Abstract
Serious actualists take it that all properties are existence entailing. I
present a simple puzzle about sentence tokens which seems to show that
serious actualism is false. I then consider the most promising response
to the puzzle. This is the idea that the serious actualist should take
ordinary property-talk to contain an implicit existential
presupposition. I argue that this approach does not work: it fails to
generalise appropriately to all sentence types and tokens. In
particular, it fails to capture the right distinctions we ought to make
between what I call typographical sentence types—an interesting
and previously undiscussed class of fine-grained sentence types which
are partially individuated by their typography, or how they look when
written out.
Original language | English |
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Number of pages | 18 |
Journal | Erkenntnis |
Volume | First Online |
Early online date | 18 Apr 2023 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 18 Apr 2023 |