Abstract
A state of affairs is the intension of a statement.[*1] This is an explicative definition or explication; thus it is neither an analysis of established meaning, nor a purely conventional nominal definition. It is a weighty objection against this definition that it is too narrow; for one would certainly like to call some entities “states of affairs” which are not the intensions of statements (not the intensions of meaningful declarative sentences), although they could be. Moreover, it may be that the definition is also too wide. Do statements that are neither true nor false (let us not commit from the start to the thesis that there are no such statements) intend states of affairs (express states of affairs as their intensions), assuming that they do intend something?
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© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Meixner, U. (1997). The Concept of State of Affairs. In: Axiomatic Formal Ontology. Synthese Library, vol 264. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8867-6_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8867-6_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-4898-1
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