Describing the world

Brian Weatherson now says that 'the world exists' is exactly as natural as 'there is a G', where G applies to worlds that are exactly like this one. I agree. But this only makes things worse, because the class G denotes seems very natural: It contains our world and all its exact intrinsic duplicates. Is this a gruesome gerrymander? We still need a further restriction on best theories apart from naturalness.

As Weatherson also notes, the problem seems to be that -- like most of our words -- G is introduced 'demonstratively'. That is, it denotes different properties in different contexts (aka epistemic possibilities). That sounds right. So the further restriction could be that a good theory should only use non-demonstrative terms and predicates (whose A-intension is the same as their C-intension). This would imply both of the restrictions I suggested yesterday.

By the way, if you need a good example for a scattered object with a nice name, the NASA has just discovered one: According to this press release, Amalthea, a moon of Jupiter, is just "a loosely packed pile of rubble".

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