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Nonexistent Objects as Truth-Makers: Against Crane’s Reductionism

According to Meinongianism, some objects do not exist but we can legitimately refer to and quantify over them. Moreover, Meinongianism standardly regards nonexistent objects as contributing to the truth-makers of sentences about nonexistent objects. Recently, Tim Crane has proposed a weak form of Me...

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Autores principales: Casati, Filippo, Fujikawa, Naoya
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer Netherlands 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6099664/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30158723
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9710-2
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author Casati, Filippo
Fujikawa, Naoya
author_facet Casati, Filippo
Fujikawa, Naoya
author_sort Casati, Filippo
collection PubMed
description According to Meinongianism, some objects do not exist but we can legitimately refer to and quantify over them. Moreover, Meinongianism standardly regards nonexistent objects as contributing to the truth-makers of sentences about nonexistent objects. Recently, Tim Crane has proposed a weak form of Meinongianism, a reductionism, which denies any contribution of nonexistent objects to truth-making. His reductionism claims that, even though we can truly talk about nonexistent objects by using singular terms and quantifiers about them, any truth about nonexistent objects is reducible to some truths about existent objects. In this paper, we critically examine the reductionism casting some doubts on the reducibility of truths of sentences like ‘a winged pig is possible’ or ‘some winged pig does not exist’ into truths about existent objects. We also argue that the truth of such sentences can be explained by adopting a strong form of Meinongianism which admits contribution of nonexistent objects to the truth-making of such sentences.
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spelling pubmed-60996642018-08-27 Nonexistent Objects as Truth-Makers: Against Crane’s Reductionism Casati, Filippo Fujikawa, Naoya Philosophia (Ramat Gan) Article According to Meinongianism, some objects do not exist but we can legitimately refer to and quantify over them. Moreover, Meinongianism standardly regards nonexistent objects as contributing to the truth-makers of sentences about nonexistent objects. Recently, Tim Crane has proposed a weak form of Meinongianism, a reductionism, which denies any contribution of nonexistent objects to truth-making. His reductionism claims that, even though we can truly talk about nonexistent objects by using singular terms and quantifiers about them, any truth about nonexistent objects is reducible to some truths about existent objects. In this paper, we critically examine the reductionism casting some doubts on the reducibility of truths of sentences like ‘a winged pig is possible’ or ‘some winged pig does not exist’ into truths about existent objects. We also argue that the truth of such sentences can be explained by adopting a strong form of Meinongianism which admits contribution of nonexistent objects to the truth-making of such sentences. Springer Netherlands 2016-04-19 2016 /pmc/articles/PMC6099664/ /pubmed/30158723 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9710-2 Text en © The Author(s) 2016 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
spellingShingle Article
Casati, Filippo
Fujikawa, Naoya
Nonexistent Objects as Truth-Makers: Against Crane’s Reductionism
title Nonexistent Objects as Truth-Makers: Against Crane’s Reductionism
title_full Nonexistent Objects as Truth-Makers: Against Crane’s Reductionism
title_fullStr Nonexistent Objects as Truth-Makers: Against Crane’s Reductionism
title_full_unstemmed Nonexistent Objects as Truth-Makers: Against Crane’s Reductionism
title_short Nonexistent Objects as Truth-Makers: Against Crane’s Reductionism
title_sort nonexistent objects as truth-makers: against crane’s reductionism
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6099664/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30158723
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9710-2
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