19 Facts About Nathan Salmon

Nathan U Salmon is an American philosopher in the analytic tradition, specializing in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of logic.

Nathan Salmon is the grandson of archivist Emily Sene and oud player Isaac Sene.

Nathan Salmon attended Lincoln Elementary School in Torrance, California through eighth grade, where he was a classmate and friend of the child prodigy, James Newton Howard.

Nathan Salmon was assistant professor of philosophy at Princeton University from 1978 to 1982.

Nathan Salmon is currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he has taught since 1984.

Nathan Salmon has taught at Princeton University, UCLA, the University of California, Riverside, the University of Southern California, and was a regular visiting distinguished professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center from 2009 to 2012.

Nathan Salmon is a proponent of the theory of direct reference.

Nathan Salmon maintains that co-designative proper names are inter-substitutable with preservation of semantic content.

On Nathan Salmon's account Ortcutt is believed by Ralph to be a spy, since Ralph is appropriately cognitively disposed toward the proposition about Ortcutt that he is a spy when taking that proposition by means of one proposition-guise, even though Ralph is not so disposed relative to an alternative, equally relevant proposition-guise.

Nathan Salmon provided direct-reference accounts of problems of nonexistence and of names from fiction.

Nathan Salmon argues, directly contrary to Immanuel Kant, that existence is a property, one that particular individuals have and other individuals lack.

Nathan Salmon extends this view to what he calls mythical objects, like the hypothetical planet, Vulcan.

Nathan Salmon has applied his account of mythical objects to Peter Geach's famous problem of uncovering the logical form of the particular sentence, "Hob thinks a witch has blighted Bob's mare, and Nob wonders whether she killed Cob's sow".

Nathan Salmon's account shows how the problematic sentence can be true even though there are no witches, and even if Hob and Nob do not know about each other, and there is no one whom they think is a witch.

Nathan Salmon thinks, again contrary to Kant, that it is perfectly legitimate to invoke existence in a term's definition.

Nathan Salmon maintains a sharp division between semantics and pragmatics.

Nathan Salmon argues that in uttering a sentence, a speaker typically asserts a good deal more than the words' semantic content, and that, consequently, it is a mistake to identify the semantic content of a sentence with what is said by its speaker.

In particular, Nathan Salmon is known for his development and defense of a reductio ad absurdum argument, using a sorites-like problem, against nearly universally accepted modal logic systems S4 and S5, which he argues commit "the fallacy of necessity iteration," sanctioning the invalid inference from the observation that a proposition p is a necessary truth to the conclusion that it is a necessary truth that p is a necessary truth.

Nathan Salmon argues that if there were such a pair of things, x and y, then this pair would have to be different from the reflexive pair of x with itself, since there is a fact concerning whether x and x are the same.