, or sets, or numbers, or meanings, or events. And we can take into account theoretical virtues such as simplicity and unificatory power, preferring simple powerful theories to gerrymandered, ad-hoc-seeming generalisations or to mere collections of data points. There may be other channels of investigation as well. In short, we can do metaphysics. 1

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Section: Sider's Argument For Unrestricted Compositionmentioning

confidence: 88%

Vagueness, Multiplicity and Parts

Nolan

2006

Nous

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“…Meinong to the rescue. Suppose different precisifications of ‘there exists’ correspond to different ways of dividing up the things that there are rather than the things that exist’ (Gallois 2004, 652).…”

Section: Resisting the Argument?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Is 'Everything' Precise?

2006

Dialectica

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There are certain metaphysically interesting arguments ‘from vagueness’, for unrestricted mereological composition and for four‐dimensionalism, which involve a claim to the effect that idioms for unrestricted quantification are precise. An elaboration of Lewis’ argument for this claim, which assumes the view of vagueness as semantic indecision, is presented. It is argued that the argument also works according to other views on the nature of vagueness, which also require for an expression to be vague that there are different admissible alternatives of the relevant sort, such as epistemicism, as defended by Williamson. Recent attempts to resist the argument are discussed and rejected.

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“…We have in mind here contemporary Meinongians (e.g., Gallois on the non‐present) and so‐called “truthmaker non‐maximalists” (e.g., Merricks 2007 on the non‐present and non‐actual).…”

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confidence: 99%

Time, Modality, and the Unbearable Lightness of Being

Frischhut

Skiles

2013

Thought: A Journal of Philosophy

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We develop a theory about the metaphysics of time and modality that combines the conceptual resources devised in recent sympathetic work on ontological pluralism (the thesis that there are fundamentally distinct kinds of being) with the thought that what is past, future, and merely possible is less real than what is present and actual (albeit real enough to serve as truthmakers for statements about the past, future, and merely possible). However, we also show that despite being a coherent, distinctive, and prima facie appealing position, the theory succumbs to what we call the “problem of mixed ontological status”. We conclude that the proponents of the theory can only evade these problems by developing ontological pluralism in a radically different way than it has been by its recent sympathizers.

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Comments on Ted Sider: Four Dimensionalism

Cited by 32 publications

References 0 publications

Vagueness, Multiplicity and Parts

Vagueness, Multiplicity and Parts

Is 'Everything' Precise?

Time, Modality, and the Unbearable Lightness of Being

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