Dr James Miller james.miller@durham.ac.uk
Associate Professor
It has been a common assumption that words are substances that instantiate or have properties. In this paper, I question the assumption that our ontology of words requires posting substances by outlining a bundle theory of words, wherein words are bundles of various sorts of properties (such as semantic, phonetic, orthographic, and grammatical properties). I argue that this view can better account for certain phenomena than substance theories, is ontologically more parsimonious, and coheres with claims in linguistics.
Miller, J. T. M. (2021). A bundle theory of words. Synthese, 198, 5731-5748. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02430-3
| Journal Article Type | Article |
|---|---|
| Acceptance Date | Oct 4, 2019 |
| Online Publication Date | Oct 17, 2019 |
| Publication Date | 2021 |
| Deposit Date | Jul 29, 2020 |
| Publicly Available Date | Jul 29, 2020 |
| Journal | Synthese |
| Print ISSN | 0039-7857 |
| Electronic ISSN | 1573-0964 |
| Publisher | Springer |
| Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
| Volume | 198 |
| Pages | 5731-5748 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02430-3 |
| Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1259593 |
Published Journal Article (Advance online version)
(327 Kb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Copyright Statement
Advance online version This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
How to Misspell 'Paris'
(2024)
Journal Article
Metaphysical Realism and Anti-realism
(2022)
Book
The Language of Ontology
(2021)
Book
The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics
(2020)
Book
Sameness of Word
(2022)
Journal Article
About Durham Research Online (DRO)
Administrator e-mail: dro.admin@durham.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2025
Advanced Search