This paper discusses “inclusionism ” in the context of David Lewis’s modal realism (and in the context of parasitic accounts of modality such as John Divers’s agnosticism about possible worlds). This is the doctrine that everything is a world. I argue that this doctrine would be beneficial to Divers-style agnosticism; that it suggests a reconfiguration of the concept of actuality in modal realism; and finally that it suffers from an as-yet unsolved difficulty, the problem of the unmarried husbands. This problem also shows that Stephen Yablo’s analysis of “intrinsic ” is inadequate. 1 Isolationism and inclusionism In his paper “Intrinsicness”, Stephen Yablo describes a revised version of David Lewis’s modal realism, incorporating the doctrine he calls inclusionism: that “Some worlds contain others as proper parts ” (Yablo 1999, p. 483). Which worlds might those be? Yablo’s inclusionist says that every world that properly contains anything has a world as a proper part; that is, every part of a world is a world, every mereological fusion of worlds is a world, you are a world, I am a world, for all intents and purposes, everything is a world. 1 This view has several benefits. 1) Yablo is particularly interested in its surprising benefit of providing an analysis of “intrinsic”. According to Yablo, G is extrinsic iff “whether a thing is or

Abstract. Among Quine’s main concerns in his “On What There Is”, there was that of solving a problem of expressibility for ontological denials. His proposed solution to such a problem was, in a purely Carnapian vein, a shift of attention to the semantic features of ontological claims – what Quine called the strategy of “semantic ascent”. Quine’s relevant assumption is that talk about language is much less controversial than first-order talk of worldly items. My contention is that the semantic ascent strategy fails as a somehow “neutral ” means to clarify ontological disputes and that it is better understood as a means to resolve or even dissolve such disputes. 1

Aristotelian, or non-Platonist, realism holds that mathematics is a science of the real world, just as much as biology or sociology are. Where biology studies living things and sociology studies human social relations, mathematics studies the quantitative or structural aspects of things, such as ratios, or patterns, or complexity,

The philosophy of probability has been alive and well for several decades in Australia and New Zealand. Some distinctive lines of thought have emerged, resonating with broader themes that have come to be associated with Australasian philosophers: realist/objectivist accounts of various theoretical entities; an ongoing concern with logic, including the development of non-classical logics; and conceptual analysis, rooted in commonsense but informed by science. In this article I concentrate on work by philosophers on the interpretation of probability, its logical foundations, and its philosophical applications (thus, for example, I will not discuss the pioneering research of R.A. Fisher in statistics at the University of Adelaide). My nomination for the earliest major Australasian philosopher of probability may surprise some readers: Karl Popper. He counts as Australasian by dint of his employment at the University of Canterbury from 1937 until the end of World War II; he counts as a major philosopher of probability by any estimation. Two of his contributions have initiated research programs in the foundations of probability that are still thriving: his (1959a) axiomatization of primitive conditional probability

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I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. Bertrand Russell, Autobiography, vol. 1, Prologue. The Quine/Putnam indispensability argument is regarded by many as the chief argument for the existence of platonic objects. We argue that this argument cannot establish what its proponents intend. The form of our argument is simple. Suppose indispensability to science is the only good reason for believing in the existence of platonic objects. Either the dispensability of mathematical objects to science can be demonstrated and, hence, there is no good reason for believing in the existence of platonic objects, or their dispensability cannot be demonstrated and, hence, there is no good reason for believing in the existence of mathematical objects which are genuinely platonic. Therefore, indispensability, whether true or false, does not support platonism. Mathematical platonists claim that at least some of the objects

This paper forms part of a wider campaign: to deny pointillisme. That is the doctrine that a physical theory’s fundamental quantities are defined at points of space or of spacetime, and represent intrinsic properties of such points or point-sized objects located there; so that properties of spatial or spatiotemporal regions and their material contents are determined by the point-by-point facts. More specifically, this paper argues against pointillisme about the concept of velocity in classical mechanics; especially against proposals by Tooley, Robinson and Lewis. A companion paper argues against pointillisme about (chrono)geometry, as proposed by Bricker. To avoid technicalities, I conduct the argument almost entirely in the context of “Newtonian ” ideas about space and time, and the classical mechanics of pointparticles, i.e. extensionless particles moving in a void. But both the debate and my arguments carry over to relativistic physics. 1