There are many different ways to talk about the world. Some ways of talking are more expressive than others—that is, they enable us to say more things about the world. But what exactly does this mean? When is one language able to express more about the world than another? In my dissertation, I systematically investigate different ways of answering this question and develop a formal theory of expressive power, translation, and notational variance. In doing so, I show how these investigations (...) help to clarify the role that expressive power plays within debates in metaphysics, logic, and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

This essay clarifies quantifier variance and uses it to provide a theory of indefinite extensibility that I call the variance theory of indefinite extensibility. The indefinite extensibility response to the set-theoretic paradoxes sees each argument for paradox as a demonstration that we have come to a different and more expansive understanding of ‘all sets’. But indefinite extensibility is philosophically puzzling: extant accounts are either metasemantically suspect in requiring mysterious mechanisms of domain expansion, or metaphysically suspect in requiring nonstandard assumptions about (...) mathematical objects. Happily, the view of quantifier meanings that underwrites quantifier variance can be used to provide an account of indefinite extensibility that is both metasemantically and metaphysically satisfying. Section 1 introduces the puzzle of indefinite extensibility; section 2 develops and clarifies the metasemantics of quantifier variance; section 3 solves section 1's puzzle of indefinite extensibility by applying section 2's account of quantifier meanings; and section 4 compares the theory developed in section 3 to several other theories in the literature. (shrink)

The Continuum Problem has inspired set theorists and philosophers since the days of Cantorian set theory. In the last 15 years, W. Hugh Woodin, a leading set theorist, has not only taken it upon himself to engage in this question, he has also changed his mind about the answer. This paper illustrates Woodin’s solutions to the problem, starting in Sect. 3 with his 1999–2004 argument that Cantor’s hypothesis about the continuum was incorrect. From 2010 onwards, Woodin presents a very different (...) argument, an argument that Cantor’s hypothesis is in fact true. This argument is still incomplete, but according to Woodin, some of the philosophical issues surrounding the Continuum Problem have been reduced to precise mathematical questions, questions that are, unlike Cantor’s hypothesis, solvable from our current theory of sets. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have attempted to solve the problem of null-probability possible events in Bayesian epistemology by proposing that there are infinitesimal probabilities. Hájek and Easwaran have argued that because there is no way to specify a particular hyperreal extension of the real numbers, solutions to the regularity problem involving infinitesimals, or at least hyperreal infinitesimals, involve an unsatisfactory ineffability or arbitrariness. The arguments depend on the alleged impossibility of picking out a particular hyperreal extension of the real numbers (...) and/or of a particular value within such an extension due to the use of the Axiom of Choice. However, it is false that the Axiom of Choice precludes a specification of a hyperreal extension—such an extension can indeed be specified. Moreover, for all we know, it is possible to explicitly specify particular infinitesimals within such an extension. Nonetheless, I prove that because any regular probability measure that has infinitesimal values can be replaced by one that has all the same intuitive features but other infinitesimal values, the heart of the arbitrariness objection remains. (shrink)

Decision theory faces a number of problematic gambles which challenge it to say what value an ideal rational agent should assign to the gamble, and why. Yet little attention has been devoted to the question of what an ideal rational agent is, and in what sense decision theory may be said to apply to one. I show that, given one arguably natural set of constraints on the preferences of an idealized rational agent, such an agent is forced to be indifferent (...) among entire families of goods, and hence cannot choose among them. This result illustrates the dangers of speaking of the choices of an ?ideal rational agent? when one does not make precise the exact nature of the idealizing assumptions. The result may also be viewed as providing an upper bound on the kinds of idealizing assumptions which can be made for rational agents, beyond which the very concept of choice becomes attenuated. (shrink)