Higher-Order Metaphysics

Higher-order logic, with its quantifiers binding variables in sentence position and predicate position, provides an attractive way of formalizing talk of propositions, properties and relations in metaphysics. In such a formalization, these entities are naturally taken to be extra-linguistic just like the referents of singular terms. The topic of the workshop is the metaphysics of propositions, properties and relations, understood in such an extra-linguistic way, whether formulated in higher-order or first-order terms.

In particular, the workshop will focus on how finely these entities are individuated, asking for informative necessary and/or sufficient conditions for propositions, properties or relations to be identical. For example, do any two truth-functionally equivalent sentences express the same proposition? This issue might by summed up as the following question: how fine-grained is reality? Other key questions include:

• Should we formalize talk of propositions, properties and relations using first- or higher-order quantifiers?
• How should one respond to the paradoxes of propositions and properties due to Russell, Myhill and Prior, as well as Frege's paradox of the concept horse?
• How does the fineness of grain of propositions, properties and relations relate to other metaphysical vocabulary, such as "metaphysically necessary", "fundamental", "ground" and "real definition"?
• What can philosophers learn about the metaphysics of propositions, properties and relations from work in logic and computer science, e.g., on algebraic models for non-classical logics?
• What applications does the metaphysics of propositions, properties and relations have within metaphysics, in philosophy, and outside of philosophy, and how do these applications inform it?

In addition to talks by the two keynote speakers, the following contributed talks were selected from anonymized submissions to an open call for papers:

• Andrew Bacon & Jeffrey Sanford Russell (University of Southern California): The Logic of Opacity
• Stephan Leuenberger (University of Glasgow): The Consistency of Non-reductive Supervenience Theses
• Jon Erling Litland (University of Texas at Austin): Exact Necessitation
• Robert Schwartzkopff (University of Hamburg): The Misconception of Number(word)s as Object(word)s
• Alexander Skiles (Université de Neuchâtel): Grounding, Essence, and Identity (joint work with Fabrice Correia)
• Dustin Tucker (Colorado State University): Hyperintensionality and the Paradox of the Knower

The event is open to the public and free; please register by emailing [email protected] by 1 May 2016.

In connection with this workshop, a workshop on "Paradoxes of Cardinality and Fineness of Grain" will take place in Oslo on 7-8 June 2016:

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/arche/events/event?id=954