Wolfgang Schwarz

TPG Fix

Since it doesn't look I will be able to finish the new version of my Tree Proof Generator anytime soon, I've now added a rough fix for the problem with unrecognized old terms.

Break

Sorry for the recent lack of postings. I'm taking a break from typing to rest my wrists.

Backups

Not only my hands, but also my computers are now threatening to fall apart. While I unfortunately forgot to make backups of my hands, I've just copied all important data from my computers to the server. Most of it is not worth letting the googlebot know, a possible exception being two German scripts (1, 2) I wrote last year about recursiveness, representability, and Gödel's first incompleteness theorem, largely based on chapters 14 and 15 of Computability and Logic, 3rd ed. I've also uploaded some of the songs I made during the past 10 years to this directory, though as with all bad music, it's much more fun creating it than listening to it.

Fictionalism's Ontological Commitment

Fictionalism about a certain discourse is the view that statements belonging to this discourse are to be interpreted like statements in fictional discourse.

Now as Brian has observed, on the common account of fictional discourse, "Fictional(Fa)" implies "(Ex)Fictional(Fx)" (even though it normally doesn't imply "(Ex)Fx"). So one might think that on the common account, fictionalism can't do with fewer entities than realism, even though it can do with different entities. However, the common account is not committed to "Fictional(a != b)" implying "(Ex)(Ey)(x != y)". After all, it usually allows for "(Ex)(Fictional(Fx) and Fictional (not-Fx))", so why not allow for "(Ex)(Fictional(x != b) and Fictional(x = b))"? So maybe one could endorse fictionalism about mathematics and the common account of fictional discourse without being committed to an infinity of entities by claiming that all the "numbers" talked about in mathematics are in fact identical.

Realism, Reductionism, Determinatism

Allan Hazlett, in his Against Fictionalism, says that if numbers exist then "there is a fact of the matter about which sets numbers are", even if we can't find it out. I don't think realism and reductionsism about numbers implies this kind of determinatism. (Sorry, "determinism" was already taken.)

Vague Objects, Strange Properties

Assume some sentence "Fa" is neither determinately true nor determinately false. This might be due to the fact that

1) It is somewhat indeterminate exactly which object "a" denotes.

or

In Defense of the Impossibility Hypothesis

My wrists still don't feel quite fine, in particular after writing such a long piece as this one. So this will probably be the last entry for another couple of days.

I want to defend the Impossibility Hypothesis about Imaginative Resistance. The hypothesis is that when we find ourselves unwilling to accept that some statement explicitly made in a fiction is true in the fiction, this is (always) because what the statement says is in some sense conceptually impossible.

Visitors

I would like to know what is being discussed in some non-public forum on ubbforums.ubi.com, from where quite a lot of visitors have arrived within the past weeks. (From a brief glance at these forums, I don't even have a clue what they might be about.) So if you are one of these visitors, would you drop me a line and tell me?

Counterfactuals and Games of Make-Believe

In chapter 10 of The Varieties of Reference, Gareth Evans endorses a counterfactual analysis of truth in games of make-believe: When children play the mud pie game, an utterance of "Harry placed the pie in the oven" is true (in the game) iff (roughly) it would be true given that these globs of mud were pies and this metal object were an oven.

Semantic Properties and Bearerless Names

Linguistic expressions have all kinds of properties. In other words, they can be alike in all kinds of ways. For example, two sentences (of a particular language) can be alike in that