Leo, (01)
I'd like to clarify my points in favor of reducing the amount
of metalanguage terminology. (02)
I am strongly in favor of theoretical research in all the branches
of cognitive science and in the interdisciplinary studies that
relate them. That includes philosophy, psychology, linguistics,
neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and many subfields and
branches, such as anthropology, sociolinguistics, etc. (03)
All those fields have much to contribute, but they all have
different traditions with different definitions for many of
the same terms. (04)
> Many ontologists will not ground their ontologies (or ontological
> analysis) on set theory, though they will use logic, which has
> a foundation in set theory. (05)
Actually, you don't even need set theory. You can represent
a Tarski-style model with a very minimal theory of collections
that does not require a collection to have other collections
as members. That won't let you build up a Cantor hierarchy
of infinities, but you don't need them. (06)
> with necessary properties/attributes (identity or essence properties) (07)
That's more metalanguage. If you have simple FOL as your logic,
all you need are relations with various numbers of arguments.
You don't need the words 'property' or 'attribute', since you
can represent them with relations. You don't need the word
'identity', since you can use the symbol '='. (08)
And whenever you use words like 'necessary' or 'essence', you add
issues about modality. That raises the question about where the
modal effect comes from. Kripke fans talk about possible worlds,
but that gets into more dubious ontology about unobservable worlds. (09)
That's why I recommend Dunn's semantics of laws and facts, which is
equivalent to Kripke's (in the sense that every theorem in K's
version has a theorem with an isomorphic proof stated in D's version).
You can even drop the metalevel terms 'law' and 'fact', since they're
just sets (or collections) of statements in some version of FOL. (010)
The exercise of getting rid of terminology clarifies many issues
and causes other issues to vanish. After you get rid of the terms,
you can -- if you wish -- bring back some useful subset, but with
simple definitions stated in terms of your preferred version of logic. (011)
> T. Sider. Four-Dimensionalism. An Ontology of Persistence and Time.
> Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2001. (012)
The book costs $34.71. But you can download a 34-page PDF by the same
author with the same title for free: (013)
http://tedsider.org/papers/4d.pdf (014)
You can also download other papers from the same directory. (015)
John (016)
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