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The Syntactic Priority Thesis and Ontological Disputes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

George Duke
George Duke*
Affiliation:
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University, Melbourne Campus at Burwood, Australia
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Extract

The syntactic priority thesis (henceforth SP) asserts that the truth of appropriate sentential contexts containing what are, by syntactic criteria, singular terms, is sufficient to justify the attribution of objectual reference to such terms (Wright, 1983, 24). One consequence that the neo-Fregean draws from SP is that it is through an analysis of the syntactic structure of true statements that ‘ontological questions are to be understood and settled’ (Wright, 1983, 25). Despite the significant literature on SP, little consideration has been given to this bold metaontological claim.1 My concern here is accordingly not with specific applications of SP to debates in the philosophy of mathematics, but rather with the neo-Fregean's claim that SP can constitute a decisionprocedure in relation to substantive ontological disputes. I argue that the explanatory power of SP is limited to an account of what ‘there are’ sentences are true and does not extend as far as substantive ontology.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 42 , Issue 2 , June 2012 , pp. 149 - 164
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2012

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