According to orthodox semantics, a given sentence as used at a given situation expresses at most one content. In the last decade, this view has been challenged with several objections. Many of them have been addressed in the literature. But one has gone almost unheeded. It stems from sentences that are used to address several people individually, like ‘Jesus loves you!’ as uttered by a priest at a sermon. Cappelen :23–46, 2008), Egan :251–279, 2009), López de Sa :241–253, 2014), and (...) MacFarlane claim that, to account for such cases, one has to adopt a pluralist semantics, according to which the sentences in question express more than one content. In this paper, I shall counter this objection. Exploiting different so far underappreciated features of singular and plural ‘you,’ I argue, orthodox semantics can very well account for the cases in question. (shrink)

Externalism is the thesis that the contents of intentional states and speech acts are not determined by the way the subjects of those states or acts are internally. It is a widely accepted but not entirely uncontroversial thesis. Among such theses in philosophy, externalism is notable for owing the assent it commands almost entirely to thought experiments, especially to variants of Hilary Putnam's famous Twin Earth scenario. This paper presents a thought experiment-free argument for externalism. It shows that externalism is (...) a deductive consequence of a pair of widely accepted principles whose relevance to the issue has hitherto gone unnoticed. (shrink)

Some have argued for a division of epistemic labor in which mathematicians supply truths and philosophers supply their necessity. We argue that this is wrong: mathematics is committed to its own necessity. Counterfactuals play a starring role.

Some have argued for a division of epistemic labor in which mathematicians supply truths and philosophers supply their necessity. We argue that this is wrong: mathematics is committed to its own necessity. Counterfactuals play a starring role.

The concept of being in a position to know is an increasingly popular member of the epistemologist’s toolkit. Some have used it as a basis for an account of propositional justification. Others, following Timothy Williamson, have used it as a vehicle for articulating interesting luminosity and anti-luminosity theses. It is tempting to think that while knowledge itself does not obey any closure principles, being in a position to know does. For example, if one knows both p and ‘If p then (...) q’, but one dies or gets distracted before being able to perform a modus ponens on these items of knowledge and for that reason one does not know q, one is still plausibly in a position to know q. It is also tempting to suppose that, while one does not know all logical truths, one is nevertheless in a position to know every logical truth. Putting these temptations together, we get the view that being in a position to know has a normal modal logic. A recent literature has begun to investigate whether it is a good idea to give in to these twin temptations—in particular the first one. That literature assumes very naturally that one is in a position to know everything one knows and that one is not in a position to know things that one cannot know. It has succeeded in showing that, given the modest closure condition that knowledge is closed under conjunction elimination, being a position to know cannot satisfy the so-called K axiom of normal modal logics. In this paper, we explore the question of the normality of the logic of being in a position to know in a more far-reaching and systematic way. Assuming that being in a position to know entails the possibility of knowing and that knowing entails being in a position to know, we can demonstrate radical failures of normality without assuming any closure principles at all for knowledge. Moreover, the failure of normality cannot be laid at the door of the K axiom for knowledge, since the standard principle NEC of necessitation also fails for being in a position to know. After laying out and explaining our results, we briefly survey the coherent options that remain. (shrink)

According to Burge, it is not possible to commit brute errors in the process of critical reasoning. This thesis lies at the heart of Burge’s influential theory of self-knowledge. By appealing to a version of the slow-switching argument, this paper contends that Burge’s view is not compatible with his commitment to externalism about mental content. In particular, it is argued that accepting externalism opens up the possibility of brute errors in the process of critical reasoning.

Ted A. Warfield reviews the history of epistemology and argues that epistemologists mistakenly take for granted the inference that the failure of closure of some necessary condition on knowledge is sufficient for the failure of epistemic closure. So he concludes that epistemologists should avoid using this inference to explain the failure of epistemic closure. However, I will defend the inference that epistemologists often employ in their discussions. My thesis is that although this inference is invalid, one can still legitimately conclude (...) the failure of epistemic closure from the failure of closure of some necessary condition on knowledge. (shrink)

Epistemic modal operators give rise to something very like, but also very unlike, Moore's paradox. I set out the puzzling phenomena, explain why a standard relational semantics for these operators cannot handle them, and recommend an alternative semantics. A pragmatics appropriate to the semantics is developed and interactions between the semantics, the pragmatics, and the definition of consequence are investigated. The semantics is then extended to probability operators. Some problems and prospects for probabilistic representations of content and context are explored.

It may appear that in order to be any way at all, a thing must exist. A possible – worlds version of this claim goes as follows: (E) For every x, for every possible world w, Fx at w only if x exists at w. Here and later in (R), the letter ‘F’ is used as a schematic letter to be replaced with a one – place predicate. There are two arguments against (E). The first is by analogy. Socrates is (...) widely admired now but he does not exist now. So, it is not the case that for every x, for every time t, Fx at t only if x exists at t. Possible worlds are analogous to times. Therefore, (E) is false (cf., Kaplan 1973: 503 – 05 and Salmon 1981: 36 – 40). For the second argument, replace ‘F’ with ‘does not exist’. (E) then says that for every x, for every possible world w, x does not exist at w only if x exists at w. This is obviously false. Therefore (E) is false (cf., Kaplan 1977: 498). Despite their considerable appeal, these arguments are not unassailable. The first argument suffers from the weakness inherent in any argument from analogy; the analogy it rests on may not.. (shrink)

Debates about the semantics and pragmatics of predicates of personal taste have largely centered on contextualist and relativist proposals. In this paper, I argue in favor of an alternative, absolutist analysis of PPT. Theorists such as Max Kölbel and Peter Lasersohn have argued that we should dismiss absolutism due to its inability to accommodate the possibility of faultless disagreement involving PPT. My aim in the paper is to show how the absolutist can in fact accommodate this possibility by drawing on (...) an account of faultless disagreement that improves upon a recent proposal due to Karl Schafer. In amending Schafer’s proposal, I put forward an empirically informed view of our beliefs regarding matters of personal taste, as well as an account of our assertions concerning such matters. I also argue that absolutists should take disagreement about these matters to be conative, rather than doxastic, in nature. The anticipated result is an independently compelling account of faultless disagreement about matters of personal taste that fits naturally with absolutism. (shrink)

De se beliefs typically pose a problem for propositional theories of content. The Property Theory of content tries to overcome the problem of de se beliefs by taking properties to be the objects of our beliefs. I argue that the concept of self-ascription plays a crucial role in the Property Theory while being virtually unexplained. I then offer different possibilities of illuminating that concept and argue that the most common ones are either circular, question-begging, or epistemically problematic. Finally, I argue (...) that only a primitive understanding of self-ascription is viable. Self-ascription is the relation that subjects stand in with respect to the properties that they believe themselves to have. As such, self-ascription has to be primitive if it is supposed to do justice to the characteristic features of de se beliefs. (shrink)

Despite increasing prominence, ‘ought’-contextualism is regarded with suspicion by most metaethicists. As I’ll argue, however, contextualism is a very weak claim, that every metaethicist can sign up to. The real controversy concerns how contextualism is developed. I then draw an oft-overlooked distinction between “parochial” contextualism—on which the contextually-relevant standards are those that the speaker, or others in her environment, subscribe to—and “aspirational” contextualism—on which the contextually-relevant standards are the objective standards for the relevant domain. However, I argue that neither view (...) is acceptable. I suggest an original compromise: “ecumenical contextualism”, on which some uses of ‘ought’ are parochial, others aspirational. Ecumenical contextualism is compatible with realism or antirealism, but either combination yields interesting results. And though it’s a cognitivist view, it is strengthened by incorporating an expressivist insight: for robustly normative usages of ‘ought’, the contextually-relevant standards must be endorsed by the speaker. (shrink)

It is regrettably common for theorists to attempt to characterize the Humean dictum that one can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ just in broadly logical terms. We here address an important new class of such approaches which appeal to model-theoretic machinery. Our complaint about these recent attempts is that they interfere with substantive debates about the nature of the ethical. This problem, developed in detail for Daniel Singer’s and Gillian Russell and Greg Restall’s accounts of Hume’s dictum, is of (...) a general type arising for the use of model-theoretic structures in cashing out substantive philosophical claims: the question of whether an abstract model-theoretic structure successfully interprets something often involves taking a stand on non-trivial issues surrounding the thing. In the particular case of Hume’s dictum, given reasonable conceptual or metaphysical claims about the ethical, Singer’s and Russell and Restall’s accounts treat obviously ethical claims as descriptive and vice versa. Consequently, their model-theoretic characterizations of Hume’s dictum are not metaethically neutral. This encourages skepticism about whether model-theoretic machinery suffices to provide an illuminating distinction between the ethical and the descriptive. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe close connection often cited between Hegel and Wilfrid Sellars is not only said to lie in their common negative challenges to the ‘framework of givenness,’ but also in the positive less...

Demonstrative noun phrases (e.g., that guy , this ) are of interest to philosophers of language and semanticists because they are sensitive to demonstrations or speaker intentions. The interpretation of a demonstrative therefore sheds light on the role of the context in natural language semantics. This survey reviews two types of approaches to demonstratives: Kaplan's direct reference treatment of demonstratives and other indexicals, and recent challenges to Kaplan's approach that focus on less obviously context-sensitive uses of demonstratives. The survey then (...) covers selected research on demonstratives in linguistics. This research offers new empirical puzzles and contrasting theoretical approaches to demonstratives. (shrink)

The meanings of utterances and thoughts are commonly regarded in philosophical semantics as abstract objects, called «propositions», which account for how different utterances and thoughts can be synonymous and which constitute the primary truth-bearers. I argue that meanings are instead natural properties that play causal roles in the world, that the kind of «One over Many» thinking underlying the characterization of shared meanings as abstract objects is misguided and that utterances and thoughts having truth-values in virtue of their meanings does (...) not entail that meanings themselves are truth-bearers. (shrink)

This paper argues that the classification of propositional attitudes into the de re, de dicto, and de se is incomplete. De se attitudes are widely agreed to be closely connected to de re attitudes. But there is a species of belief that is linked to agent-centered action in the way that de se beliefs are, but is also associated with entities, places, and especially times, under a description. These mark out a fourth kind. One way to think about what makes (...) them distinctive is that, despite being ‘essentially indexical’ they can be retained across different contexts of evaluation without having diagonal content. The paper also discusses the connection between such beliefs and the kinds of utterances (like ‘Don't put off for tomorrow what you can do today’) that are contested as examples of what David Kaplan called ‘monsters.’. (shrink)

§0. A familiar if obscure idea: an indicative conditional presents its consequent as holding in the actual world on the supposition that its antecedent so holds, whereas a subjunctive conditional merely presents its consequent as holding in a world, typically counterfactual, in which its antecedent holds. Consider this pair.

Quine (1960, Word and object. Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press, ch. 2) claims that there are a variety of equally good schemes for translating or interpreting ordinary talk. ‘Rabbit’ might be taken to divide its reference over rabbits, over temporal slices of rabbits, or undetached parts of rabbits, without significantly affecting which sentences get classified as true and which as false. This is the basis of his famous ‘argument from below’ to the conclusion that there can be no fact of the matter (...) as to how reference is to be divided. Putative counterexamples to Quine’s claim have been put forward in the past (see especially Evans 1975; 1975, Journal of Philosophy, LXXII(13), 343–362. Reprinted in McDowell (Ed.), Gareth Evans: Collected papers. Oxford: Clarendon Press.), and various patches have been suggested (e.g. Wright (1997, The indeterminacy of translation. In C. Wright & B. Hale (Eds.), A companion to the philosophy of language (pp. 397–426). Oxford: Blackwell)). One lacuna in this literature is that one does not find any detailed presentation of what exactly these interpretations are supposed to be. Drawing on contemporary literature on persistence, the present paper sets out detailed semantic treatments for fragments of English, whereby predicates such as ‘rabbit’ divide their reference over four-dimensional continuants (Quine’s rabbits), instantaneous temporal slices of those continuants (Quine’s rabbit-slices) and the simple elements which compose those slices (undetached rabbit parts) respectively. Once we have the systematic interpretations on the table, we can get to work evaluating them. (shrink)

Inscrutability arguments threaten to reduce interpretationist metasemantic theories to absurdity. Can we find some way to block the arguments? A highly influential proposal in this regard is David Lewis’ ‘ eligibility ’ response: some theories are better than others, not because they fit the data better, but because they are framed in terms of more natural properties. The purposes of this paper are to outline the nature of the eligibility proposal, making the case that it is not ad hoc, but (...) instead flows naturally from three independently motivated elements; and to show that severe limitations afflict the proposal. In conclusion, I pick out the element of the eligibility response that is responsible for the limitations: future work in this area should therefore concentrate on amending this aspect of the overall theory. (shrink)

On reading the last sentence, did you interpret me as saying falsely that everything — everything in the entire universe — was packed into my carry-on baggage? Probably not. In ordinary language, ‘everything’ and other quantifiers (‘something’, ‘nothing’, ‘every dog’, ...) often carry a tacit restriction to a domain of contextually relevant objects, such as the things that I need to take with me on my journey. Thus a sentence of the form ‘Everything Fs’ is true as uttered in a (...) context C if and only if everything that is relevant in C satisfies the predicate ‘F’; ‘everything’ ranges just over the contextually relevant things. Such generality is restricted in a context-relative way. (shrink)

Externalism is widely endorsed within contemporary philosophy of mind and language. Despite this, it is far from clear how the externalist thesis should be construed and, indeed, why we should accept it. In this entry I distinguish and examine three central types of externalism: what I call foundational externalism, externalist semantics, and psychological externalism. I suggest that the most plausible version of externalism is not in fact a very radical thesis and does not have any terribly interesting implications for philosophy (...) of mind, whereas the more radical and interesting versions of externalism are quite difficult to support. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungRelativisten wollen erklären, wie es möglich ist, dass X urteilt „A soll vollzogen werden“ und Y urteilt „A soll nicht vollzogen werden“ und beide das Wahre urteilen. Sowohl indexikalistische Relativisten als auch Wahrheitsrelativisten gehen dabei vom Verhältnis der Negation zwischen den Urteilen aus. Wahrheitsrelativisten halten dafür, dass im ersten Urteil ein Inhalt akzeptiert wird, der im zweiten abgelehnt wird, und dass die Wahrheit beider Urteile durch verschiedene moralische Standards zu evaluieren ist. Indexikalisten denken, dass im ersten Urteil ein anderer Inhalt (...) akzeptiert wird, als im zweiten abgelehnt wird, und dass der Inhalt beider Urteile durch verschiedene Standards determiniert wird. Ich argumentiere zum einen, dass keine der beiden Positionen verständlich machen kann, weshalb die beiden Urteile unvereinbar sind. Zum anderen schlage ich vor, die Unvereinbarkeit der Urteile als interpersonales Dilemma zu deuten, also als praktischen Konflikt zwischen wahren moralischen Urteilen. Dieser Vorschlag kann das Negationsverhältnis zwischen den Urteilen als Implikation des Konflikts verständlich machen. Er ist außerdem ebenso offen für eine relativistische wie für eine universalistische Semantik moralischer Begriffe. (shrink)

Are there ‘self-referential’ propositions? That is, propositions that say of themselves that they have a certain property, such as that of being false. There can seem reason to doubt that there are. At the same time, there are a number of reasons why it matters. For suppose that there are indeed no such propositions. One might then hope that while paradoxes such as the Liar show that many plausible principles about sentences must be given up, no such fate will befall (...) principles about propositions. But the existence of self-referential propositions would dash such hopes. Further, the existence of such propositions would also seem to challenge the widespread claim that Liar sentences fail to express propositions. The aim of this paper is thus to settle the question–at least given an assumption. In particular, I argue that if propositions are structured, then self-referential propositions exist. (shrink)

The notion of a proposition is central to philosophy. But it is subject to paradoxes. A natural response is a hierarchical account and, ever since Russell proposed his theory of types in 1908, this has been the strategy of choice. But in this paper I raise a problem for such accounts. While this does not seem to have been recognized before, it would seem to render existing such accounts inadequate. The main purpose of the paper, however, is to provide a (...) new hierarchical account that solves the problem. (shrink)

What has the self to be like such that introspective awareness of it is possible? The paper asks if Descartes’s idea of an inner self can be upheld and discusses this issue by invoking two principles: the phenomenal transparency of experience and the semantic compositionality of conceptual content. It is assumed that self-awareness is a second-order state either in the domain of experience or in the domain of thought. In the former case self-awareness turns out empty if experience is transparent. (...) In the latter, it can best be conceived of as a form of mental quotation. Various proposed analyses of direct and indirect quotation are discussed and tested regarding their applicability to thought. It is concluded that, on the assumption of compositionality, the inner self is only insofar accessible to awareness as it has an accessible phonological structure, as apparently only inner speech does. (shrink)

Expressivism, as applied to a certain class of statements, evaluative ones, for instance, is constituted by two doctrines, only the first of which will concern me in this paper. Evaluative statements, according to this doctrine, aren’t propositional (susceptible of truth or falsity). In this paper, I will argue that one of the vexing problems (that I label the “logical problem”) this doctrine engenders for the expressivist is equally pressing for some cognitivists (who think evaluative statements do have a truth-value). I (...) will present the difficulty and argue that some constructivists, who are cognitivists, cannot contend with it at all, and others must resort to more complex ways than the one available to other cognitivists. (shrink)

There are good reasons to think natural languages are compositional. But compound nominals (CNs) are largely productive constructions that have proven highly recalcitrant to compositional semantic analysis. I evaluate existing proposals to treat CNs compositionally and argue that they are unsuccessful. I then articulate an alternative proposal according to which CNs contain covert indexicals. Features of the context allow a variety of relations to be expressed using CNs, but this variety is not expressed in the lexicon or the semantic rules (...) of the language. This proposal accounts for the diversity of contents CNs can be used to express while preserving compositionality. Finally, I defend this proposal against some recent anti-contextualist arguments. (shrink)

Fine (2007) argues that Frege’s puzzle and its relatives demonstrate a need for a basic reorientation of the field of semantics. According to this reorientation, the domain of semantic facts would be closed not under the classical consequence relation but only under a stronger relation Fine calls “manifest consequence.” I examine Fine’s informally sketched analyses of manifest consequence, showing that each can be amended to determine a class of strong consequence relations. A best candidate relation emerges from each of the (...) two classes, and I prove that the two candidates extensionally coincide. The resulting consequence relation is of independent interest, for it might be held to constitute a cogent standard of reasoning that proceeds under a deficient grasp on the identity of objects. (shrink)

It is a widely held view in philosophy that propositions perform a plethora of different theoretical roles. Amongst other things, they are believed to be the semantic values of sentences in contexts, the objects of attitudes, the contents of illocutionary acts, and the referents of that-clauses. This assumption is often combined with the claim that propositions have their truth-values eternally. In this paper I aim to show that these two assumptions are incompatible: propositions cannot both fulfill the mentioned roles and (...) be eternally true or false. Following Kaplan and Lewis’s Operator Argument, I argue that compositional semantic values of sentences in contexts do not correspond to eternal propositions. Thus, either we regard the non-eternal entities that in fact realize the semantic role of propositions as also fulfilling the remaining propositional roles, or we abandon the assumption that there is a unique realizer of all the roles. The Operator Argument has recently come under attack, mainly for its tense-logical assumptions. However, rejecting these assumptions is not a sufficient defense of the compatibility of the two claims, since the extensional alternative to the tense-logical framework does not allow us to universally retain eternal propositions as compositional semantic values of sentences either. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper defends a controversial view about personal identity. It argues that it is possible to endorse both Phenomenalism and Materialism about persons. Phenomenalism is the view that personal identity is grounded in phenomenal consciousness. Materialism is the view that we are material objects. Many believe that the two views are incompatible. In this paper, I show that it is possible to accept both. I consider two objections against their combination—the argument from disembodiment and an important objection by Tim (...) Bayne. My responses are based on Kripke’s analysis of necessary a posteriori and contingent a priori statements. I make the case that both objections rest on different kinds of modal illusions. This strategy can be applied to other arguments, and the paper is intended to advocate a general approach to personal identity. (shrink)

Beliefs are commonly analyzed as binary relations between subjects and propositions. Perry and Lewis have shown that the standard account has difficulties in handling self-locating beliefs. Robert Stalnaker has recently put forward a version of the standard account that is supposed to overcome this problem. Stalnaker's motivation for defending the propositional account of belief is that it comes with a simple and powerful propositional model of communication. In this paper I argue that Stalnaker's proposal fails. The only way of upholding (...) the propositional account of belief is by abandoning the simple account of communication. (shrink)

According to an attractive account of belief, our beliefs have centered content. According to an attractive account of communication, we utter sentences to express our beliefs and share them with each other. However, the two accounts are in conflict. In this paper I explore the consequences of holding on to the claim that beliefs have centered content. If we do in fact express the centered content of our beliefs, the content of the belief the hearer acquires cannot in general be (...) identical to the content the speaker expresses. I sketch an alternative account of communication, the Recentering model, that accepts this consequence and explains how expressed and acquired content are related. (shrink)

I set out and defend a view on indicative conditionals that I call “indexical relativism ”. The core of the view is that which proposition is expressed by an utterance of a conditional is a function of the speaker’s context and the assessor’s context. This implies a kind of relativism, namely that a single utterance may be correctly assessed as true by one assessor and false by another.

There is a long-standing disagreement among Branching-Time theorists. Even though they all believe that the branching representation accurately grasps the idea that the future, contrary to the past, is open, they argue whether this representation is compatible with the claim that one among many possible futures is distinguished—the single future that will come to be. This disagreement is paralleled in an argument about the bivalence of future contingents. The single, privileged future is often called the Thin Red Line. I reconstruct (...) the history of the arguments for and against this idea. Then, I propose my own version of the Thin Red Line theory which is immune to the major objections found in the literature. I argue that the semantic disagreement is grounded in distinct metaphysical presuppositions. My solution is expressed in a conceptual framework proposed by John MacFarlane, who distinguishes semantics from postsemantics. I extend his distinction and introduce a new notion of presemantics to elucidate my idea. (shrink)

The purpose of the paper is to rethink the role of actuality in the branching model of possibilities. We investigate the idea that the model should be enriched with an additional factor—the so-called Thin Red Line—which is supposed to represent the single possible course of events that gets actualized in time. We believe that this idea was often misconceived which prompted some unfortunate reactions. On the one hand, it suggested problematic semantic models of future tense and and on the other, (...) it provoked questionable lines of criticism. We reassess the debate and point to potential pitfalls, focusing on the semantic dimension of the Thin Red Line theory. Our agenda transcends the semantics, however. We conclude that semantic considerations do not threaten the Thin Red Line theory and that the proper debate should be carried in the domain of metaphysics. (shrink)

The Eleatic philosophers argued that it was impossible for anything to change, since that would require something to differ from itself. Although this line of reasoning is unpersuasive, it challenges us to provide an account of temporal predication, which is the focus of much recent work on change. This paper surveys various approaches to change and temporal predication and addresses related questions about identity, persistence, properties, time, tense, and temporal logic.

Our world is a world of change. Children are born and grow into adults. Material possessions rust and decay with age and ultimately perish. Yet scepticism about change is as old as philosophy itself. Heraclitus, for example, argued that nothing could survive the replacement of parts, so that it is impossible to step into the same river twice. Zeno argued that motion is paradoxical, so that nothing can alter its location. Parmenides and his followers went even further, arguing that the (...) very concept of qualitative change is inconsistent. Change in any respect is impossible, they argued, since change requires difference and nothing differs from itself.1 Few today would accept the Eleatic conclusion that change is impossible. But the topic of change continues to be a source of much debate, as it brings together various issues that are central to metaphysics, language and logic – including identity, persistence, time, tense, and temporal logic. As we consider various approaches to our topic, it will become clear that one’s perspective on change is often determined by one’s position in the broader philosophical landscape. (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)

I critically examine the claim that modal collapse arguments against the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) are in general fallacious. In a recent paper, Christopher Tomaszewski alleges that modal collapse arguments against DDS are invalid, owing to illicit substitutions of nonrigid singular terms into intensional contexts. I show that this is not, in general, the case. I show, further, that where existing modal collapse arguments are vulnerable to this charge the arguments can be repaired without any apparent dialectical impropriety. (...) I conclude that the genuine debate over modal collapse and divine simplicity and modal collapse is substantially a controversy over the metaphysics of divine action, and that this constitutes a fruitful direction in which to take future discussions of the subject. (shrink)

In his 1786 essay, What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?, Kant characterizes the business of reasoning by referring to the use of the spatial orientations ‘right’ and ‘left’; he, then, extents his analysis to mathematical and logical ways of orientation. The following paper will start off by analyzing the Kantian standard account of orientation to, eventually, amend that account by deepening and correcting it in three respects: the indexical character of orientation that is due to the particular (...) standpoint of the subject who is oriented by a particular cluster of available reference points; the twofold comparative procedure of orientation in which a situation is assessed by virtue of a practically justified and indexically structured net of orientation; and the receptive modes of orientation, mirroring the ‘existential’ fact that the subject is already oriented to a situation by established institutions. The paper ends in briefly considering the pitfalls and benefits of being disoriented. (shrink)