Innocent Statements and Their Metaphysically Loaded Counterparts
Innocent Statements and Their Metaphysically Loaded Counterparts
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无辜的陈述及其形而上学的对应物
DOI：
10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769835.003.0002
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发表时间：
2007
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Thomas Hofweber
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Thomas Hofweber
谈论性质、命题和自然数的一个令人困惑的特点是，明确地关于它们的陈述可以在不改变真值条件的情况下从根本没有提到它们的陈述中引入。因此，似乎数、性质和命题的存在可以“从无到有”建立起来。这个形而上学的难题与一系列句法和语义难题有关，这些难题涉及普通的、形而上学上无辜的陈述与它们的形而上学上负载的对应物之间的关系，这些陈述明确地提到了数字、属性和命题，但似乎与前者等价。我认为，标准的解决方案的形而上学的困惑作出了错误的假设语义的加载对应。相反，我提出了一个解决句法和语义难题的方案，并认为这个解决方案也给了我们一个新的解决方案的形而上学的难题。我认为，而不是包含更多的语义奇异的条款，旨在指额外的实体，加载对应的焦点建设。它们的句法结构是为了提供有焦点的信息，而不是指新的实体。这将使我们能够拼出弗雷格的隐喻的内容雕刻。
One puzzling feature of talk about properties, propositions and natural numbers is that statements that are explicitly about them can be introduced apparently without change of truth conditions from statements that don’t mention them at all. Thus it seems that the existence of numbers, properties and propositions can be established ‘from nothing’. This metaphysical puzzle is tied to a series of syntactic and semantic puzzles about the relationship between ordinary, metaphysically innocent statements and their metaphysically loaded counterparts, statements that explicitly mention numbers, properties and propositions, but nonetheless appear to be equivalent to the former. I argue that the standard solutions to the metaphysical puzzles make a mistaken assumption about the semantics of the loaded counterparts. Instead I propose a solution to the syntactic and semantic puzzles, and argue that this solution also gives us a new solution to the metaphysical puzzle. I argue that instead of containing more semantically singular terms that aim to refer to extra entities, the loaded counterparts are focus constructions. Their syntactic structure is in the service of presenting information with a focus, but not to refer to new entities. This will allow us to spell out Frege’s metaphor of content carving.