There is a well-known puzzle about properties, propositions and natural numbers, namely that talk about them can be introduced apparently without change of truth conditions. The paper makes a proposal about how that can be and what it shows about the relevant pairs of sentences. In particular the different uses that these sentences have in communication are discussed, as is the relationship between syntactic form and other aspects of a sentence.

We argue that noun phrases should not be seen as coming in only three kinds: referential, predicative and quantificational. We in particular discuss whether there is some kind of methodological privilege for assuming that there are only as few kinds of NPs as are proven to be necessary, and other issues about the methodology of semantics. We end with a list of examples that are prima facie candidates for being an encuneral NP.

This review mostly discusses Künne's positive proposal about truth, his Modest Account. In particular, I discuss propositional quantification, which is required for Künne's formulation of the Modest Account, and under what conditions this account is acceptable. I argue that it requires a view of propositions which he rejects, (but I accept).

Number words like "two" and "four" occur in natural language in at least two, apparently incompatible ways. Sometimes they appear to be singular terms, at other times they appear to be adjectives, or parts of quantifiers. How these two occurrences relate to each other is somewhat mysterious, as is how they relate to symbolic uses of numerals. In this paper we will first investigate and reject some proposals that have been made about their relationship, and then propose a new account of it. This new account will give us a unified view about the different uses of number words in natural language, and it is, in part, motivated by widely held views in natural language semantics and by a solution to certain cognitive problems that we face in learning basic arithmetic. According to this account all number words are determiners in all of these occurances. Finally, I outline a view in the philosophy of arithemtic which holds that arithmetic truth is literal and objective truth, but it does not depend on what or how many objects exists. This gives us a non-Fregean form of logicism.

The paper investigates what kind of metaphysical problem the problem of change might be, and what role it should play in the philosophy of time. I look at a number of candidates of what kind of metaphysical problem it might be. I conclude that there is no metaphysical problem about change, and that one should not motivate a metaphysics of time by arguing that it is the best solution to the problem of change. The paper also contains an outline of a new way to draw the endurance-perdurance distinction, which will be more fully developed in a joint paper with David Velleman.

This paper is a critical discussion of Schiffer's new book The Things we Mean, and part of a sympossium on this book. I in particular disucss the relation between Schiffer's new pleonastic theory and his older no-reference theory. I focus on his discussion of substitution failure of that-clauses (I fear that p vs. I fear the proposition that p), and on the question whether non-existent objects might be pleonastic entities, and whether pleonastic entities might be non-existent objects.

I argue that the semantic thesis of direct reference and the metaphysical thesis of the supervenience of the non-physical on the physical cannot both be true. The argument first develops a necessary condition for supervenience, a so-called conditional locality requirement, which is then shown to be incompatible with some physical object having object dependent properties, which in turn is required for the thesis of direct reference to be true. We apply this argument to formulate a new argument against the claim that a thisness is analyzable in purely general terms, one that does not rely on complete symmetry nor the falsity of the identity of indiscernibles. I outline a strategy at the end how the conclusion could be avoided, at a price.

I formulate an internalist conception of talk about properties and propositions, according to which such talk is literally true, but not about any entities. This is contrasted with an externalist conception, according to which such talk is about a language independent domain of entities. The internalist conception of quantification over properties and propositions takes quantification over them to be a generalization over the instances, and not as ranging over a language independent domain of entities. This internalist view seems to be easily refuted by taking recourse to inexpressible properties and propositions. In this paper I discuss what arguments we have for thinking that there are inexpressible properties and propositions, and I formulate a version of internalism that can accommodate them. This version of internalism suggest a view about how and why different languages differ in expressive power, which I call the expressibility hypothesis which is formulated and discussed. The resulting internalist view has the idealist sounding consequence that all the properties of all objects can be expressed by us in our present language, while at the same time having the realist consequence that what properties objects have is independent of us.
Warning: This paper is rather long.

A survey article about logic and ontology, and how they relate to each other. Discusses in particular differnt conceptions of logic and of ontology, and various ways of overlap.