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Ideas of Ruth Barcan Marcus, by Text

[American, 1921 - 2012, Professor at Yale University. Famous for the 'Barcan Formula'.]

1971 Essential Attribution
p.188 p.188 11180 Essentialist sentences are not theorems of modal logic, and can even be false
p.189 p.189 11181 Aristotelian essentialism involves a 'natural' or 'causal' interpretation of modal operators
p.192 p.192 11182 If essences are objects with only essential properties, they are elusive in possible worlds
p.192 p.192 11183 The use of possible worlds is to sort properties (not to individuate objects)
p.193 p.193 11185 'Is essentially' has a different meaning from 'is necessarily', as they often cannot be substituted
p.193 p.193 11186 'Essentially' won't replace 'necessarily' for vacuous properties like snub-nosed or self-identical
p.193 p.193 11184 Aristotelian essentialism is about shared properties, individuating essentialism about distinctive properties
p.194 p.194 11187 In possible worlds, names are just neutral unvarying pegs for truths and predicates
p.202 p.202 11189 Dispositional essences are special, as if an object loses them they cease to exist
1978 Nominalism and Substitutional Quantifiers
p.161 p.161 10785 Maybe a substitutional semantics for quantification lends itself to nominalism
p.162 p.162 10786 Anything which refers tends to be called a 'name', even if it isn't a noun
p.162 p.162 10788 Nominalists see proper names as a main vehicle of reference
p.162 p.162 10787 Is being just referent of the verb 'to be'?
p.163 p.163 10789 Nominalists say predication is relations between individuals, or deny that it refers
p.164 p.164 10790 Quantifiers are needed to refer to infinitely many objects
p.165 p.165 10791 Substitutional semantics has no domain of objects, but place-markers for substitutions
p.166 p.166 10794 The nominalist is tied by standard semantics to first-order, denying higher-order abstracta
p.166 p.166 10795 Substitutional language has no ontology, and is just a way of speaking
p.166 p.166 10796 If objects are thoughts, aren't we back to psychologism?
p.167 p.167 10797 Substitutivity won't fix identity, because expressions may be substitutable, but not refer at all
p.167 p.167 10798 A true universal sentence might be substitutionally refuted, by an unnamed denumerable object
p.167 p.167 10799 Nominalists should quantify existentially at first-order, and substitutionally when higher