Nathan Salmon
Encyclopedia
Nathan U. Salmon is an American
philosopher
in the analytic
tradition, specializing in metaphysics
, philosophy of language
, and philosophy of logic
.
to a working-class family of Sephardi Jews
of Spanish
-Turkish
heritage. He is the grandson of archivist Emily Sene (née Emily Perez) and oud
player Isaac Sene.
The first person in his family to go to college, Salmon attended El Camino College
and the University of California, Los Angeles
(UCLA). At UCLA
he studied with Tyler Burge
, Alonzo Church
, Keith Donnellan
, Donald Kalish
, David Kaplan
, Saul Kripke
, and Yiannis Moschovakis. Salmon earned his Ph.D.
in 1979 while he was assistant professor of philosophy at Princeton University
. In 1984 the Council of Graduate Schools awarded him the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities, on the basis of his book, Reference and Essence (1981), which was based on his UCLA doctoral dissertation. His second book, Frege's Puzzle (1986), was selected by Scott Soames
for a literary website as one of the best five books on the philosophy of language.
Salmon is currently distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara
, where he has taught since 1984. He has also taught at UCLA, the University of California, Riverside
, and the University of Southern California
, and was a regular visiting distinguished professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center from 2009 to 2011.
s and of Frege's puzzle
about true identifications, i.e., truths of the form "a = b". Salmon maintains that co-designative proper names are inter-substitutable with preservation of semantic content. Thus, on his view the sentence "Samuel Clemens was witty" expresses exactly the same content as "Mark Twain was witty", whether or not the competent user of these sentences recognizes it. Therefore a person who believes that Mark Twain
was witty ipso facto believes that Samuel Clemens was witty, even if he or she also believes, inconsistently, that Clemens was not witty. Salmon argues that this is made palatable by recognizing that to believe a proposition is to be cognitively disposed in a particular manner toward that proposition when taking it by means of some proposition-guise or other, and that one may be so disposed relative to one proposition-guise while not being so disposed relative to another. Salmon applies this apparatus to solve a variety of famous philosophical puzzles, including Frege's puzzle, Kripke's puzzle about so-called de dicto belief, and W. V. O. Quine's puzzle about de re belief. For example, Quine describes a scenario in which Ralph believes that Ortcutt is no spy, yet Ralph also believes that the man in the brown hat is a spy, when unbeknownst to Ralph the man in the hat is none other than Ortcutt. Under these circumstances, is Ortcutt believed by Ralph to be a spy? The grounds for an affirmative or negative judgment seem equally balanced. On Salmon's account Ortcutt is believed by Ralph to be a spy, since Ralph is appropriately cognitively disposed toward the proposition about Ortcutt that he is a spy when taking that proposition by means of one proposition-guise, even though Ralph is not so disposed relative to an alternative, equally relevant proposition-guise.
, that existence
is a property, one that particular individuals have and other individuals lack. According to Salmon, the English verb "exist" is (along with its literal tranlsations into other languages), among other things, a term for this alleged property, and a sentence of the form "a exists" is true if and only if the subject term designates something with the property, and is false (and "a does not exist" is true) if and only if the subject term designates something with the complementary property of nonexistence. Thus Russell
's example, "The present king of France exists", is neither true nor false, since France is not presently a monarchy, and therefore "the present king of France" does not designate; whereas "Napoleon exists" is simply false, since although Napoleon once existed, the moment he died he took on the property of nonexistence.
By contrast, Salmon maintains that "Sherlock Holmes exists" is literally true, whereas "Sherlock Holmes was a detective" is literally false. According to Salmon, Sherlock Holmes
is an abstract entity created by author Arthur Conan Doyle
, and the fiction is a story, or a collection of stories, which are about that very character but are literally false. Holmes really exists, but is only depicted as a detective in the fiction. In the fiction, Holmes is a detective; in reality, Holmes is merely a fictional detective.
Salmon extends this view to what he calls mythical objects, like the hypothetical planet, Vulcan
. Vulcan really exists, but it is not a real planet. It is an abstract entity that is only depicted as a planet in the myth. Salmon's account of fiction and myth thus has direct application to the philosophy of religion. Salmon has also applied his account of mythical objects to Peter Geach
's famous problem of uncovering the logical form
of the particular sentence, "Hob thinks a witch has blighted Bob's mare, and Nob wonders whether she (the same witch) killed Cob's sow". Salmon's account shows how the problematic sentence can be true even though there are no witches, and even if Hob and Nob do not know about each other, and there is no one whom they think is a witch.
Salmon thinks, again contrary to Kant
, that it is perfectly legitimate to invoke existence in a term's definition. Thus "God" might be legitimately defined as the conceivable individual that is divine and also exists. According to Salmon, the ontological argument
for God's existence fallaciously assumes that "The F is F" is a truth of logic
, or an analytic truth. What is true by logic is a significantly weaker variant: "If anything is uniquely F, then the F is F". The strongest conclusion that validly
follows from the proposed definition is that if any conceivable individual actually is uniquely both divine and existent, then God actually exists. This same conclusion is also a trivial logical consequence of the atheist
's contention that no conceivable individual actually is uniquely both divine and existent. According to Salmon's critique, the ontological argument thus shows nothing.
by λ-conversion, typically not strictly synonymous, i.e., they typically differ in semantic content—as for example "a is large and also a is seaworthy" and "a is a thing that is both large and seaworthy".
Salmon maintains a sharp division between semantics
and pragmatics
(speech acts). He argues that in uttering a sentence, a speaker typically asserts a good deal more than the words' semantic content, and that, consequently, it is a mistake to identify the semantic content of a sentence with what is said by its speaker. Salmon maintains that such an identification is an instance of a mistaken form of argument in the philosophy of language, "the pragmatic fallacy."
for, among other things, his analysis of arguments for essentialism
--the doctrine that some properties of things are properties that those things could not fail to have (except perhaps by not existing). In particular, Salmon is known for his development and defense of a reductio ad absurdum
argument, using a sorites-like problem (slippery slope
), against nearly universally accepted modal logic
systems S4 and S5, which he argues commit "the fallacy of necessity iteration," sanctioning the invalid inference from the observation that a proposition p is a necessary truth to the conclusion that it is a necessary truth that p is a necessary truth. He defends his view by exposing a mistake in a standard argument favoring S5, while arguing that there are not only possible worlds
--thought of as maximal scenarios that might have obtained—but in addition classically consistent impossible world
s: maximal scenarios that could not obtain.
"disproof" of indeterminate identity
, i.e., the philosophically popular idea that for some pairs of things there is no fact of the matter concerning whether those things are one and the very same. Salmon argues that if there were such a pair of things, x and y, then this pair would have to be different from the reflexive pair of x with itself, since there is a fact concerning whether x and x are the same. It would then follow by set theory
that x and y are not the same, and in that case there would be a fact of the matter after all concerning whether x and y are the same: they are not. Therefore, there cannot be a pair of things for which there is no fact concerning their identity. On the other hand, Salmon maintains that not all vagueness is due to language and some indeterminacy results from how things themselves are, i.e., that for some things and some attributes, independently of language, there is no fact of the matter concerning whether those things have those attributes. Critics of Salmon's alleged proof acknowledge that the highlighted difference between <x, y> and <x, x>--that there is a fact whether the elements of the latter, but not of the former, are the same thing—is genuine, but respond that it does not validly support the conclusion that those pairs are not the same.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
philosopher
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
in the analytic
Analytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century...
tradition, specializing in metaphysics
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
, philosophy of language
Philosophy of language
Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for analytic philosophers is concerned with four central problems: the nature of meaning, language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language...
, and philosophy of logic
Philosophy of logic
Following the developments in Formal logic with symbolic logic in the late nineteenth century and mathematical logic in the twentieth, topics traditionally treated by logic not being part of formal logic have tended to be termed either philosophy of logic or philosophical logic if no longer simply...
.
Biography
Salmon was born January 2, 1951 in Los AngelesLos Angeles, California
Los Angeles , with a population at the 2010 United States Census of 3,792,621, is the most populous city in California, USA and the second most populous in the United States, after New York City. It has an area of , and is located in Southern California...
to a working-class family of Sephardi Jews
Sephardi Jews
Sephardi Jews is a general term referring to the descendants of the Jews who lived in the Iberian Peninsula before their expulsion in the Spanish Inquisition. It can also refer to those who use a Sephardic style of liturgy or would otherwise define themselves in terms of the Jewish customs and...
of Spanish
Spanish and Portuguese Jews
Spanish and Portuguese Jews are a distinctive sub-group of Sephardim who have their main ethnic origins within the Jewish communities of the Iberian peninsula and who shaped communities mainly in Western Europe and the Americas from the late 16th century on...
-Turkish
Turkish people
Turkish people, also known as the "Turks" , are an ethnic group primarily living in Turkey and in the former lands of the Ottoman Empire where Turkish minorities had been established in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Romania...
heritage. He is the grandson of archivist Emily Sene (née Emily Perez) and oud
Oud
The oud is a pear-shaped stringed instrument commonly used in North African and Middle Eastern music. The modern oud and the European lute both descend from a common ancestor via diverging paths...
player Isaac Sene.
The first person in his family to go to college, Salmon attended El Camino College
El Camino College
El Camino College is a two-year public community college located partially in the unincorporated area of Alondra Park and partially in the City of Torrance in Los Angeles County, California, United States. It is commonly referred to as "Elco" or "ECC"...
and the University of California, Los Angeles
University of California, Los Angeles
The University of California, Los Angeles is a public research university located in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, USA. It was founded in 1919 as the "Southern Branch" of the University of California and is the second oldest of the ten campuses...
(UCLA). At UCLA
UCLA Department of Philosophy
The UCLA Department of Philosophy is a constituent department of the Division of Humanities in the UCLA College of Letters and Science. From the mid-20th century, the department has been a leading and widely respected center for the study of Analytic Philosophy, especially Mathematical Logic,...
he studied with Tyler Burge
Tyler Burge
Tyler Burge is a Professor of Philosophy at UCLA. He has made contributions to several areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the history of philosophy. In the history of philosophy, he has published articles on the philosophy of Gottlob Frege...
, Alonzo Church
Alonzo Church
Alonzo Church was an American mathematician and logician who made major contributions to mathematical logic and the foundations of theoretical computer science. He is best known for the lambda calculus, Church–Turing thesis, Frege–Church ontology, and the Church–Rosser theorem.-Life:Alonzo Church...
, Keith Donnellan
Keith Donnellan
Keith Donnellan is a contemporary philosopher and Professor Emeritus of the UCLA department of Philosophy. He has made important contributions to the philosophy of language, most notably to the analysis of proper names and definite descriptions...
, Donald Kalish
Donald Kalish
Donald Kalish was an American logician, educator, and anti-war activist.-Background:Born in Chicago, Illinois, Kalish earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in psychology and his doctorate in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley...
, David Kaplan
David Kaplan (philosopher)
David Benjamin Kaplan is an American philosopher and logician teaching at UCLA. His philosophical work focuses on logic, philosophical logic, modality, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology. He is best known for his work on demonstratives, on propositions, and on reference in...
, Saul Kripke
Saul Kripke
Saul Aaron Kripke is an American philosopher and logician. He is a professor emeritus at Princeton and teaches as a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center...
, and Yiannis Moschovakis. Salmon earned his Ph.D.
Doctor of Philosophy
Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...
in 1979 while he was assistant professor of philosophy at Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
. In 1984 the Council of Graduate Schools awarded him the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities, on the basis of his book, Reference and Essence (1981), which was based on his UCLA doctoral dissertation. His second book, Frege's Puzzle (1986), was selected by Scott Soames
Scott Soames
Scott Soames is a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California. He specializes in the philosophy of language and the history of analytic philosophy...
for a literary website as one of the best five books on the philosophy of language.
Salmon is currently distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara
University of California, Santa Barbara
The University of California, Santa Barbara, commonly known as UCSB or UC Santa Barbara, is a public research university and one of the 10 general campuses of the University of California system. The main campus is located on a site in Goleta, California, from Santa Barbara and northwest of Los...
, where he has taught since 1984. He has also taught at UCLA, the University of California, Riverside
University of California, Riverside
The University of California, Riverside, commonly known as UCR or UC Riverside, is a public research university and one of the ten general campuses of the University of California system. UCR is consistently ranked as one of the most ethnically and economically diverse universities in the United...
, and the University of Southern California
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...
, and was a regular visiting distinguished professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center from 2009 to 2011.
Millianism
Salmon is a proponent of the theory of direct reference. Salmon has provided accounts both of propositional attitudePropositional attitude
A propositional attitude is a relational mental state connecting a person to a proposition. They are often assumed to be the simplest components of thought and can express meanings or content that can be true or false...
s and of Frege's puzzle
Frege's Puzzle
Frege's Puzzle is a puzzle about the semantics of proper names, although the title is also sometimes applied to a related puzzle about indexicals...
about true identifications, i.e., truths of the form "a = b". Salmon maintains that co-designative proper names are inter-substitutable with preservation of semantic content. Thus, on his view the sentence "Samuel Clemens was witty" expresses exactly the same content as "Mark Twain was witty", whether or not the competent user of these sentences recognizes it. Therefore a person who believes that Mark Twain
Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...
was witty ipso facto believes that Samuel Clemens was witty, even if he or she also believes, inconsistently, that Clemens was not witty. Salmon argues that this is made palatable by recognizing that to believe a proposition is to be cognitively disposed in a particular manner toward that proposition when taking it by means of some proposition-guise or other, and that one may be so disposed relative to one proposition-guise while not being so disposed relative to another. Salmon applies this apparatus to solve a variety of famous philosophical puzzles, including Frege's puzzle, Kripke's puzzle about so-called de dicto belief, and W. V. O. Quine's puzzle about de re belief. For example, Quine describes a scenario in which Ralph believes that Ortcutt is no spy, yet Ralph also believes that the man in the brown hat is a spy, when unbeknownst to Ralph the man in the hat is none other than Ortcutt. Under these circumstances, is Ortcutt believed by Ralph to be a spy? The grounds for an affirmative or negative judgment seem equally balanced. On Salmon's account Ortcutt is believed by Ralph to be a spy, since Ralph is appropriately cognitively disposed toward the proposition about Ortcutt that he is a spy when taking that proposition by means of one proposition-guise, even though Ralph is not so disposed relative to an alternative, equally relevant proposition-guise.
Existence
Salmon provided direct-reference accounts of problems of nonexistence and of names from fiction. Salmon argues, directly contrary to Immanuel KantImmanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
, that existence
Existence
In common usage, existence is the world we are aware of through our senses, and that persists independently without them. In academic philosophy the word has a more specialized meaning, being contrasted with essence, which specifies different forms of existence as well as different identity...
is a property, one that particular individuals have and other individuals lack. According to Salmon, the English verb "exist" is (along with its literal tranlsations into other languages), among other things, a term for this alleged property, and a sentence of the form "a exists" is true if and only if the subject term designates something with the property, and is false (and "a does not exist" is true) if and only if the subject term designates something with the complementary property of nonexistence. Thus Russell
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
's example, "The present king of France exists", is neither true nor false, since France is not presently a monarchy, and therefore "the present king of France" does not designate; whereas "Napoleon exists" is simply false, since although Napoleon once existed, the moment he died he took on the property of nonexistence.
By contrast, Salmon maintains that "Sherlock Holmes exists" is literally true, whereas "Sherlock Holmes was a detective" is literally false. According to Salmon, Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes is a fictional detective created by Scottish author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The fantastic London-based "consulting detective", Holmes is famous for his astute logical reasoning, his ability to take almost any disguise, and his use of forensic science skills to solve...
is an abstract entity created by author Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle DL was a Scottish physician and writer, most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, generally considered a milestone in the field of crime fiction, and for the adventures of Professor Challenger...
, and the fiction is a story, or a collection of stories, which are about that very character but are literally false. Holmes really exists, but is only depicted as a detective in the fiction. In the fiction, Holmes is a detective; in reality, Holmes is merely a fictional detective.
Salmon extends this view to what he calls mythical objects, like the hypothetical planet, Vulcan
Vulcan (hypothetical planet)
Vulcan was a small planet proposed to exist in an orbit between Mercury and the Sun. In an attempt to explain peculiarities of Mercury's orbit, in the 19th-century French mathematician Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier hypothesized that they were the result of another planet, which he named Vulcan...
. Vulcan really exists, but it is not a real planet. It is an abstract entity that is only depicted as a planet in the myth. Salmon's account of fiction and myth thus has direct application to the philosophy of religion. Salmon has also applied his account of mythical objects to Peter Geach
Peter Geach
Peter Thomas Geach is a British philosopher. His areas of interest are the history of philosophy, philosophical logic, and the theory of identity.He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford...
's famous problem of uncovering the logical form
Logical form
In logic, the logical form of a sentence or set of sentences is the form obtained by abstracting from the subject matter of its content terms or by regarding the content terms as mere placeholders or blanks on a form...
of the particular sentence, "Hob thinks a witch has blighted Bob's mare, and Nob wonders whether she (the same witch) killed Cob's sow". Salmon's account shows how the problematic sentence can be true even though there are no witches, and even if Hob and Nob do not know about each other, and there is no one whom they think is a witch.
Salmon thinks, again contrary to Kant
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
, that it is perfectly legitimate to invoke existence in a term's definition. Thus "God" might be legitimately defined as the conceivable individual that is divine and also exists. According to Salmon, the ontological argument
Ontological argument
The ontological argument for the existence of God is an a priori argument for the existence of God. The ontological argument was first proposed by the eleventh-century monk Anselm of Canterbury, who defined God as the greatest possible being we can conceive...
for God's existence fallaciously assumes that "The F is F" is a truth of logic
Logic
In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...
, or an analytic truth. What is true by logic is a significantly weaker variant: "If anything is uniquely F, then the F is F". The strongest conclusion that validly
Validity
In logic, argument is valid if and only if its conclusion is entailed by its premises, a formula is valid if and only if it is true under every interpretation, and an argument form is valid if and only if every argument of that logical form is valid....
follows from the proposed definition is that if any conceivable individual actually is uniquely both divine and existent, then God actually exists. This same conclusion is also a trivial logical consequence of the atheist
Atheism
Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities...
's contention that no conceivable individual actually is uniquely both divine and existent. According to Salmon's critique, the ontological argument thus shows nothing.
Semantics and pragmatics
Salmon argues that natural-language sentences that are representable as λ-converts of one another (in the sense of Church's lambda-calculus) are, although logically equivalentLogical equivalence
In logic, statements p and q are logically equivalent if they have the same logical content.Syntactically, p and q are equivalent if each can be proved from the other...
by λ-conversion, typically not strictly synonymous, i.e., they typically differ in semantic content—as for example "a is large and also a is seaworthy" and "a is a thing that is both large and seaworthy".
Salmon maintains a sharp division between semantics
Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
and pragmatics
Pragmatics
Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. It studies how the...
(speech acts). He argues that in uttering a sentence, a speaker typically asserts a good deal more than the words' semantic content, and that, consequently, it is a mistake to identify the semantic content of a sentence with what is said by its speaker. Salmon maintains that such an identification is an instance of a mistaken form of argument in the philosophy of language, "the pragmatic fallacy."
Essentialism
Salmon is also known in metaphysicsMetaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
for, among other things, his analysis of arguments for essentialism
Essentialism
In philosophy, essentialism is the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any entity of that kind must possess. Therefore all things can be precisely defined or described...
--the doctrine that some properties of things are properties that those things could not fail to have (except perhaps by not existing). In particular, Salmon is known for his development and defense of a reductio ad absurdum
Reductio ad absurdum
In logic, proof by contradiction is a form of proof that establishes the truth or validity of a proposition by showing that the proposition's being false would imply a contradiction...
argument, using a sorites-like problem (slippery slope
Slippery slope
In debate or rhetoric, a slippery slope is a classic form of argument, arguably an informal fallacy...
), against nearly universally accepted modal logic
Modal logic
Modal logic is a type of formal logic that extends classical propositional and predicate logic to include operators expressing modality. Modals — words that express modalities — qualify a statement. For example, the statement "John is happy" might be qualified by saying that John is...
systems S4 and S5, which he argues commit "the fallacy of necessity iteration," sanctioning the invalid inference from the observation that a proposition p is a necessary truth to the conclusion that it is a necessary truth that p is a necessary truth. He defends his view by exposing a mistake in a standard argument favoring S5, while arguing that there are not only possible worlds
Possible Worlds
Possible Worlds may refer to:* Possible worlds, a concept in philosophy* Possible Worlds , by John Mighton** Possible Worlds , by Robert Lepage, based on the Mighton play* Possible Worlds , by Peter Porter...
--thought of as maximal scenarios that might have obtained—but in addition classically consistent impossible world
Impossible world
In philosophical logic, the concept of an impossible world is used to model certainphenomena that cannot be adequately handled using ordinary possible worlds...
s: maximal scenarios that could not obtain.
Identity
Salmon also provided a controversial reductio ad absurdumReductio ad absurdum
In logic, proof by contradiction is a form of proof that establishes the truth or validity of a proposition by showing that the proposition's being false would imply a contradiction...
"disproof" of indeterminate identity
Identity (philosophy)
In philosophy, identity, from , is the relation each thing bears just to itself. According to Leibniz's law two things sharing every attribute are not only similar, but are the same thing. The concept of sameness has given rise to the general concept of identity, as in personal identity and...
, i.e., the philosophically popular idea that for some pairs of things there is no fact of the matter concerning whether those things are one and the very same. Salmon argues that if there were such a pair of things, x and y, then this pair would have to be different from the reflexive pair of x with itself, since there is a fact concerning whether x and x are the same. It would then follow by set theory
Set theory
Set theory is the branch of mathematics that studies sets, which are collections of objects. Although any type of object can be collected into a set, set theory is applied most often to objects that are relevant to mathematics...
that x and y are not the same, and in that case there would be a fact of the matter after all concerning whether x and y are the same: they are not. Therefore, there cannot be a pair of things for which there is no fact concerning their identity. On the other hand, Salmon maintains that not all vagueness is due to language and some indeterminacy results from how things themselves are, i.e., that for some things and some attributes, independently of language, there is no fact of the matter concerning whether those things have those attributes. Critics of Salmon's alleged proof acknowledge that the highlighted difference between <x, y> and <x, x>--that there is a fact whether the elements of the latter, but not of the former, are the same thing—is genuine, but respond that it does not validly support the conclusion that those pairs are not the same.
Books
- Content, CognitionCognitionIn science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science...
, and CommunicationCommunicationCommunication is the activity of conveying meaningful information. Communication requires a sender, a message, and an intended recipient, although the receiver need not be present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the time of communication; thus communication can occur across vast...
(2007). Oxford University Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-928272-2 - Frege's PuzzleFrege's PuzzleFrege's Puzzle is a puzzle about the semantics of proper names, although the title is also sometimes applied to a related puzzle about indexicals...
(Second Edition) (1986). Ridgeview, Atacadero, California. ISBN 0-924922-05-2 - MetaphysicsMetaphysicsMetaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
, MathematicsPhilosophy of mathematicsThe philosophy of mathematics is the branch of philosophy that studies the philosophical assumptions, foundations, and implications of mathematics. The aim of the philosophy of mathematics is to provide an account of the nature and methodology of mathematics and to understand the place of...
, and MeaningLinguistic meaningThe nature of meaning, its definition, elements, and types, was discussed by philosophers Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. According to them 'meaning is a relationship between two sorts of things: signs and the kinds of things they mean '. One term in the relationship of meaning necessarily...
(2005). Oxford University Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-928471-7 - PropositionPropositionIn logic and philosophy, the term proposition refers to either the "content" or "meaning" of a meaningful declarative sentence or the pattern of symbols, marks, or sounds that make up a meaningful declarative sentence...
s and AttitudesPropositional attitudeA propositional attitude is a relational mental state connecting a person to a proposition. They are often assumed to be the simplest components of thought and can express meanings or content that can be true or false...
(1988), (co-edited with Scott SoamesScott SoamesScott Soames is a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California. He specializes in the philosophy of language and the history of analytic philosophy...
). Oxford University Press, New York. ISBN 0-19-875091-9 - ReferenceReferenceReference is derived from Middle English referren, from Middle French rèférer, from Latin referre, "to carry back", formed from the prefix re- and ferre, "to bear"...
and EssenceEssenceIn philosophy, essence is the attribute or set of attributes that make an object or substance what it fundamentally is, and which it has by necessity, and without which it loses its identity. Essence is contrasted with accident: a property that the object or substance has contingently, without...
(Second Edition) (1981). Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York. ISBN 1-59102-215-0
Selected Articles
- "Analyticity and Apriority" (1993) in Philosophical Perspectives, 7: Language and Logic, James Tomberlin, (ed). Ridgeview, Atascadero.
- "Assertion and Incomplete Definite Descriptions" (1982) Philosophical Studies 42: 37-46.
- "Being of Two Minds: Belief with Doubt" (1995) Noûs 29 (1): 1-20.
- "Demonstrating and Necessity" (2002) Philosophical Review 111 (4): 497-537
- "Existence" (1987) in Philosophical Perspectives, James Tomberlin (ed). Ridgeview, Atascadero.
- "The Fact That x = y" (1987) Philosophia 17: 517-518.
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