This is a (moderately long) book-length discussion of a problem that exercised the fathers of Analytic Philosophy, following a distinguished tradition in fact traceable to Plato’s later dialogues, the Parmenides and the Sophist. It is a problem that is not often discussed these days (but see King 2007, whose views are not explicitly discussed in this book – curiously, for a work otherwise as sc...

Other things being equal, a letter is identified more accurately and rapidly in the context of a word than in the context of a nonword. This word-superiori ty effect has been demonstrated many times wi th materials conforming to English orthography. The present experiment, using the probe letter-recogni tion procedure, demonstrates the same effect for the Serbo-Croatian orthography. In that the...

It has been argued that empirical science undermines the claim that people can deserve punishment, and that the criminal justice system therefore ought to be radically reformed. Such arguments lose their force if moral responsibility and desert do not depend on what caused the action, but on the agent’s choice. We solve one problem for the justification of the criminal justice system, but creat...

A theory of object identity, knowing whether or not two glimpses refer to the exact same object, is presented in two parts. Part I argues that apparent motion, prism adaptation, ventriloquism, priming, stereopsis, and Gestalt grouping all require the identity decision. It is argued that object identity is general and required when samples come from different times, places, modalities, and eyes....

In this paper, I describe how Donnellan's distinction between referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions should be represented in a computational model of reference. After briefly discussing the significance of Donnellan's distinction, I reinterpret it as being three-tiered, relating to object representation, referring intentions, and choice of rehrring expression. I then present...

Leibniz’s conception of bodies seems to be a puzzling theory. Bodies are seen as aggregates of monads and as wellfounded phenomena. This has initiated controversy and unending discussions. The paper attempts to resolve the apparent inconsistencies by a new and formally spirited reconstruction of Leibniz’s theory of monads and perception, on the one hand, and a (re-)formulation and precisation o...

Many philosophers use “physicalism” and “naturalism” interchangeably. In this paper, I will distinguish ontological naturalism from physicalism. While broad versions of physicalism are compatible with naturalism, naturalism doesn't have to be committed to strong versions of physical reductionism, so it cannot be defined as equivalent to it. Instead of relying on the notion of ideal physics, nat...

combinatorial relations between them simply come along for free. Which among all these abstract possibilities are concretely instantiated by physics, for example by genuine causal connections between objects? Russell readily admitted this criticism (Demopoulos & Friedman, 1989; Seager, 2006), but Newman is actually endorsing Russell’s real proposal for an enhanced physicalism, in which causal d...

We argue that the notion of distal similarity on which Edelman’s reconstruction of the process of perception and the nature of representation rests is ill defined. As a consequence, the mapping between world and description that is supposedly at stake is, in fact, a mapping between two different descriptions or “representations.” Edelman has shown experimentally that people can extract the unde...

Reference to properties is normally achieved by the use of nominalizations of predicative expressions. The article examines the relation between different kinds of such nominalizations: while traditionally, the terms ‘wisdom’ and ‘the property of being wise’ were thought to be coreferential, there are certain contexts in which they do not seem to be interchangeable salva veritate. Based on this...