Nonexistence, Vague Existence, Merely Possible Existence

Vague Existence Implies Vague Identity

Vague Composition Without Vague Existence

David Lewis (1986) criticizes moderate views of composition on the grounds that a restriction on composition must be vague, and vague composition leads, via a precisificational theory of vagueness, to an absurd vagueness of existence. I show how to resist this argument. Unlike the usual resistance, however, I do not jettison precisificational views of vagueness. Instead, I blur the connection b...

Existence and Nonexistence of Solutionsfor

Harmonic Homeomorphisms: Existence and Nonexistence

These notes were prepared for International Workshop on Harmonic and Quasiconformal Mappings in Chennai, August 2010. They are based on several papers written jointly with Tadeusz Iwaniec, Jani Onninen, and Ngin-Tee Koh. The source papers are available from www.arxiv.org

Existence and Nonexistence of Descriptive Patterns

In the present paper, we study the existence of descriptive patterns, i. e. patterns that cover all words in a given set through morphisms and that are optimal in terms of revealing commonalities of these words. Our main result shows that if patterns may be mapped onto words by arbitrary morphisms, then there exist infinite sets of words that do not have a descriptive pattern. This answers a qu...