In his book Aboutness, Stephen Yablo gives a definition of 'being true about'. A sentence can be false, but sill be true about part of its subject matter, and Yablo tries to capture this using a possible worlds analysis.

I wrote a small post about why I think his construction fails: https://lilith.cc/~victor/dagboek/index.php/2026/05/11/yablo-on-being-true-about/

#philosophy #philosophyoflanguage

Yablo on being true about – Victor's website

Our editor Deirdre Anne Hendrick's M.A. thesis, "Citing Silences: Finding a History 'Outside' the Archive," is available open access on PhilArchive. It argues that silences produced by Euro-Western historiography in the service of white supremacy can be cited in ways that force the archive to acknowledge its own violence — developing the concept of the "hauntological irrealis" through Trouillot, Derrida, Butler, and Hartman.
https://philpapers.org/rec/HENCSF
#philosophy #PhilosophyOfHistory #archive #haunting #CriticalRaceTheory #OpenAccess #PhilosophyOfLanguage
Deirdre Anne Hendrick, Citing Silences: Finding a History ‘Outside’ the Archive - PhilPapers

This thesis examines how the authorizing norms of Euro-Western historiography—organized by white supremacy—produce and maintain silences, excluding entire communities from historical narrative. Trouillot identifies silences as structural to historical narrative, operating ...

Looking for examples for a paper. Can anyone think of words which:
1. were originally just words with a normal meaning (in English)
2. for a brief time had a slang usage meaning something else
3. are/were still used in the original usage, even though the slang usage has now died away?

#philosophyoflanguage #linguistics #slang

Hi,

I'm an associate professor at Department of Engineering, University of Fukui. I'm interested in theoretical computer science, software engineering, mathematical logic, also related philosophical topics. If you want to study in Fukui, please let me know.

My recent papers:

Mathematics:
Beckmann, A., & Yamagata, Y. (2025). On proving consistency of equational theories in bounded arithmetic. The Journal of Symbolic Logic

Theoretical Computer Science:
Ikeda, M., Yamagata, Y., & Kihara, T. (2024). On the Metric Temporal Logic for Continuous Stochastic Processes. Logical Methods in Computer Science,

Software Engineering:
Yamagata, Y., Liu, S., Akazaki, T., Duan, Y., & Hao, J. (2020). Falsification of cyber-physical systems using deep reinforcement learning. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

Philosophy:
Suzuki, U., & Yamagata, Y. (2023). Notion of validity for the bilateral classical logic. arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.13376.

#Logic #MathematicalLogic #BoundedArithmetic #SoftwareEngineering
#Philosophy
#PhilosophicalLogic
#PhilosophyOfLanguage

Accidental ontologist. 🧐 I am madly working on a couple of new ontology books. As a follow-up to A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, I noticed that the challenge is deeper than language; it's ontological. In my first book on the topic, I focus on the societal problems. In the next, I'll focus on a broader object reality.

👉 https://philosophics.blog/2026/01/30/ontological-blindness-in-modern-moral-science/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social

#writing #philosophy #psychology #hiatus #socialmedia #focus #ontology #society #humancondition #tribes #blog #philosophyoflanguage #podcast

Check out my new paper!

*On baptisms*

(In my field, a 'baptism' is just any giving a name to a thing -- this is not a theology paper!)

I develop the first full account of baptisms/dubbings in the tradition of Kripkean causal theories of reference. That is, I explain how it works when we give names to things.

https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2026.2618510

#philosophy #philosophyoflanguage

Quantum mechanics may not be strange at all. What fails is a childhood heuristic we quietly promoted to metaphysics.

👉 https://philosophics.blog/2026/01/25/the-expiration-date-of-object-permanence/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social

Schrödinger’s cat was a reductio. We turned it into an explanation.

This is not a new interpretation of quantum mechanics. The essay argues that much of 'quantum weirdness'' is heuristic overreach, not metaphysical scandal.

#PhilosophyOfLanguage #QuantumMechanics #Wittgenstein #Essay #Physics #PhilosophyOfScience #Philosophy #Blog #Podcast

A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis. 📖 https://a.co/d/3FhE49S
Almost 10 years in the works, I explain why more time and detail cannot improve some forms of communication due to diminishing marginal returns to effort. This book covers English, but I've already extended the hypothesis to French (elsewhere), and I am working on other ontological barriers.
#philosophy #language #books #writing #communication #reading #philosophyoflanguage #meaning #linguistics #epistemology #ontology #nonfiction