Determinable

Tropy to jednostkowe własności, takie jak ciężar tej książki, jej kolor i kształt. Pojęcie to stało się w filozofii analitycznej podstawą najlepszej wersji nominalizmu. Próbuję pokazać, że jednostkowe własności można także przyjmować w różnych realistycznych koncepcjach uniwersaliów. Analizuję systemy św. Tomasza, Georga Wilhelma Friedricha Hegla i Romana Ingardena. Okazuje się, że wszyscy oni byli zwolennikami teorii tropów.

A fair amount of the philosophical discussion about pain and unpleasantness has focused on providing a constitutive account of unpleasantness. These theories provide a more fundamental description of what unpleasantness is by appealing to other well-established notions in the architecture of the mind. In contrast, I address the nature of unpleasantness from a structural account. I will argue for how unpleasantness is built, rather than what unpleasantness is made of, as it were. I focus on the heterogeneity of experience, which has been a somewhat neglected issue in the literature about unpleas-antness: after careful introspection, there seems to be nothing phenomenal that all and only unpleasant experiences share. In order to address the heterogeneity of unpleasant experiences, I propose that the structure of the rich phenomenology of unpleasantness should be understood as a determinable property constituted by multiple essential dimensions.

Ingvar Johansson has argued that there are not only determinate universals, but also determinable ones. I here argue that this view is misguided by reviving a line of argument to the following effect: what makes determinates falling under a same determinable similar cannot be distinct from what makes them different. If true, some similarities — imperfect similarities between simple determinate properties — are not grounded in any kind of property-sharing. I suggest that determinables are better understood as maximal disjunctions of brutely and imperfectly similar determinates. Such brute similarities have been thought to clash with realism about universals. I argue that this worry stems from the mistaken assumption that perfect and imperfect similarities are relations of a same kind. If exact and inexact resemblances are distinct and heterogeneous explananda, the realist about universals might explain the first thanks to property-sharing, while happily leaving imperfect similarities between properties unexplained.

If causalism is a complete theory of what it is to behave intentionally, it also has to account for intentional omissions. Carolina Sartorio (2009) has developed a powerful argument, the Causal Exclusion for Omissions, showing that intentional omissions cannot be explained by causalism. A crucial claim in the argument is that there is a causal competition between a mental omission and the mental action performed instead. In this paper I reject the argument by demonstrating that there is no causal competition ever between an omission and the action performed instead. I propose what I call the Realisationist Conception of Omissions, which consists in considering omissions as multiply realisable absences whose realisers are specific positive actions. I further argue in favour of the Determinationist Conception of Omissions, according to which the relation between omissions and their realisers is a determinable/determinate relation. Since there can be no causal preemption between a determinable and its determinates, there can be no causal preemption between omissions and the actions performed instead, and causalism is safe. I also show that this view of omissions has some other independent advantages – like for example that of solving the problem of the spatio-temporal localisation of omissions.

El lenguaje del sistema extiende el lenguaje de la lógica clásica al incluir un operador para la noción de afirmación alterna (en contraste con la afirmación clásica o afirmación usual), y también operadores de incompatibilidad y determinabilidad entre la pareja de operadores negación versus afirmación alterna. El sistema está caracterizado por una semántica de valuaciones, con la cual se muestra la no equivalencia entre los dos operadores afirmación. Como es de esperarse, el sistema colapsa en la lógica clásica si se pide esta equivalencia. Se generan dos sistemas intermedios cuando se pide por un lado que la afirmación alterna implique la clásica y por otro lado la implicación recíproca.

MSC: 03BXX, 03B45, 03B53