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1

Modalny realizm i nazwy własne

100%

Warzoszczak P.

Diametros

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2008

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issue 15

74-93

PL

Celem niniejszego artykułu jest omówienie zasadniczych tez modalnego realizmu i wskazanie trudności, do jakich prowadzi akceptacja realistycznych postulatów. Szczególną uwagę zwraca się na konsekwencje płynące z teorii odpowiedników, która w różnych formach wydaje się być integralną częścią modalnego realizmu. Stąd do zasadniczych konsekwencji tej teorii modalności należy zanegowanie istnienia trans-światowych obiektów. Ostatnia teza skutkuje niepokojącym zachowywaniem się nazw własnych w zdaniach z funktorami modalnymi. Autor artykułu argumentuje, że takie zachowanie się nazw własnych w zdaniach modalnych sprawia, iż modalny realizm nie jest autentyczną teorią modalności.

EN

The paper discusses modal realism, as expounded by David Lewis, and points out some crucial difficulties of this wide-ranging philosophical position. An essential component of it is the counterpart theory, which has the unfortunate consequence of eliminating trans-world objects from our ontology. And this leads to an enormously anomalous behavior of proper names in modal sentences, seriously undermining the plausibility of modal realism.

2

Leopold Hess i Maja Kittel o modalnym realizmie i nazwach własnych

100%

Warzoszczak P.

Diametros

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2008

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issue 18

104-122

PL

Polemika z tekstem: Leopold Hess, Maja Kittel, Modalny realizm raz jeszcze, Diametros 17

3

The Later Carnap and Contemporary Metaphysical Debates. Part I, The Later Carnap Views on Ontology and Fictionalism

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Warzoszczak P.

Filozofia Nauki

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2012

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vol. 20

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issue 3

35-63

PL

In the paper I consider the prospects of interpreting late Carnap view on ontology as being in part a sort of fictionalism. More precisely, I argue that the theses he maintained in the volume of The Library of Living Philosophers devoted to his philosophy, in which he concerned with semantics in general and the confirmation of existential claims, make his account of an ontologically uncommittal acceptance of existential claims, as presented in his Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology, unsatisfying. In this work, he claimed that – to put it roughly – one can accept existential claims as true relatively to rules that constitue the linguistic framework in which these claims are formulated and that from the truth relative to these rules one can’t derive any conclusion about the objective truth of these existential claims. But in the volume of The Library of Living Philosophers he adopted a new view on the nature of semantic values and took them to be extralinguistic entities. This change forced him to redefine the notion of being true relative to rules of the liguistic framework in terms of being true in admissible models of this language, where a model is an ad-missible model of a given language, if all meaning postulates of this language are satisfied in that model. This change of the view calls for an explanation of how it is possible to take some existential claims to be true in a model without accepting the existence of entities in the domain of that model. Following S. Yablo’s view ex-pressed in his Does Ontology Rest on Mistake, I suggest that one can accept the thesis that existential claims are satisfied by some extralinguistic entities in some model in a spirit of make-believe in which one makes supposition that there are such enti-ties and that they satisfy these existential claims. I also argue against propositions of interpreting Carnap as a quasi-realist on the ground that this kind of interpretation doesn’t give a justice to the distinction between internal existential claims and prag-matic external existential claims, i.e. those claims that should be treated as claims about pragmatic values of a given linguistic framework.

4

Two Types of Modal Fictionalism

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Warzoszczak P.

Filozofia Nauki

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2009

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vol. 17

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issue 1

41-67

PL

The main aim of the article is a comparison of two types of modal fictionalism (which is, to put it roughly, the antirealist view concerning the existence of possible worlds). The most popular version of modal fictionalism, proposed by Gideon Rosen, is compared with the modal fictionalism based on Stephen Yablo's ideas concerning object fictionalism. Both views aim to: (i) deliver an interpretation of existential quantifiers ranging over possible worlds, according to which quantifying over possible worlds does not imply ontological commitments to possible worlds; (ii) give an analysis of modality. The distinctive feature of the former view is an account of all sentences with existential quantification ranging over possible worlds as elliptical versions of sentences of the form "According to fiction of plurality of worlds, there is a world, in which...". The modal fictionalist presupposes that the occurrence of the story prefix "According to such and such fiction" makes all quantifiers in its range uncommittal ones. The latter view consists in taking sentences quantifying over possible worlds as uttered in make-believe spirit, where the speaker pretends that there are possible worlds and hence does not commit herself to the existence of possible worlds. Important feature of this view is that its proponent presupposes that there is some kind of dependence between that what modal facts there are and what is pretended in the game of make-believe for possible worlds discourse. The first view lacks this feature. I argue that if one supposes that some of our ordinary modal statements, e.g. "This car could have had different colour than it actually has," provide information about features of objects they are about, then Rosen's version of modal fictionalism faces the problem of explaining how modal fictionalist's analysis of modality preserves this kind of information about objects. The proponent of the latter version has tools to explain how her analysis preserves those bits of information about objects. I conclude that this could be treated as a reason of preferring Yablo's version of modal fictionalism.

5

Later Carnap and Contemporary Metaphysical Debates. Part II, Was the Later Carnap a Proponent of Epistemicism?

100%

Warzoszczak P.

Filozofia Nauki

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2012

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vol. 20

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issue 4

45-62

PL

In the paper I consider the prospects of interpreting late Carnap views on ontology as being in part a sort of epistemism. More precisely, I argue that the theses that he maintained in the Empirism, Semantics, and Onotology and the volume of The Library of Living Philosophers devoted to his philosophy put him close to proponents of epistemicism, according to which ontological debates over truth-values of metaphysical theses need not to be verbal disputes, but the prospects of resolving them are meager, since there are no evidences that could support either given metaphysical thesis or its negation. Most likely, Carnap should be read as a proponent of a more radical version of this view, since he maintained that in principle there are no such evidences. I find this view fit well with Carnap’s argumentative strategy against substantial character of metaphysical debates, since he stresses the lack of evidences in favour of or against metaphysical claims as the main reason for his deflationism in ontology. However, what is the most worrisome in taking this route of interpreting late Carnap views on ontology is that among the presuppositions of epistemicism is the thesis that one can make sense of the talk about truth-values of metaphysical claims, whereas Carnap maintained they lack truth-values due to lack of cognitive contents. But taking the change of his view on the nature of semantic values in the volume of The Library of Living Philosophers devoted to his philosophy, where he claimed that extralinguistic entities should serve a role of semantic values and the notion of truth should be defined relatively to a given interpretation in a given model, I find his opinion on metaphysical claims unjustified, since one can define the the notion of truth for these claims relatively to models and hence make a talk about their truth values (relatively to models) sensible. It doesn’t follow from that that one can also make a sense of a claim being absolutely true, since it would require to take one model to be special one in the sense that it fits the way reality is, which is something that the proponent of epistemicism deny on the ground that there are no evidences that could be taken to show that one of the models of a given language is special in this respect. I also discuss applications of the inference to the best explanation in argumentation in favour of various sorts of realism and argue that this kind of argumentation always leaves room for some ontological dispute between parties from which one deny the existence of entities that the other argued for through application of the inference to the best explanation and hence that no metaphysical debate can be resolved by application of the inference to the best explanation under the threat of circularity. The paper is the continuation of considerations made in my paper The Later Carnap and Contemporary Metaphysical Debates. Part I, in which I’ve argued that one can treat Carnap to be also a proponent of fictionalism. In effect, Carnap’s deflationism in ontology seems to be a combination of fictionalism and epistemicism.

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Modalny realizm i nazwy własne

Leopold Hess i Maja Kittel o modalnym realizmie i nazwach własnych

The Later Carnap and Contemporary Metaphysical Debates. Part I, The Later Carnap Views on Ontology and Fictionalism

Two Types of Modal Fictionalism

Later Carnap and Contemporary Metaphysical Debates. Part II, Was the Later Carnap a Proponent of Epistemicism?