TY - JOUR
T1 - Theories of Abstract Objects without Ad Hoc Restriction
AU - Wang, Wen fang
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgments For comments on earlier drafts I wish to thank Edward Zalta, Anil Gupta, Graham Priest, and two anonymous referees of Erkenntnis. My research was supported by a grant from National Science Council, Taiwn (NSC98 2420-H-194-008).
PY - 2011/1
Y1 - 2011/1
N2 - The ideas of fixed points (Kripke in Recent essays on truth and the liar paradox. Clarendon Press, London, pp 53-81, 1975; Martin and Woodruff in Recent essays on truth and the liar paradox. Clarendon Press, London, pp 47-51, 1984) and revision sequences (Gupta and Belnap in The revision theory of truth. MIT, London, 1993; Gupta in The Blackwell guide to philosophical logic. Blackwell, London, pp 90-114, 2001) have been exploited to provide solutions to the semantic paradox and have achieved admirable success. This happy situation naturally encourages one to look for other philosophical areas of their further applications where paradoxical results seem to follow from intuitively acceptable principles. In this paper, I propose to extend the use of these ideas to give two new treatments of abstract objects. Sections 1 and 2 below check several abstractionist theories and their main defects. Section 3 shows how the two ideas can be applied to generate consistent theories of abstract objects without any ad hoc restriction on any principle.
AB - The ideas of fixed points (Kripke in Recent essays on truth and the liar paradox. Clarendon Press, London, pp 53-81, 1975; Martin and Woodruff in Recent essays on truth and the liar paradox. Clarendon Press, London, pp 47-51, 1984) and revision sequences (Gupta and Belnap in The revision theory of truth. MIT, London, 1993; Gupta in The Blackwell guide to philosophical logic. Blackwell, London, pp 90-114, 2001) have been exploited to provide solutions to the semantic paradox and have achieved admirable success. This happy situation naturally encourages one to look for other philosophical areas of their further applications where paradoxical results seem to follow from intuitively acceptable principles. In this paper, I propose to extend the use of these ideas to give two new treatments of abstract objects. Sections 1 and 2 below check several abstractionist theories and their main defects. Section 3 shows how the two ideas can be applied to generate consistent theories of abstract objects without any ad hoc restriction on any principle.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=79551558792&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s10670-010-9260-0
DO - 10.1007/s10670-010-9260-0
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:79551558792
SN - 0165-0106
VL - 74
SP - 1
EP - 15
JO - Erkenntnis
JF - Erkenntnis
IS - 1
ER -