Graeme Forbes

Origins and Identities

Kripke’s thesis of the essentiality of biological origin (Kripke [1972), pp. 312–4) maybe written

Physicalism, instrumentalism and the semantics of modal logic

\left( {EBO} \right)\square \left( {\forall x} \right)\square \left( {\forall \lambda } \right)\left[ {y\;originates\,from\,x} \right] \to \square \left( {y\;exists \to y\;originates\,from\,x} \right){.^1}

I—Graeme Forbes

That is, for any possible objects x and y, if y originates from x in some world, then y originates from x in every world in which y exists. This thesis strikes an intuitive chord with many, and a number of proposed justifications for it have been advanced.2 My own argument for (EBO) is based on a principle about identity, namely, that for things which in some good sense come from or are composed of or constructed from other things (“composite” objects), ungrounded identities and ungrounded non-identities are to be abjured.

Intensional verbs in event semantics

Modal logicians have recently been concerned to bring the methods of model theory for modal logic to bear upon some main philosophical concerns about modality’ : the conditions of the semantic legitimacy of syntactically de re forms2, the coherence of some presupposed notions, and the idea of a distinction between essential and accidental attributes. In this paper, we will try to exploit such formal work in order to further develop these philosophical concerns. In particular, we will investigate the philosophical underpinnings of essential& theories, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, of essential3 theses; for, of familiar examples of the latter, only those belonging to modal set theory display sufficient organization to be thought of as constituting a developed theory.3 An example of an essentialist thesis from modal set theory is the following:

An Investigation of a Gricean Account of Free-Choice or

The delicate point in the formalistic position is to explain how the non-intuitionistic classical mathematics is significant, after having initially agreed with the intuitionists that its theorems lack a real meaning in terms of which they are true (S. C. Kleene, 1952).

A Combinatorial Theory of Possibility.

The Eiffel Tower is a structure in wrought iron weighing 7,000 tonnes. It is composed of 18,000 precision-manufactured pieces fastened together by 2,500,000 rivets. Its foundations, opposite the Palais de Chaillot, were completed on June 3

The metaphysics of modality

In I, I summarize the semantics for the relational/notional distinction for intensional transitives developed in Forbes (2000b). In II-V I pursue issues about logical consequence which were either unsatisfactorily dealt with in that paper or, more often, not raised at all. I argue that weakening inferences, such as ‘Perseus seeks a mortal gorgon, therefore Perseus seeks a gorgon’, are valid, but that disjunction inferences, such as ‘Perseus seeks a mortal gorgon, therefore Perseus seeks a mortal gorgon or an immortal gorgon’, are invalid. Since ‘a gorgon’ and ‘a mortal gorgon or an immortal gorgon’ are extensionally and intensionally the same quantifier, it is not completely trivial to arrange the semantics of intensional transitives so that this classification of the inferences is obtained. (This paper is an abridged version of Forbes (2001a); the latter will be incorporated into a forthcoming monograph, Attitude Problems .)

Is There a Problem About Persistence

In Attitude Problems, I gave an account of opacity in the complement of intensional transitive verbs that combined neo-Davidsonian event-semantics with a hidden-indexical account of substitution failure. In this paper, I extend the account to clausal verbs.