Overall Similarity, Natural Properties, And Paraphrases (original) (raw)
Related papers
Argumenta, 2017
David Lewis may be regarded as an antiessentialist. The reason is that he is said to believe that individuals do not have essential properties independent of the ways they are represented. According to him, indeed, the properties that are determined to be essential to individuals are a matter of which similarity relations among individuals are salient, and salience, in turn, is a contextual matter also determined to some extent by the ways individuals are represented. Todd Buras argues that the acknowledgment of natural properties in counterpart theoretic ontology affects Lewis’s theory with regard to essentialism. Buras’s reasoning is appealing. He claims that, since natural properties determine the existence of similarity relations among individuals that are salient independent of context, Lewis can no longer be claimed to be an antiessentialist. The aim of this paper is to argue, against Buras, that if counterpart theory was antiessentialist before natural properties were taken i...
Resemblance theories of properties
Philosophical Studies, 2010
The paper aims to develop a resemblance theory of properties that technically improves on past versions. The theory is based on a comparative resemblance predicate. In combination with other resources, it solves the various technical problems besetting resemblance nominalism. The paper's second main aim is to indicate that previously proposed resemblance theories that solve the technical problems, including the comparative theory, are nominalistically unacceptable and have controversial philosophical commitments.
Intrinsicality and counterpart theory
Synthese, 2015
It is shown that counterpart theory and the duplication account of intrinsicality-two key pieces of the Lewisian package-are incompatible. In particular, the duplication account yields the result that certain intuitively extrinsic modal properties are intrinsic. Along the way I consider a potentially more general worry concerning certain existential closures of internal relations. One conclusion is that, unless the Lewisian provides an adequate alternative to the duplication account, the reductive nature of their total theory is in jeopardy. 1 The duplication account Lewis attempts to reduce intrinsicality to (at least for him) more fundamental notions. The account he provides, which I shall call the duplication account (DA for short), states that DA. A property is intrinsic iff it never differs among duplicates. Lewis gives two separate accounts of duplication, thereby yielding two separate formulations of DA. According to the first [Lewis, 1986, pp. 61-62], two things are duplicates just in case they share their perfectly natural properties, and their parts can be put into one-one correspondence so that corresponding parts share the same perfectly natural properties and stand in the same perfectly natural relations (to the things and their parts only). Call this account Perfect (since it relies on the sharing of perfectly natural properties). According to the second [Langton and Lewis, 1998], two things are duplicates just in case they share their basic intrinsic properties, where a property is basic intrinsic just in case it is neither disjunctive nor the negation of a disjunctive property, and it is independent of accompaniment, i.e. it can be: (i) had by a lonely thing; (ii) lacked by a lonely thing; (iii) had by an accompanied thing; (iv) lacked by an accompanied thing. A thing (i.e. possible individual, not transworld sum) is lonely just in case it exists without any contingent, wholly distinct worldmate and it is accompanied otherwise, and two things are wholly distinct just in case they share no common part. Finally, a property is disjunctive if it is not natural but is expressible by a disjunction (of conjunctions) of natural properties. One may prefer a characterization involving the less contentious notion of comparative naturalness, according to which a property is disjunctive if it is expressible by a disjunction (of conjunctions) of properties, each sufficiently more natural than the disjunction (where what counts as sufficient is left unclear). Call this second account Disjunctive (since it relies on disjunctiveness). A number of objections to DA apply only to Disjunctive. For instance, Dan Marshall and Josh Parsons [Marshall and Parsons, 2001] argue that the intuitively extrinsic property being such that there is a cube is, according to Disjunctive, intrinsic. In response, Langton and Lewis say:
Papers on Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology and Pedagogy, 2018
After stressing the importance of the notion of similarity for the theories of meaning, the author discusses the definition of similarity as 'feature matching' and proves it inadequate, offering another operational definition of similarity derived from late Wittgenstein’s idea of 'family resemblances'. Similarity is understood as a 'perceived' pattern of relation correspondences that precedes the abstraction of common features and cannot be reduced to it.
Shadows of the Same: A Post-Deleuzean Theory of Similarity and Substance
This article presents an analytic-continental cross analysis of the problem of universals in properties and particulars. The author contends, however, that it is not enough to divide philosophical arguments about substance only into theories with-and theories without universals. The existence or non-existence of universals is a question of identity, but arguments about substance must also explain instantiation, which the author argues can be divided by either participation or repetition. To this end, the author constructs a four-fold metaontology: Participation with Universals, Participation without Universals, Repetition with Universals, and Repetition without Universals. The author defends a Repetition without Universals program, which, in order to work, must include a non-universalist concept of emergent similarity.
Modal Realism, Counterpart Theory, and Unactualized Possibilities
Metaphysica, 2014
It is a commonsense thesis that unactualized possibilities are not parts of actuality. To keep his modal realism in line with this thesis, David Lewis employed his indexical account of the term “actual.” I argue that the addition of counterpart theory to Lewis’s modal realism undermines his strategy for respecting the commonsense thesis. The case made here also reveals a problem for Lewis’s attempt to avoid haecceitism.
On Deriving Essentialism from the Theory of Reference
Philosophical Studies, forthcoming
Causal theories of reference for natural kind terms are widely agreed to play a central role in arguments for the claim that theoretical identity statements such as “Water is H2O” are necessary, if true. However, there is also fairly wide-spread agreement, due to the arguments of Nathan Salmon (in Reference and Essence), that causal theories of reference do not alone establish such essentialism about natural kinds: an independent, non-trivial essentialist premise is also needed. In this paper I will question this latter agreement. I will argue that there is an independently attractive explanation of why such identity statements are metaphysically necessary, if true: an explanation which relies on assumptions about the semantics of natural kind terms, general philosophical assumptions about reference, and straightforward empirical assumptions, but presupposes no non-trivial essentialist premises.
An Impossibility Result on Semantic Resemblance
dialectica, 2008
It is shown that a set of prima facie plausible assumptions on the relation of meaning resemblance – one of which is a compositionality postulate – is inconsistent. On this basis it is argued that either there is no theoretically useful and distinct notion of semantic resemblance at all, or that the traditional conception of the compositionality of meaning has to be adapted. In the former case, arguments put forward by Nelson Goodman and Paul Churchland in favor of the concept of meaning resemblance are defeated. In the other case, it must be possible to account for “degrees of compositionality” or other refinements of compositionality that are compatible with meaning resemblance.