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Paper   IPM / Philosophy / 16348
School of Analytic Philosophy
  Title:   Plenitudinous Russellianism, 'that'-Clauses and the Principle of Substitutivity
  Author(s):  Seyed Nasrollah Mousavian
  Status:   Published
  Journal: Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review
  Year:  2020
  Pages:   1-24
  Supported by:  IPM
  Abstract:
Recently, in a series of papers, Joshua Spencer has introduced, defended, and developed a modified version of Neo-Russellianism (NR), namely Plenitudinous Russellianism (PR), according to which there are structurally identical but numerically distinct singular Russellian propositions (SRPs). PR claims to provide novel semantic solutions to all the major problems that NR faces with no radical revision in NR. In this paper, I introduce a semantic puzzle for PR: the view leads to the violation of the principle of substitutivity of co-referential proper names within simple (predicative) 'that'-clauses (PS1). I consider different responses to my argument, and show that none of them is fully satisfactory for the Russellian. I conclude that PR needs to depart from NR more radically.

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