It is proposed that any dynamical system with coexisting chaotic attractors has an emergent property. This provides a nonreductive explanation of mental states and their high sensitivity to noise and initial conditions. If metaphysical terms result from the mental states and these are emergent properties of dynamical systems with coexisting attractors, such as the brain, it is suggested that th...

This book is a collection of new essays around the broad central theme of the nature of logic, or the question: ‘what is logic?’ It is a book about logic and philosophy equally. What makes it unusual as a book about logic is that its central focus is on metaphysical rather than epistemological or methodological concerns. By comparison, the question of the metaphysical status of mathematics and ...

Entities A particular source of opposition to Carnap's semantic methods arises from the use of abstract entities such as classes, properties, and numbers, many philosphers feeling that such use depends upon demonstration that these abstract entities "do actually exist". Carnap regarded such questions as metaphysical and hence senseless, but they were raised by anti-metaphysical empiricists. Car...

Thomas Long has argued that there is an irreconcilable metaphysical difference between the views of those who, like ourselves, believe that on quality-of-life grounds it is sometimes justifiable to end the life of a severely handicapped infant, and those who, like Paul Ramsey, reject this view. Because of this metaphysical difference, Long considers it impossible for our arguments to refute Ram...

Salvaging analyticity, I argued, depends crucially on distinguishing between a metaphysical and an epistemic version of that concept. According to the metaphysical notion, a sentence is analytic if it owes its truth entirely to its meaning and without any contribution from the ‘facts.’ By contrast, I took a sentence to be epistemically analytic if grasp of its meaning can suffice for justified ...