THE LIMITS OF STIPULATION: RECONSIDERING THE STANDARD METER Eduardo Villanueva Critica Revista Hispanoamericana De Filosofia, 2025 This paper criticizes Ruffino’s illocutionary defense of Kripke’s famous example of the contingent a priori: the standard meter. Ruffino uses Searle and Vanderveken’s speech act theory to argue that measurement stipulations generate a priori knowledge of contingent facts. Against this, I argue that the institutional conditions underlying these stipulations cannot be separated from the grounds of justification. Unlike mathematical or logical knowledge, knowledge that these institutional conditions are satisfied is essential to knowledge of measurement stipulations, preventing genuine a priori status.
Hale's Deflationary Conception of Properties and Frege's Theorem Eduardo Villanueva Analysis United Kingdom, 2020 Being Necessary: Themes of Ontology and Modality from the Work of Bob Hale is a collection of 12 essays on a wide range of topics in metaphysics, philosophical logic and philosophy of mathematics that occupied the mind of the late Bob Hale, written by some of the leading figures in those fields. The book has much to recommend it.1 However, being such a diverse collection of papers and having such a limited space myself, I am forced to be selective in this short piece. Thus, my discussion will be focused on the main objections against Hale’s Deflationary Conception of Properties offered by Steward Shapiro, Roy T. Cook and Richard Kimberly Heck in their contributions to this volume. My discussion will proceed as follows. In §2, I present the view these authors criticize: Hale’s conception of properties. In §§3 and 4, I discuss briefly the main philosophical motivations behind Hale’s view and its relation to the neo-Fregean logicist programme. In §5, I review Shapiro’s and Cook’s arguments for the claim that Hale’s conception of properties does not fare well with the full Axiom of Choice. Finally, §6 is devoted to Heck’s argument that Hale’s view cannot accommodate a fundamental piece of the neo-Fregean programme: the impredicative version of the Comprehension Axiom Scheme.
