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1. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 113 > Issue: 3
Shieva Kleinschmidt

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All of the current leading theories of location are parsimonious: they have at most one locative primitive, and the definitions of all of the other locative relations appeal to nothing beyond that primitive, mereological properties and relations, and basic logic. I argue that if we believe there can be extended, mereologically simple regions, we can construct cases that are incompatible with every possible parsimonious theory of location. In these cases, an object is contained within a simple region that is larger than the object; that is, there is some region, r, and some object, x, are such that every subregion of r fails to be completely free of x, yet x fails to fill r. I argue that we ought to respond to this incompatibility by rejecting the analytic possibility of extended, simple regions.

2. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 113 > Issue: 3
Bryan Pickel, Brian Rabern

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Kit Fine has reawakened a puzzle about variables with a long history in analytic philosophy, labeling it “the antinomy of the variable”. Fine suggests that the antinomy demands a reconceptualization of the role of variables in mathematics, natural language semantics, and first-order logic. The difficulty arises because: (i) the variables ‘x’ and ‘y’ cannot be synonymous, since they make different contributions when they jointly occur within a sentence, but (ii) there is a strong temptation to say that distinct variables ‘x’ and ‘y’ are synonymous, since sentences differing by the total, proper substitution of ‘x’ for ‘y’ always agree in meaning. We offer a precise interpretation of the challenge posed by (i) and (ii). We then develop some neglected passages of Tarski to show that his semantics for variables has the resources to resolve the antinomy without abandoning standard compositional semantics.

3. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 113 > Issue: 3

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4. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 113 > Issue: 3

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