Serious actualism, typography, and incompossible sentences
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.
Citation
Masterman , C J 2023 , ' Serious actualism, typography, and incompossible sentences ' , Erkenntnis , vol. First Online . https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-023-00688-1
Publication
Erkenntnis
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1572-8420Type
Journal article
Collections
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