Abstract
In The Construction of Logical Space, Agustín Rayo defends trivialism, according to which number-involving truths are trivially equivalent to other, non-number-involving truths; picturesquely, ‘I have five fingers on my hand’ and ‘the number of fingers on my hand is five’ express the same fact, but carved up in different ways. A single fact thus has multiple structures. I distinguish two ways this might go: on the deflationary picture, facts get their structures from our linguistic practices, while on an inflationary picture, facts have multiple structures independently of language. I argue that Rayo’s view is best interpreted as deflationary. Thus interpreted, it blocks off an attractive solution to the old problems of intensionality. I further argue a that a semi-deflationary variant of Rayo’s view can make use of the attractive solution—but it thereby sacrifices the supposed mathematical benefits of trivialism.
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References
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Turner, J. The construction of logical space and the structure of facts. Philos Stud 172, 2609–2616 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0427-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0427-4