and the philosophy of mathematics. He is the author of Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics (2016) as well as numerous articles.
Hofweber applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Idealism and the Harmony of Thought and Reality, and reported the following:
Page 99 contrasts the underspecification view of quantification with some alternatives and elaborates on certain aspects of this view. In particular, it distinguished the view that quantifiers are underspecified from the view that there are two different quantifiers, and it makes clear that the motivation for the underspecification view does not come from individual examples, but from the general role that quantification has in communication. The underspecification view essentially says that quantifiers can be read in more than one way: their semantics at the level of language leaves open how they are to be specified at the level of an utterance. They are polysemous, like many other expressions in English. For example, the verb “get” appears in slightly different readings in the sentence “Before I get home I need to get beer to get drunk.” Similarly, the quantifier “everything” can be read in different ways in the sentence “Everything exists”. On the one had, that sentence seems to be trivially true, since all things exist. But on the other hand it seems to be trivially false, since we know of counterexamples: Santa. Santa doesn’t exist, so how can you say that everything exists. The resolution of this tension is to hold that quantifiers have more than one reading: they can be read to make a claim about a language-independent domain of things, or they can be used to inferentially relate to instances in our own language. This view is motivated just before page 99, in a different way than how I illustrate it now, and then clarified on page 99.Visit Thomas Hofweber's website.
I am afraid that page 99 is not indicative of the book as a whole and looking only at it doesn’t give a good sense of what is going on in the book, nor does it make much sense out of context. Page 99 focuses on a particular aspect of an argument from the philosophy of language that is crucial for the defense of the overall position of the book. It deals with a more narrow technicality rather than some grander issues that are the focus of the book as a whole. The overall goal of the book is to defend the position that human beings have a special, distinguished place in reality as a whole. This place is supposed to be secured not via a connection to God, but via an argument that reality itself is not independent of our human minds. This is an idealist view, in the traditional philosophical sense, since it gives minds, and our minds in particular, a special metaphysical place in the world. The way this form of idealism is defended is via considerations about a harmony between our conceptual thought and reality. In essence, harmony obtains when every fact that obtains is representable in human conceptual thought or language. I argue that harmony must obtain via considerations about language: every fact must be representable, because of an issue connected to the quantifier “every fact”. That issue is tied to the underspecification view of quantification, which is clarified on page 99. Essentially the idea is that when we quantify over facts we use the quantifier in its inferential reading. It is the part of the book deepest into the weeds of the philosophy of language behind the defense of idealism and our special place in the world. After that part the book discusses other, grander, out of of the weeds, issues like ineffable facts and concepts we cannot rationally replace. Don’t judge the book by page 99! Better to start reading from the beginning to see if you like it enough to read on.
--Marshal Zeringue
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