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Predication and cartographic representation

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Abstract

I argue that maps do not feature predication, as analyzed by Frege and Tarski. I take as my foil (Casati and Varzi, Parts and places, 1999), which attributes predication to maps. I argue that the details of Casati and Varzi’s own semantics militate against this attribution. Casati and Varzi emphasize what I call the Absence Intuition: if a marker representing some property (such as mountainous terrain) appears on a map, then absence of that marker from a map coordinate signifies absence of the corresponding property from the corresponding location. Predication elicits nothing like the Absence Intuition. “F(a)” does not, in general, signify that objects other than a lack property F. On the basis of this asymmetry, I argue that attaching a marker to map coordinates is a different mode of semantic composition than attaching a predicate to a singular term.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, USA

    Michael Rescorla

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  1. Michael Rescorla
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Correspondence to Michael Rescorla.

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Rescorla, M. Predication and cartographic representation. Synthese 169, 175–200 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-008-9343-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-008-9343-5

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