Alien Structure

Matti Eklund explores the idea that language might have a completely different structure to the languages we know, and that reality might be such that some alien language, using different kinds of semantic tools represents reality better than our languages do: reality might have alien structure.

Matti Eklund is Chair Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at Uppsala University. He received his PhD from MIT in 2000. Prior to coming to Uppsala, he held positions at for example University of Colorado at Boulder and Cornell University. Much of his work to date has been on metaphysics, philosophy of language and philosophy of logic. His book Choosing Normative Concepts (OUP, 2017) deals mainly with metaethics.

- 1: Introducing alien structure - 2: Motivation - 3: Ontological categories - 4: In defense of alien structure - 5: The somewhat alien - 6: Alien metaphysics - 7: Radical metaphysics - 8: Alien structure and natural languages - 9: Alien structure, language and maps - 10: Sentences and truth - 11: And beyond