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The Paradox of Conceptualizability

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Notes

  1. As Rebecca Bamford has pointed out to me, this passage does not quite align with Berkeley. For Berkeley, ultimately, all objects are actual objects of perception because God is all-perceiving. However, the historically misaligned version of Berkeley still serves nicely to illustrate the difference between actualist and possibilist brands of anti-realism.

  2. This specific incarnation of the idea has gained considerably currency in the semantic anti-realist tradition following Dummett. Crispin Wright proposes this as a way for semantic anti-realists to articulate the idea that a statement is decidable in principle (Wright 1982: 210). See also Tennant (1997), Chap. 5 for extensive discussion of decidability in principle.

  3. This proof follows the proof provided in Brogaard and Salerno (2019), but with the knowledge operator (K) replaced by the conceptualizationΦ operator (CΦ).

References

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Correspondence to Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen.

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Pedersen, N.J.L.L. The Paradox of Conceptualizability. Philosophia 49, 555–563 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00227-0

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