Logical Combinatorialism

Datos Bibliográficos

ID10698874
AutoresAndrew Bacon (University of Southern California, autor de correspondencia)
Año2020
Volumen129
Número4
Páginas537-589
Fecha de publicación2020-10-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe Philosophical Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0031-8108 • E-ISSN: 1558-1470
EditorialDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00318108-8540944
OpenAlexW4256681121
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas14
Referencias citadas36

In explaining the notion of a fundamental property or relation, metaphysicians will often draw an analogy with languages. The fundamental properties and relations stand to reality as the primitive predicates and relations stand to a language: the smallest set of vocabulary God would need in order to write the “book of the world.” This paper attempts to make good on this metaphor. To that end, a modality is introduced that, put informally, stands to propositions as logical truth stands to sentences. The resulting theory, formulated in higher-order logic, also vindicates the Humean idea that fundamental properties and relations are freely recombinable and a variant of the structural idea that propositions can be decomposed into their fundamental constituents via logical operations. Indeed, it is seen that, although these ideas are seemingly distinct, they are not independent, and fall out of a natural and general theory about the granularity of reality

Analogy · Epistemology · Linguistics · Logical conjunction · Logical consequence · Logical form · Metaphor · Natural (archaeology) · Order (exchange) · Programming language · Property (philosophy) · Relation (database) · Set (abstract data type) · Vocabulary · Advanced Algebra and Logic · Computer Science · Logic, Reasoning, and Knowledge · Mathematics · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science