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What’s wrong with begging the question? Some philosophers believe that question-begging arguments are inevitably fallacious and that their fallaciousness stems from a shared “formal” deficiency. In contrast, some philosophers, like Robinson deny that begging the question is fallacious at all. And others characterize begging the question as an “informal” fallacy of reasoning that can only be understood with the aid of epistemic notions. Sorensen joins this last camp by offering a powerful argument against both Robinson’s skepticism and fully formal approaches (...) |
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Chisholm's Paradox and the Four Worlds Paradox are paradoxes about the cross-world identity of artifacts that are made of parts. The paradoxes are described as derivable in S5 modal logic from principles concerning the essentiality of the original matter of an artifact and the Tolerance Principle concerning possible changes in the original matter. On one hand, the original matter is essential to the artifact; on the other hand, bare identity or distinctness with respect to the original matter can be inferred (...) |
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The distinction between essential versus accidental properties has been characterized in various ways, but it is currently most commonly understood in modal terms: an essential property of an object is a property that it must have, while an accidental property of an object is one that it happens to have but that it could lack. Let’s call this the basic modal characterization, where a modal characterization of a notion is one that explains the notion in terms of necessity/possibility. In the (...) |
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Rosanna Keefe (`Vagueness by Numbers' MIND 107 1998 565--79) argues that theories of vagueness based upon fuzzy logic and set theory rest on a confusion: once we have assigned a number to an object to represent (for example) its *height*, there is no distinct purpose left to be served by assigning a number to the object to represent its *degree of tallness*; she claims that ``any numbers assigned in an attempt to capture the vagueness of `tall' do no more than (...) |
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Some philosophers believe that everyday objects are 4-dimensional spacetime worms, that a person (for example) persists through time by having temporal parts, or stages, at each moment of her existence. None of these stages is identical to the person herself; rather, she is the aggregate of all her temporal parts.1 Others accept “three dimensionalism”, rejecting stages in favor of the notion that persons “endure”, or are “wholly present” throughout their lives.2 I aim to defend an apparently radical third view: not (...) |
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The dogma that the propositional logic of metaphysical modality is S5 is rebutted. The author exposes fallacies in standard arguments supporting S5, arguing that propositional metaphysical modal logic is weaker even than both S4 and B, and is instead the minimal and weak metaphysical-modal logic T. |
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The dogma that the propositional logic of metaphysical modality is S5 is rebutted in related installments (previously published and unpublished essays). |
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Is there an interesting relation between the Preface paradox and the Sorites paradox that might be used to illuminate either or both of those paradoxes and the phenomena of rationality and vagueness with which they, respectively, are bound up? In particular, if we consider the analogy alongside a familiar response to the Preface Paradox that employs degrees of belief, does this give any support to the thought that we should adopt some kind of degree-theoretic treatment of vagueness and the sorites? (...) |
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Lewis’s [1968] counterpart theory (LCT for short), motivated by his modal realism, made its appearance within a year of Chisholm’s modal paradox [1967]. We are not modal realists, but we argue that a satisfactory resolution to the paradox calls for a counterpart-theoretic (CT-)semantics. We make our case by showing that the Chandler–Salmon strategy of denying the S4 axiom [◊◊ψ →◊ψ] is inadequate to resolve the paradox – we take on Salmon’s attempts to defend that strategy against objects from Lewis and (...) |
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In this paper I argue that Gareth Evans’ famous proof of the impossibility of de re indeterminate identity fails on a counterpart-theoretic interpretation of the determinacy operators. I attempt to motivate a counterpart-theoretic reading of the determinacy operators and then show that, understood counterpart-theoretically, Evans’ argument is straightforwardly invalid. |
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In the literature on vagueness one finds two very different kinds of degree theory. The dominant kind of account of gradable adjectives in formal semantics and linguistics is built on an underlying framework involving bivalence and classical logic: its degrees are not degrees of truth. On the other hand, fuzzy logic based theories of vagueness—largely absent from the formal semantics literature but playing a significant role in both the philosophical literature on vagueness and in the contemporary logic literature—are logically nonclassical (...) |
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