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| Talking about Nothing. Numbers, Hallucinations, and Fictions | |
| Συγγραφέας: István Aranyosi István Aranyosi: Talking about Nothing. Numbers, Hallucinations, and Fictions (pdf, 5 pages) If everything exists, then it looks, prima facie, as if talking about nothing is equivalent to not  talking  about  anything.  However,  we  appear  as  talking  or  thinking  about  particular nothings, that is, about particular items that are not among the existents. How to explain this  phenomenon?  One  way  is  to  deny  that  everything  exists,  and  consequently  to  be ontologically committed to nonexistent “objects”. Another way is to deny that the process of  thinking  about  such  nonexistents  is  a  genuine  singular  thought.  The  first  strategy  we may call “the Meinongian tradition” (championed by authors like Alexius Meinong, Ernst Mally,  Terence  Parsons,  Richard  Routley,  and  Ed  Zalta),    while  the  second  could  be dubbed “the de re tradition” (connected to work  by Gareth Evans, John McDowell, and Tyler Burge). Finally, the third way to solve the above puzzle, and probably the majority view  in  contemporary  philosophy,  is  due  to  Bertrand  Russell  and  W.V.O.  Quine,  who deny  the  particularity  of  the  apparent  nonexistent  object  and  the  singularity  of  the corresponding  thought  via  the  view  that  any  statement  about  apparently  particular nonexistents  can  be  paraphrased  into  a  quantified  expression  containing  no  genuinely referring terms. Jody Azzouni’s book is an attempt to argue for and develop a fourth view, based on the hitherto unrecognised notion of an “empty singular thought”, which Azzouni takes to have a place in logical space. Concomitant to developing the view, Azzouni applies it to three typical cases of talk about nonexistents: numbers, hallucinations, and fictions. As the  name  suggests,  empty  singular  thought  is  devised  as  having  three  essential characteristics:  (1)  it  is  genuine  thought,  no  different  from  any  other,  (2)  it  is  singular, that is, its content is partly determined by particular non-conceptualised states of affairs, and (3) nevertheless it is genuinely empty, unlike Meinongian thought, that is, its object “does not exist in any sense”, to use Azzouni’s own formulation. Azzouni  undertakes  some  challenging  acrobatics  when  trying  to  persuade  the reader  that  his  view  is  substantive  and  it  does  not  end  up  being  the  same  as  any  of  the previous three views about apparent talk  about nonexistents... | |
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