Andrew Cullison

SUNY-Fredonia’s own, Neil Feit, has a book coming out this summer. OUP has a description - plus some nice blurbs from Andy Egan and John Perry on their website. I’m pasting all of that below. Description Philosophers typically suppose that the contents of our beliefs and other cognitive attitudes are propositions-things that might be true [...]

Filed under: metaphysics, philosophy, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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Here’s one standard way to formulate the skeptical paradox. I know that I have hands. I don’t know I’m not a brain-in-a-vat. If I don’t know that I’m not a brain-in-a-vat, then I don’t know that I have hands. These three sentences cannot all be true, and yet each one seems plausible. Here are the [...]

Filed under: epistemology, philosophy, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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In a previous post I presented an argument from Jubien aimed at direct reference theory that relied on mereological essentialism. Here is the post. Below is the argument again so you don’t have to click away. Michael Jubien’s Argument Against Direct Reference If Direct Reference theory is true, then ‘Venus’ in ‘Venus could have had [...]

Filed under: metaphysics, philosophy, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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This seems like a very quick and hasty objection to direct reference theory from Michael Jubien, but it’s interesting. Direct Reference Theory recall is the thesis that the meaning of a name is the thing to which it refers (and nothing more). From the present perspective [direct reference] cannot be right. It is an indisputable [...]

Filed under: metaphysics, philosophy, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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You’ve gotta love it when a car commercial picks up on the semantic/pragmatic confusion that sometimes goes with the logical connective ‘and’…

Filed under: fun, philosophy, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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I’ve been writing about Weak Substantivalism. Here are the two previous posts. 1. Two Kinds of Substantivalism2. They Are There: Some Consequences for Weak Substantivalism In the second post, I promised to post about some more counter-intuitive consequences of weak substantivalism. Here they are. More Counter-Intuitive Consequences for Weak SubstantivalismSuppose we have an Andy-shaped bag [...]

Filed under: metaphysics, philosophy, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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A few days ago I laid out three views about the nature of space-time. Here’s a quick summary of those views. For those of you who read the last post, you can probably skip down to the section titled “They are There” Relationalism - Space is not real. Talk about space is reducible to talk [...]

Filed under: metaphysics, philosophy, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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This is pretty half-baked, but consider the following proposition: (1) January 9, 2008 is present. I think it is a vague matter whether or not this is true. Imagine the minutes are slowly ticking away on January 8. It’s 11:59. As the time passes, January 9 will be determinately present, but exactly when that happens [...]

Filed under: metaphysics, philosophy, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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So, it’s time for the puzzle. First, a quick recap. 1. Ways-Millianism (Part One) I explained how Millianism responds to Frege Puzzles using ways of believing. 2. Ways-Millianism (Part Two) I explained how this strategy can be extended (and has already been extended) to respond to a variety of philosophical problems and puzzles. Now for [...]

Filed under: philosophy, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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In Ways-Millianism: A Puzzle (Part One), I explained how ways of believing can be employed to respond to Frege Puzzles. In this post, I’ll explain how this strategy gives us a nice tool for our philosopher’s toolkit. However, adding that tool introduces what appears to me to be a serious puzzle. I’ll discuss that puzzle [...]

Filed under: philosophy, philosophy of language by Andrew Cullison
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