Tropes, Bare Demonstratives, and Apparent Statements of Identity

Friederike Moltmann (1)

1 IHPST - Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques

Philosophers who accept tropes generally agree that tropes do play a role in the semantics of natural language, namely as the objects of reference of nominalizations of adjectives, such as Socrates' wisdom or the beauty of the landscape. In fact, a philosophical discussion of the ontology of tropes can hardly do without the use of such nominalizations. In this paper, I will argue that tropes play a further important role in the semantics of natural language, namely in the semantics of bare demonstratives like this and that. Like terms such as Socrates' wisdom or the beauty of the landscape, this and that can act as ordinary referential terms referring to tropes.

Keywords: philosophy of science

Domains: History, Philosophy and Sociology of Sciences

Friederike Moltmann. Tropes, Bare Demonstratives, and Apparent Statements of Identity. Noûs, 2012, ⟨10.1111/j.1468-0068.2011.00844.x⟩. ⟨halshs-00775619⟩