Workshop: Existence, Quantification and Identity

We are happy to announce the workshop Existence, Quantification and Identity! Below you can find all the relevant information about the event.

Date: April 16, 2025.
Venues:
Room A33, Red Building, USI West Campus, Via Buffi 13, Lugano
Meeting Room 1, FTL Offices, Via Pelli 2, Lugano

Speakers
Cian Dorr (NYU)
Paolo Natali (USI)
Byron Simmons (USI)
Andrea Salvador (USI)

Programme

Morning session, Room A-33

10:30 - 12:00   Cian Dorr (NYU), “Higher-Order Quantification and the Elimination of Abstract Objects"

Afternoon session, Meeting Room 1

13:30 - 14:45   Paolo Natali (USI), "Higher-Order Ontological Pluralism"
15:00 - 16:15   Andrea Salvador (USI), “Identicals by Logic"
16:30 - 17:45   Byron Simmons (USI), "Being and Logic”

Abstracts

Cian Dorr

Higher-Order Quantification and the Elimination of Abstract Objects

There is a common practice of providing natural-language ‘glosses’ on sentences in the language of higher order logic: for example, the higher-order sentence ∃X(X Socrates) might be glossed using the English sentence ‘Socrates has some property’. It is widely held that such glosses cannot be strictly correct, on the grounds that the word ‘property’ is a noun and thus, if meaningful at all, should be meaningful in the same way as any other noun. Against this view, this paper argues that natural languages feature pervasive type-ambiguity in such a way that the relevant English sentences are in fact semantically equivalent to the higher-order sentences of which they serve as ‘glosses’. It also responds to some objections that have often been taken to be fatal to such type-ambiguity, such as the challenge of accounting for the meaning of ‘mixed disjunctions’ like ‘Either Mars or the property of being red is interesting’.

N.B. The paper is available on Philpapers for those who want to read it ahead.

Paolo Natali

Higher-Order Ontological Pluralism

Ontological pluralism is often characterised as the view that there are different modes (or ways) of being. Various proposals have been put forward to cash out more precisely what a mode of being is and to test the theoretical credentials of pluralism. In this talk, I shall, first, present what I regard as the two main current accounts of modes of being. Then, I shall argue against them based on their lack of “logical kick”. Third, I shall defend an account of modes of being based on quantification at different orders, an account which I call ‘Higher-Order Ontological Pluralism’ (HOOP). I shall attempt to show: (i) that HOOP, sometimes cursorily discussed by pluralists, has been too quickly dismissed in the literature on the subject; (ii) that a view along the lines of HOOP naturally emerges even from Aristotle’s main motivations for the idea that “being is said in many ways”, a claim often taken to embed the first historical version of ontological pluralism.

Byron Simmons

Being and Logic

Being, as it is standardly maintained, is a purely logical concept: to say, for instance, that Paris exists is simply to say that Paris is identical to something. But what if, instead of attempting to understand being or existence in purely logical terms, we were to take the logic of quantification to be grounded in the very essence of being itself? This speculative suggestion might be nothing more than a curiosity if, as is standardly assumed, there is only one quantified logic which holds for absolutely everything there is. Yet if, as would seem to be the case in certain conceivable ontologies, different domains of entities were governed by systematically different logics, that might give us reason to interpret these entities as enjoying fundamentally different ways of being. In this talk, I will explore the tenability of interpreting differences in logic as differences in being.

Andrea Salvador

Identicals by Logic

By asserting a statement, we say things are in a certain way. Also, different statements can say things are in the same way, or describe the same facts. Similar remarks apply to theories, where two theories are equivalent when, intuitively, they describe the same facts. Following a recent custom, I call “generalised identities” (GIs) statements that claim that two statements describe the same facts. A question then naturally arises: what statements are identical, in this general sense, by logic alone? Dorr (2016), Correia (2016) and Elgin (2023) recently answered this question. However, I give reasons for believing that their answers are incorrect. I thus provide an exact truthmaker semantics for GIs which instead captures the correct logic of GI. Notably, and in contrast with the other proposals, the semantics provides exact verification and falsification clauses for GIs. This is done by introducing “identity-states”—states which consider certain propositions identical—and imposing suitable constraints on the models to ensure they provide adequate possible identity-states and enough identity-states. Furthermore, the same semantics can capture the interaction between GI and metaphysical necessity in a natural way.

Organisers
Institute of Philosophy (ISFI),
The SNSF funded projects: Equivalence in Metaphysics, Temporal Existence.