Ofra Magidor

University of Oxford

Co-predication and Property Inheritance

(co-authored with David Liebesman)

30 June 2017, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: It is tempting to think that words like ‘book’ are ambiguous between a ‘physical book’ sense and an ‘informational book’ sense: on the physical sense, three copies of War and Peace count as three books, and on the informational sense, as only one book. However, this ambiguity hypothesis seems to face problems with cases of co-predication, namely sentences such as ‘Three red books are informative’. The problem arises from the claims that: (i) ‘red’ only applies to physical books; (ii) ‘informative’ only applies to informational books; and (iii) we have only one occurrence of the word ‘book’ in the sentence.

Co-predication has been taken in the literature to be a deep problem that forces us into radical conclusions, most notably, the abandonment of referential semantics altogether. In this paper we argue that no such radical conclusions are warranted. We offer a novel account of co-predication which denies both that ‘book’ is ambiguous, and that there are strong categorical restrictions preventing physical books from being informative, or informational books from being red. We show how our account can address a wide variety of cases of co-predication and deal with some objections.