Counting Things that Could Exist
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4351506 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Tobias Rosefeldt (0000-0002-3418-6128, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 67 |
| Issue | 266 |
| Pages | 127-147 |
| Publication date | 2017-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Philosophical Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0031-8094 • E-ISSN: 1467-9213 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/pq/pqw039 |
| OpenAlex | W2394524974 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 17 |
The paper deals with cases of counting things that could exist but do not actually exist that resist common strategies for actualist paraphrases and that play an important role in motivating Timothy Williamson's ontology of contingently concrete objects. It is argued that these cases should be understood as cases of quantification not over individual possible objects but rather over kinds of objects, some of which do not actually have instances. This claim is motivated by a comparison with other cases of natural-language quantification with a similar logical form that, in any case, have to be interpreted as involving quantification over kinds of things even if their surface structure seems to suggest otherwise.
Epistemology · Natural (archaeology) · Ontology · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · History · Logic, Reasoning, and Knowledge · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,2 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2021 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |