Works in Progress

I attempt to develop an account of real immediate definition. Reversing the usual order of explanation I then use this account of real definition to characterize the notion of essence.

In truthmaker semantics the subject matter of a proposition is taken to be a single state – the fusion of all the truthmakers and falsemakers of the proposition. This account works beautifully for the truth-functional operations but breaks down for quantified propositions. The account incorrectly predicts that the proposition that someone is wise is partly about Socrates. In this talk I develop a novel account of subject matter that can account for the subject matter of quantified propositions. The basic idea is that the subject matter of a proposition is taken to a collection of states – the subject matter of the proposition should be thought of as what is common to those states

I develop an account of the immediate full grounds for conditionals. The key idea behind the approach lies in defining what it is to subtract the grounds for the antecedent from the grounds for the consequent. The grounds for the conditional are, roughly, the results of such subtractions. This thus shows how to generalize Fine’s and Yablo’s ideas about the incremental conditional from the setting of truthmaker theory to a grounding framework. I then argue that propositions that have the form of theorems of intuitionistic propositional logic are all zero-grounded.

I argue against a ground theoretic construal of criteria of identity and in favor of an essentialist construal

Following the seminal work of Fine there has recently been a lot of interest in generative or constructional ontologies. In such ontologies all objects are generated from the given objects by iterated application of generative operations. This paper raises and solves a novel problem for such ontologies. Existing accounts of generative operations -like the one in Fine’s “Towards a Theory of Part” – cannot account of ordered objects like sequences.