This dissertation shows how initial conditions play a special role in the explanation of contingent and irregular outcomes, including, in the form of geographic context, the special case of uneven development in the social sciences. The dissertation develops a general theory of this role, recognizes its empirical limitations in the social sciences, and considers how it might be applied to the question of uneven development. The primary purpose of the dissertation is to identify and correct theoretical problems in the study (...) of uneven development; it is not intended to be an empirical study. Chapter 1 introduces the basic problem, and discusses why it has become especially salient in debates concerning uneven development. Chapter 2 develops an argument for the importance of initial conditions in the philosophy of science, developed specifically in the context of the Bhaskar/Cartwright ‘open systems’ (and by extension, ‘exogenous factor’) emphasis on the ubiquity of contingency in the universe and rejection of explanation based on laws of nature (regularity accounts) of causation. Chapter 3 makes three claims concerning the concept of contingency, especially as related to the study of society: 1) that there are eight distinct uses of the word contingency, and its many meanings are detrimental to clarity of discussion and thought in history and the social sciences; 2) that it is possible to impose some order on these different uses through developing a classification of contingency into three types based on assumptions concerning possible worlds and determinism; 3) that one of the classes is a special use of the word without relevance to the social sciences, while the two remaining classes are nothing more than a variety of the ‘no hidden factors’ argument in the debate on indeterminism and determinism (and thus related to the concept of spacetime trajectories caused by initial conditions and the interference of these in the form of ‘exogenous factors’ with ‘open systems’). Chapter 4 The concept of explanation based on initial conditions together with laws of nature is widely associated with determinism. In the social sciences determinism has frequently been rejected due to the moral dilemmas it is perceived as presenting. Chapter 4 considers problems with this view. Chapter 5 considers attitudes among geographers, economists, and historians towards using geographic factors as initial conditions in explanation and how they might acceptably be used, in particular their role in ‘anchoring’ aspatial theories of social processes to real-world distributions. Chapter 6 considers the relationship of the statistical methods common in development studies with the trend towards integrating geographical factors into econometric development studies. It introduces the statistical argument on ‘apparent populations’ that arrives at conclusions concerning determinism consistent with Chapters 2 and 3 of the dissertation. The need for the visual interpretation of data with descriptive statistics and maps and their utility in the study of uneven development is discussed with a number of examples. Chapter 7 applies these concepts to the ‘institutions versus geography’ debate in development studies, using Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson’s 2002 ‘reversal of fortune’ argument as a primary example. Chapter 8 considers possible directions for future work, both theoretical and empirical. Chapter 9 concludes with a discussion of additional possible objections to the use of initial conditions as exogenous factors in explanation. (shrink)

Summary of Anna Pilatova’s doctoral thesis A User’s Guide to Proper Names, Their Semantics And Pragmatics The origins of this work go all the way back to my reading of Kripke’s Naming and Necessity in 1993. It had left me with a feeling of dissatisfaction that lingered long enough to inspire my MA thesis (on Internalism and Externalism in the Theories of Reference), and finally inspired the current work. Over time, I became acquainted with other influential accounts of reference of (...) proper names, but my unease with essentialism and wariness of direct designation remained. In the User’s Guide to Proper Names, I seized the opportunity to analyse what I thought was problematic with the mainstream theories of reference of proper names. I tried to tease apart a number of related doctrines about the behaviour of proper names, and thus arrive at a better understanding of how the various parts of the theories of reference I chose to analyse are related. This helped me to develop my own proposal regarding both the semantics and the pragmatics of proper names. The Guide is organised around a particular approach to the tasks of a semantic theory. According to this view, proposed by Stalnaker, a semantic theory dealing with proper names should account for the descriptive semantics of names, their foundational semantics, and the semantics of modal statements in which they figure. Descriptive semantics focuses on the contribution a proper name makes to the truth-value of sentences in which it occurs. Based on such an analysis, a proper name is assigned a semantic value, which is supposed to provide us with an interpretation of that name. A crucial part of this task is to see just what kind of thing the semantic value of a proper name is. In interpreting sentences containing proper names, one can, and often does, use the notion of possible worlds. This is especially true if the sentences in question are modal. There are various approaches to modality, which carry with them different sets of presuppositions. An analysis of the systematic features and presuppositions of various possible-world frameworks is a part of the task of the semantics of modal statements. Another task of semantics of modal statements is to investigate whence the constraints on possible worlds used in analysing these statements should derive, that is, whether, and to what degree, they should derive from the descriptive or the foundational part of the semantic enterprise. Both of these parts of a semantic theory have the potential to make predictions about the foundational semantics of proper names, which deals with the speaker’s behaviour and communication. Foundational semantics aims at answering the following question: What makes it the case that the language spoken by a particular individual or community has the very descriptive semantics it has? In this investigation, one looks at the speaker, her intentions and communicative goals, and tries to look at the strategies she uses to get her (linguistic) point across. To show the usefulness of organising the User’s Guide to Proper Names around these distinctions, and to provide their proper characterisation, is the task of the first part of the introductory first chapter, Outlining the Field and Introducing Some of the Players. In the second part of the same chapter, Setting the Scene, I give a preliminary outline of some of the notions needed to describe the theories of reference that are later investigated, that is mainly the theories proposed by Kripke, Kaplan, Lewis, and Stalnaker. The second chapter, Descriptive Semantics, focuses on the descriptive semantics proposed by Kripke and Kaplan for proper names. In the first part of the chapter, I introduce several arguments in favour of rigid designation. A closer look reveals that none of the three arguments in question -- the modal, the epistemological, and the semantic one -- is actually an argument for rigid designation. They all just argue against some forms of descriptivism. Moreover, in the case of the modal and the epistemological argument, it is relatively easy to find forms of descriptivism that are immune to the lines of reasoning proposed in these arguments. The semantic argument seems to be the strongest of the three. An analysis of a direct argument for rigid designation highlights the connection between rigid designation and certain preconceptions about the identity of individuals. A further investigation of the notion of identity of individuals across possible worlds emerges at this point as an important issue to tackle. It also becomes clear that rigid designation alone cannot fully determine the Kripkean picture of names as non-descriptive entities referring without a mediation of any sort of conceptual content. In the second part of Chapter 2, I introduce the basic notions of Kaplan’s approach to the descriptive semantics of proper names. It turns out that in order to derive the familiar Kripkean picture of proper names, one has to presuppose direct reference for names and at least some version of haecceitism for the individuals in question. While, as we show, Kaplan’s framework does not work well for proper names, it gives us conceptual tools that help us in our undertaking. In the third chapter, Modal Statements, Individuals, and Essences, I analyse three different approaches to building a possible-world framework, Lewis’s, Kripke’s, and Stalnaker’s. In each case, the same questions are asked: What is the motivation and intended field of application of this framework? What are the ontological commitments of the approach? What form of essentialism, if any, does it imply? How does it deal with the notion of an individual? In Lewis’s case, the main problem turns out to be the theory of counterparts, which is, as I show, an integral part of his approach. The concept of an individual implied by it does not seem to correspond to any intuitive reading of counterfactual statements involving individuals. The investigation of Kripke’s framework focuses on describing the weakest form of essentialism that has to be presupposed to make the proposal work. Once that is concluded, I analyse the essentialism Kripke actually proposes, and the motivation and presuppositions on which it rests. I conclude that its motivation cannot be said to come from an analysis of language and that it presupposes a particular form of scientific realism. The rest of the chapter is devoted to a reconstruction and analysis of Stalnaker’s possible world framework, which turns out to be rather more cautious about metaphysical presuppositions and more suited for an analysis of natural language. As in the two previous proposals, I try to reconstruct the notion of actual world that is presupposed here. In the fourth chapter, Foundational Semantics, I investigate the notion of proposition implied by Lewis’s, Kripke’s, and Stalnaker’s approach. I focus on propositions containing proper names, and analyse the way in which each of the conceptions mentioned above is vulnerable to the problem of logical omniscience. An analysis of Lewis’s framework reveals that the concept of proposition implied by it is so weak as to be rather uninteresting. An investigation of Kripke’s concept of proposition deals not only with the systematic issues, but also with the Pierre puzzle and various attempts at solving it. I present a number of different approaches to the problem and compare their merits. Stalnaker is very worried about the problem of logical omniscience, and yet it turns out that his conception is less vulnerable to the adverse consequences of the problem of logical omniscience than other frameworks we investigate. I point out that various pragmatic features of Stalnaker’s framework (the epistemic nature of his possible-world framework, the Gricean principles built into the notion of assertion) help to counterbalance and mitigate the scope of the problem of logical omniscience within it. In Chapter 5, User-friendly Descriptive Semantics, I present and motivate my own proposal for the descriptive semantics of proper names and the treatment of modal statements in which they figure. Basically, the aim is to preserve the notion of names as rigidly designating expressions while admitting as little metaphysics as possible. Working with epistemic possible worlds whose domain is in each case co-determined by a particular context enables me to develop a very intuitive plausible notion of individual, to which a name can be said to refer rigidly. The interpretation of modal statements is then driven not by essentialist constraints in the common sense of the term, but by context-derived limitations, which seems to be a more natural approach. In the sixth and last chapter, Names, Indexicality, and Ambiguity, I develop a view of foundational semantics inspired by the pragmatic observation that in common parlance one can say that a name, `John Smith’ for instance, can refer to numerous individuals. A lot of attention is given to the ontology of names, and the question `What is a name?’ delivers answers which are then used in a discussion about whether names should be seen as indexical or ambiguous. I adopt the ambiguity view, and propose a way of using a Stalnakerian possible-world framework to derive intuitively plausible results for some difficult cases. The weight of the discussion all through the guide rests in an examination of different kinds of presuppositions implied by various possible-world frameworks and the notion of the individual used in accounts of the behaviour of proper names. In my own account of these issues, I do without any metaphysical assumptions and aim at describing communication in terms accessible to its participants. (shrink)

No existing conditional semantics captures the dual role of 'if' in embedded interrogatives — 'X wonders if p' — and conditionals. This paper presses the importance and extent of this challenge, linking it to cross-linguistic patterns and other phenomena involving conditionals. Among these other phenomena are conditionals with multiple 'if'-clauses in the antecedent — 'if p and if q, then r' — and relevance conditionals — 'if you are hungry, there is food in the cupboard'. Both phenomena are shown to (...) be problematic for existing analyses. Surprisingly, the decomposition of conditionals needed to capture the link with interrogatives provides a new analysis that captures all three phenomena. The model-theoretic semantics offered here relies on a dynamic conception of meaning and compositionality, a feature discussed throughout. (shrink)

My main aim is to clarify what we mean by ‘look’ sentences such as (1) below – ones that we use to talk about visual experience: -/- (1) The ball looked red to Sue -/- This is to help better understand a part of natural language that has so far resisted treatment, and also to help better understand the nature of visual experience. -/- By appealing to general linguistic principles I argue for the following account. First, we use (1) to (...) talk about an event. Second, we use the verb ‘look’ to specify the kind of event about which we are talking – it is a looking event. Third, we use the subject ‘the ball’ to specify a stimulus of the event – something that looks some way in the event. Fourth, we use the adjunct ‘to Sue’ to specify an experiencer of the event – someone to whom things look some way in the event. Finally, we use the complement ‘red’ to specify a way of the event – a way in which the event occurs (I take ways of occurring to be properties of events). Which way do we use ‘red’ in (1) to specify? I argue: the maximally specific way w such that the following is generically true: looking events whose stimulus is red occur in way w (it is important that this is understood generically: this is what does much of the work in explaining our use of (1) and other ‘look’ sentences). Putting this together, what we mean by (1) is: there was a looking event whose stimulus was the ball, whose experiencer was Sue, and which occurred in the maximally specific way that looking events occur when their stimulus is red. -/- This account of how we use ‘red’ in (1) is one of the most interesting aspects of my thesis. It extends to an account of how we use ‘proud’ in ‘John walks proud’, ‘as if he is American’ in ‘John talks as if he is American’, ‘like a duck’ in ‘John sounds like a duck’, and so on. In each case we use the expression in question to specify a way: the maximally specific way proud people walk, the maximally specific way American people talk, and so on. So the study of ‘look’ sentences has much to tell us about the functioning of many other English language constructions, and suggests that ways have a significant role to play in the semantics of natural language – a fact that has not yet been sufficiently recognised by linguists or philosophers of language. -/- My thesis also has implications for the philosophy of perception. One of the central questions about perception is: What is the nature of visual experience? What is it, for example, for a ball to look red to Sue? My thesis offers an answer: What it is for the ball to look red to Sue is for whatever it is that we mean by ‘The ball looks red to Sue’ to be the case, and what we mean by ‘The ball looks red to Sue’ is that there is a looking event whose stimulus is the ball, whose experiencer is Sue, and which is occurring in a certain way. It thus delivers an adverbial account of visual experience, one that has the resources to better deal with problems that are traditionally thought to be decisive against adverbial accounts. (shrink)

What is the epistemological structure of situations where many small risks amount to a large one? Lottery and preface paradoxes and puzzles about quantum-mechanical blips threaten the idea that competent deduction is a way of extending our knowledge. Seemingly, everyday knowledge involves small risks, and competently deducing the conjunction of many such truths from them yields a conclusion too risky to constitute knowledge. But the dilemma between scepticism and abandoning MPC is false. In extreme cases, objectively improbable truths are known. (...) Safety is modal, not probabilistic, in structure, with closure and factiveness conditions. It is modelled using closeness of worlds. Safety is analogous to knowledge. It suggests an interpretation of possible worlds semantics for epistemic logic. To avoid logical omniscience, a relation of epistemic counterparthood between formulas is introduced. This supports a safety conception of knowledge and formalizes how extending knowledge by deduction depends on logical competence. (shrink)

I defend the compatibility of the classical theistic doctrine of divine providence, which includes infallible foreknowledge of all future events, with a libertarian understanding of creaturely free will. After setting out the argument for theological determinism, which purports to show the inconsistency of foreknowledge and freedom, I reject several responses as inadequate and then defend the ‚Ockhamist‛ response as successful. I further argue that the theory of middle knowledge or ‚Molinism‛ is crucial to the viability of the Ockhamist response, and (...) proceed to defend Molinism against the most pressing objections. Finally, I argue that a proper understanding of the Creator-creature relationship accounts for why no explanation can be given for how God’s middle knowledge comes about. (shrink)

This dissertation is structured in such a way as to gradually home in on the true theory of welfare. I start with the whole field of possible theories of welfare and then proceed by narrowing down the options in a series of steps. The first step, undertaken in chapter 2, is to argue that the true theory of welfare must be what I call a partly response independent theory. First I reject the entirely response independent theories because there are widely-shared (...) intuitions suggesting that some psychological responses are indeed relevant to welfare. Then I reject the entirely response dependent theories because there are other central intuitions suggesting that our welfare is not determined solely by our psychological responses. Thus I reach the preliminary conclusion that welfare must involve some response independent (or objective) component. The next step is to consider the most promising theories in the partly response independent category. In particular, I formulate, refine and ultimately reject what seem to be the main monistic theories that have been proposed in this category. In chapter 4, I reject the Adjusted-Enjoyment Theories of Welfare because they cannot account for the claim that a life containing no pleasure or pain can still contain a positive amount of welfare (e.g. if it’s a particularly successful life). Then in chapters 5-7, I discuss Desire Satisfaction theories of welfare. I argue that even the most promising of these theories – e.g. Worthiness Adjusted Desire Satisfactionism – are problematic because they cannot accommodate the claim that a life containing no success with respect to worthwhile projects can still contain a positive amount of welfare (e.g. if it’s a particularly pleasant life). Finally, I suggest that in order to accommodate the intuitions that led to the rejection of all these other theories of welfare, what is needed is a multi-component theory. In the final chapter, I formulate a multi-component theory that is particularly promising. Not only does it avoid the problems of the monistic theories discussed earlier, but, by incorporating a number of novel mathematical devices, it avoids problems that undermine several other initially promising multi-component theories of welfare. (shrink)

Counterpossibles are counterfactuals with necessarily false antecedents. The problem of counterpossibles is easiest to state within the "nearest possible world" framework for counterfactuals: on this approach, a counterfactual is true (roughly) when the consequent is true in the "nearest" possible world where the antecedent is true. Since counterpossibles have necessarily false antecedents, there is no possible world where the antecedent is true. On the approach favored by Lewis, Stalnaker, Williamson, and others, counterpossibles are all trivially true. I introduce several arguments (...) against the trivial approach. First, it is counter-intuitive to think that all counterpossibles are true. Second, if all counterpossibles were true, then we could not make sense of their use in logical, philosophical, or mathematical arguments. Making sense of the role of sentences like these requires that they not have vacuous truth conditions. The account of counterpossibles I ultimately favor is an extension of the "nearest possible world" semantics discussed above. The Lewis/Stalnaker account is supplemented with the addition of impossible worlds, and the nearness metric is extended to range over these impossible worlds as well as possible worlds. Thus, a counterfactual is true when its consequent is true in the nearest world where the antecedent is true; if the counterfactual's antecedent is impossible, then the nearest world in question will be an impossible world. Once the framework of impossible worlds and similarity is in place, we can put it to use in the analysis of other philosophical phenomena. I examine one proposal that makes use of a theory of counterpossibles to develop an analysis of the notion of metaphysical dependence. (shrink)

A commentary on David Lewis's /On the Plurality of Worlds/.

Languages involving modalities and languages involving vagueness have each been thoroughly studied. On the other hand, virtually nothing has been said about the interaction of modality and vagueness. This paper aims to start filling that gap. Section 1 is a discussion of various possible sources of vague modality. Section 2 puts forward a model theory for a quantified language with operators for modality and vagueness. The model theory is followed by a discussion of the resulting logic. In Section 3, the (...) framework will permit us to address a puzzle raised by Elizabeth Barnes and Robert Williams. (shrink)

In contemporary natural languages semantics one will often see the use of special brackets to enclose a linguistic expression, e.g. ⟦carrot⟧. These brackets---so-called denotation brackets or semantic evaluation brackets---stand for a function that maps a linguistic expression to its "denotation" or semantic value (perhaps relative to a model or other parameters). Even though this notation has been used in one form or another since the early development of natural language semantics in the 1960s and 1970s, Montague himself didn't make use (...) of this notation in his series of groundbreaking papers on semantics. That raises the question: When was the ⟦.⟧-notation introduced to semantics? This note answers that question. (shrink)

This thesis extends Kit Fine's truthmaker semantics for counterfactuals to indicative conditionals. First, I provide Fine's truthmaker semantics and his extension to counterfactuals. Then I introduce a notion of context state into the semantics and provide the verification-conditions for indicative conditionals by employing this notion of context state. Afterwards, I turn to the logic of indicative conditionals under exact semantics and discuss the principles and inference rules which raise disagreements between variably strict and strict conditionals accounts. The account I provide (...) shows its promise by validating a plausible combination of principles and strikes a balance between variably strict and strict conditional theories. I discuss certain principles in logic of indicative conditionals under exact semantics in detail and show how the present account validates the plausible combination of them. In the end, I draw comparisons between the viable theories for indicatives and the present one, and argue that the present account takes the advantage in several respects. (shrink)

Intellectual progress involves forming a more accurate picture of the world. But it also figuring out which concepts to use for theorizing about the world. Bayesian epistemology has had much to say about the former aspect of our cognitive lives, but little if at all about the latter. I outline a framework for formulating questions about conceptual change in a broadly Bayesian framework. By enriching the resources of Epistemic Utility Theory with a more expansive conception of epistemic value, I offer (...) a picture of our cognitive economy on which adopting new conceptual tools can sometimes be epistemically rational. (shrink)

It is commonly believed that the role of context cannot be ignored in the analysis of conditionals, and counterfactuals in particular. On truth conditional accounts involving possible worlds semantics, conditionals have been analysed as expressions of relative necessity: “If A, then B” is true at some world w if B is true at all the A-worlds deemed relevant to the evaluation of the conditional at w. A drawback of this approach is that for the evaluation of conditionals with the same (...) antecedents at some world, the same worlds are deemed as relevant for all occasions of utterance. But surely this is inadequate, if shifts of contexts between occasions are to be accounted for. Both the linguistic and logical implications of this defect are discussed, and in order to overcome it a modification of David Lewis’ ordering semantics for counterfactuals is developed for a modified language. I follow Lewis by letting contexts determine comparative similarity assignments, and show that the addition of syntactic context parameters (context indices) to the language gives the freedom required to switch between sets of relevant antecedent worlds from occasion to occasion by choosing the corresponding similarity assignment accordingly. Thus an account that extends Lewis’ analysis of a language containing a single counterfactual connective > to a language containing infinitely many counterfactual connectives >_c, each indexed by a different context name c, overcomes the limitations of traditional analyses. Finally it is also shown that these traditional accounts can be recovered from the modified account if certain contextual restrictions are in place. -/- . (shrink)

This chapter by Fisher continues the theme of the relation between Armstrong and Lewis, only Fisher casts the net far wider. He begins by arguing that there were at least two different lines of influence from early twentieth-century behaviourism to the identity theory: one through logical positivism and the other through ordinary language philosophy, the latter involving Place and Smart, and Lewis and Armstrong. It was Armstrong and Lewis who were to have a profound influence on subsequent developments in analytic (...) philosophy, both methodologically and in metaphysics, and it is for this reason that Fisher devotes the rest of his chapter to tracing the origins of their theories of mind and the manner in which the emphases and methodologies deployed in developing their respective theories became the hallmarks of their wider impact on analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Recent work on probability in the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics yields a decision-theoretic derivation of David Lewis’ Principal Principle, and hence a general metaphysical theory of probability; part 1 is a discussion of this remarkable result. I defend the claim that the ‘subjective uncertainty’ principle is required for the derivation to succeed, arguing that it amounts to a theoretical identification of chance. In part 2, I generalize this account, and suggest that the Everett interpretation, in combination with a plausible (...) view of natural laws, has the potential to provide a reductive theory of metaphysical modality. I defend the resulting naturalistic modal realism, and outline some of its implications for other parts of metaphysics. (shrink)

According to modal realism formulated by David Lewis, there exist concrete possible worlds. As he argues the hypothesis is serviceable and that is a sufficient reason to think it is true. On the other side, Lewis does not consider the pragmatic reasons to be conclusive. He admits that the theoretical benefits of modal realism can be illusory or that the acceptance of controversial ontology for the sake of theoretical benefits might be misguided in the first place. In the first part (...) of the paper, I consider the worry and conclude that although the worry is justified, there can be an epistemological justification for his theory. Next, I outline the so-called indispensability argument for the legitimacy of mathematical Platonism. Finally, I argue that the argument, if accepted, can be applied to metaphysics in general, to the arguing for the existence of concrete (im)possibilia in particular. (shrink)

Divers (2014) argues that a Lewisian theory of modality which includes both counterpart theory and modal realism cannot account for the truth of certain intuitively true modal sentences involving cross-world comparatives. The main purpose of this paper is to defend the Lewisian theory against Divers’s challenge by developing a response strategy based on a degree-theoretic treatment of comparatives and by showing that this treatment is compatible with the theory.

This paper presents a new system of conditional logic B2, which is strictly intermediate in strength between the existing systems B1 and B3 from John Burgess (1981) and David Lewis (1973a). After presenting and motivating the new system, we will show that it is characterized by a natural class of frames. These frames correspond to the idea that conditionals are about which worlds are nearly closest, rather than which worlds are closest. Along the way, we will also give new characterization (...) results for B1 and B3, along with two other new systems B1.1 and B1.2. (shrink)

Modern belief revision theory is based to a large extent on partial meet contraction that was introduced in the seminal article by Carlos Alchourrón, Peter Gärdenfors, and David Makinson that appeared in 1985. In the same year, Alchourrón and Makinson published a significantly different approach to the same problem, called safe contraction. Since then, safe contraction has received much less attention than partial meet contraction. The present paper summarizes the current state of knowledge on safe contraction, provides some new results (...) and offers a list of unsolved problems that are in need of investigation. (shrink)

We have two main aims: to construct mathematical models for analysing determinism, causality and supervenience; and then to use these to demonstrate the possibility of constructing an ontic construal of the operation of free will - one requiring both the presentation of genuine alternatives to an agent and their selecting between them in a manner that permits the attribution of responsibility. Determinism is modelled using trans-temporal ontic links between discrete juxtaposed universe states and shown to be distinct from predictability. Causality (...) is defined on a temporal sequence of δ-algebras and quantified using a measure. The measure leads to definitions of causal overdetermination and epiphenomena. Proofs are constructed to demonstrate deterministic universes must carry their properties essentially but not necessarily locally. We argue determinism and causality are separate doctrines. These models and results are marshalled to put the case that a counterfactual construal of ontic choice cannot work. In response we propose ‘immanence’ - a modified form of indeterminism whereby a universe can present choices to its denizens. We prove that beings subsumed within a universe cannot pilot their own actions. We then argue these beings can exercise free will only when selecting between choices inhering within immanent relata. A being is responsible for its selections if and only if it is constituted of a temporally evolving deterministic substructure. Our proposal is novel: it avoids injecting indeterminism into the decision process. Topological models for property supervenience are developed and used to reconstruct standard definitions from the literature. These are then used to demonstrate considerations of supervenience do not affect our arguments. We have demonstrated that a model of the exercise of free will involving both genuine choices and responsibility is possible but can only operate within a non-deterministic universe possessing specific traits. (shrink)

An incorrect interpretation of Goodman’s theory of counterfactuals is persistently being offered in the literature. I find that strange. Even more so since the incorrectness is rather obvious. In this paper I try to figure out why is that happening. First I try to explain what Goodman did say, which of his claims are ignored, and what he did not say but is sometimes ascribed to him. I emphasize one of the bad features of the interpretation: it gives counterfactuals some (...) formal properties that neither Goodman nor (usually) the interpreter would accept. The usual interpretation (UI), which I claim should not be ascribed to Goodman, considers a counterfactual A>C true iff A, together with natural laws and all contingent truths cotenable with it, entails C. (UI) makes valid the law of conditional excluded middle, which Goodman clearly rejected. Among possible reasons for which the interpreters might find (UI) adequate is that (UI), as I argue, smuggles in the idea of minimal change, which is otherwise attractive, natural to many, but not to be found anywhere in Goodman’s paper. At the end I stress the significance of Goodman’s theory by arguing that we still need some of his notions to test the adequacy of our modern theories. (shrink)

What the Sorites has to tell us is a simple truth regarding our categories. It appears to saddle us with something other than a simple truth—something worse, a contradiction or a problem or a paradox—only when we insist on viewing it through a discrete logic of categories. Discrete categories and discrete logic are for robots. We aren’t robots, and the simple truth is that we don’t handle categories in the way any discrete logic would demand. For us non-robots, what the (...) Sorites has to offer is a straightforward truth regarding how incapable robots and their logic are of handling categories like ours. (shrink)

Philosophical work on free will, contemporary as well as historical, is inevitably framed by the problem of free will and determinism. One of my goals in what follows is to give a feel for the main lines of that debate in philosophy today. I will also be outlining a particular perspective on free will. Many working philosophers consider themselves Compatibilists; the perspective outlined, building on a number of arguments in the recent literature, is a contemporary form of such a view. (...) It cannot, however, claim to be the contemporary philosophical perspective. There is no such thing. Against a background of the perennial problem of free will and determinism, through ongoing argument and debate, philosophers continue to try to work toward an understanding of precisely what it means for an action to be free. (shrink)

It is argued that contraposition is valid for a class of natural language conditionals, if some modifications are allowed to preserve the meaning of the original conditional. In many cases, implicit temporal indices must be considered, making a change in verb tense necessary. A suitable contrapositive for implicative counterfactual conditionals can also usually be found. In some cases, the addition of certain words is necessary to preserve meaning that is present in the original sentence and would be lost or changed (...) in the contrapositive without them. A distinction is made between adding new meaning and adding new words to preserve existing meaning. For concessive conditionals and relevance conditionals, however, no valid contrapositive can be found. They do not belong to the class of contraposable conditionals, which can be independently defined. Difficult cases are also discussed in which the contradictory of the consequent semantically entails the truth of the antecedent. In such cases the content of the antecedent is implicit in the meaning of the consequent. Contraposition becomes possible if what is implicit in the original consequent is made explicit in the contrapositive antecedent. (shrink)

The text examines the status of the truth in the legal norms, trying to answer the questions of whether they can be subject to a truth assessment and, if such an assessment is possible, how a truth value can be attributed to legal norms. To achieve this goal, first of all, the text discusses some basic linguistic conceptions concerning the nature and truth of legal norms and subsequently, a a complex approach is being proposed for attributing truth-value to legal norms. (...) On On the one hand, the latter’s being studied by the methods of deontic logic and theory of possible worlds, and on the other hand, their relation to truth is being explained by semantic anti-realism. (shrink)

The paper explores applications of Kripke's theory of truth to semantics for anti-luck epistemology, that is, to subjunctive theories of knowledge. Subjunctive theories put forward modal or subjunctive conditions to rule out knowledge by mere luck as to be found in Gettier-style counterexamples to the analysis of knowledge as justified true belief. Because of the subjunctive nature of these conditions the resulting semantics turns out to be non-monotone, even if it is based on non-classical evaluation schemes such as strong Kleene (...) or FDE. This blocks the usual road to fixed-point results for Kripke's theory of truth within these semantics and consequently the paper is predominantly an exploration of fixed point results for Kripke's theory of truth within non-monotone semantics. Using the theory of quasi-inductive definitions we show that in case of the subjunctive theories of knowledge the so-called Kripke jump will have fixed points despite the non-monotonicity of the semantics: Kripke's theory of truth can be successfully applied in the framework of subjunctive theories of knowledge. (shrink)

This thesis investigates the metaphysical nature of necessity. My study focuses primarily on the reduction of metaphysical necessity and the question of whether a necessary truth can be reductively defined. Theodore Sider develops a new reductive account of metaphysical necessity. Unfortunately, the multiple realizability problem posed by Jonathan Schaffer undermines the credibility of Sider’s account. This underlies my motivation to search for a revised Siderian account of necessity. On this basis, I propose a modified version of Sider’s account and argue (...) that analytic, natural-kind and micro-reduction truths are necessary truths if and only if they express the same states of affairs as logical truths. Since logical truths are necessary truths, analytic, natural-kind and micro-reduction truths are necessary truths as well. In this thesis, I will proceed as follows. Chapter 1 introduces Sider’s account of necessity. In particular, I focus on his analysis of the necessity of a micro-reduction truth. His analysis is largely constitutive of the notion of a metaphysical semantics and some associated notions. I reconstruct his analysis and articulate his metaphysical semantics and the associated notions. Chapter 2 presents and clarifies the multiple realizability problem of Schaffer. His critique shows that Sider’s metaphysical semantics cannot handle multiple realizability. Sider refutes this claim by arguing that the multiple realizability problem is a problem for his analysis of the necessity of a micro-reduction truth, not for his metaphysical semantics itself. This is a good starting point to propound a modified account of necessity. Chapter 3 proposes and articulates my modified analysis of the necessity of a micro-reduction, where I show that the necessity of a micro-reduction truth can be reductively defined without appeal to Sider’s metaphysical semantics. I argue that analytic, natural-kind and microreduction truths are necessary truths if and only if they express the same states of affairs as logical truths. Logical truths are necessary and so are they. After that, I consider a potential objection to my modified account and attempt to respond to it. (shrink)

The relationship between “character” and an “actor” appears to be quite straightforward: an actor acts as/plays character [x]. But let us be more specific and reword this formulation: actor [y] acts as/plays Hamlet. Or – for the time of the play – actor [y] is Hamlet. And it is this last statement that is paradoxically utterly true and utterly false. It is in the name of a theatrical character that the tension between actor and character arises. Asking, for example, who (...) is Hamlet? yields an answer where both actor and character have legitimate exclusive rights to being “Hamlet.” In short, to whom/what does the name of a theatrical character refer? By first arguing that theatre works as a reverse-“beetle” language-game, whereby I posit that theatre allows for private rule-making, I am able to turn to the idea of reference. It is by examining the name of theatrical characters and what these names refer to that I suggest that – following Hegel – theatrical names refer dialectically. Understanding theatrical characters as such, interpretation hinges not only on the output of theatre (i.e., the meaning), but also the input (i.e., the truth value). (shrink)

This paper gives an outline of truthmaker semantics for natural language against the background of standard possible-worlds semantics. It develops a truthmaker semantics for attitude reports and deontic modals based on an ontology of attitudinal and modal objects and on a semantic function of clauses as predicates of such objects. It also présents new motivations for 'object-based truthmaker semantics' from intensional transitive verbs such as ‘need’, ‘look for’, ‘own’, and ‘buy’ and gives an outline of their semantics. This paper is (...) a commissioned 'target' article, with commentaries by W. Davis, B. Arsenijevic, K. Moulton, K. Liefke, M. Kaufmann, R. Matthews, P. Portner and A. Rubinstein, P. Elliott, G. Ramchand and my reply. (shrink)

In this dissertation I provide a novel logic of the ordinary-language conditional. First, however, I endeavor to make clearer and more precise just what the objects of the study of the conditional are, as a lack of clarity as to what counts as an instance of a given category of conditional has resulted in deep and significant confusions in subsequent analysis. I motivate for a factual/counterfactual distinction, though not at the level of particular instances of the conditional. Instead, I argue (...) that each individual instance of the conditional may be interpreted either factually or counterfactually, rather than these instances dividing into distinct types. I examine the classic Oswald–Kennedy pair of sentences, typically taken to be the quintessential example of how conditionals must be split into two different categories, to show that they in fact do not demonstrate this. I then present my account of the logic underlying the ordinary-language conditional, the system C3, and a justification of the form it takes. This logic provides distinct interpretations of the conditional as it concerns what is factual or what is counterfactual, respectively. The factual interpretation is true when both antecedent and consequent are true at the actual world, false when the antecedent is true and consequent false, and not truth-apt otherwise. The counterfactual interpretation incorporates a ceteris paribus clause, ensuring that it is not falsified by extraordinary, unforeseeable occurrences, and is true when, at all worlds at which the antecedent is ceteris paribus true, the consequent too is true. It is false when, at any of these worlds the consequent is false; and not truth-apt otherwise. I go on to examine alternative theories of the conditional—from the suppositionalist approach to evaluating the putative indicative conditional, to Stalnaker’s combined indicative and counterfactual account, and Lewis’s analysis of the counterfactual; among a number of others—and offer comparison to my own theory. Finally, I look at various challenges to my account of the conditional. Being a strict conditional (albeit variably so), that of C3 is open to the objection that it fails to match ordinary speakers’ intuitions as regards its truth-value assignments to, for instance, conditionals with necessarily true consequents. I address these so- called paradoxes of the strict conditional, and also discussion the question of truth-preservation in the C3 system in the case of such inferences as those relying on transitivity and that of modus ponens. I maintain that these inferences are indeed truth-preserving under certain, specifiable, conditions, and I close by offering possible avenues for further research. (shrink)

The practice of thought experimentation plays a central role in contemporary philosophical methodology. Many philosophers rely on thought experimentation as their primary and even sole procedure for testing theories about the natures of properties and relations. This test procedure involves entertaining hypothetical cases in imaginative thought and then undergoing intuitions about the distribution of properties and relations in them. A theory’s comporting with an intuition is treated as evidence in favour of it; but a clash is treated as evidence against (...) the theory and may even be regarded as falsifying it. -/- The epistemic power of thought experimentation is mysterious. How can experiments carried out within the mind enable us to discover truths about the natures of properties and relations like knowledge, causation, personal identity, reference, meaning, consciousness, beauty, justice, morality, and free will? This epistemological challenge is urgent, but a model of philosophical thought experimentation would seem to be a necessary propaedeutic to any serious discussion of it. An adequate model would make the relevant test procedure explicit, thereby assisting in the identification of points of potential epistemic vulnerability. -/- In this monograph I advance the propaedeutical model-building work already done by Timothy Williamson, Anna-Sara Malmgren, and Jonathan Ichikawa and Benjamin Jarvis. Following the lead of these philosophers, I focus on a single Gettier-style thought experiment and the problem of identifying the real content of the Gettier intuition. My first contribution is to establish the inadequacy of all of the existing models. Each of them, I argue, fails to solve the content problem. It emerges from my discussion, however, that Ichikawa and Jarvis’s truth in fiction approach holds out the prospect of a solution. -/- My second contribution is to develop and defend a new way of implementing the general idea behind the truth in fiction approach. The model I put forward does a better overall job of modelling Gettier-style thought experiments than any of the existing models. It has none of the defects which render those models inadequate and Iam unable to find any major defects peculiar to it. This should make us feel confident that my model is adequate. Moreover, since the Gettier-style thought experiment I focus on is paradigmatic, we should also feel confident that my model will generalise naturally to other philosophical thought experiments. (shrink)

According to one large family of views, scientific explanations explain a phenomenon (such as an event or a regularity) by subsuming it under a general representation, model, prototype, or schema (see Bechtel, W., & Abrahamsen, A. (2005). Explanation: A mechanist alternative. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 36(2), 421–441; Churchland, P. M. (1989). A neurocomputational perspective: The nature of mind and the structure of science. Cambridge: MIT Press; Darden (2006); Hempel, C. G. (1965). Aspects of scientific (...) explanation. In C. G. Hempel (Ed.), Aspects of scientific explanation (pp. 331–496). New York: Free Press; Kitcher (1989); Machamer, P., Darden, L., & Craver, C. F. (2000). Thinking about mechanisms. Philosophy of Science, 67(1), 1–25). My concern is with the minimal suggestion that an adequate philosophical theory of scientific explanation can limit its attention to the format or structure with which theories are represented. The representational subsumption view is a plausible hypothesis about the psychology of understanding. It is also a plausible claim about how scientists present their knowledge to the world. However, one cannot address the central questions for a philosophical theory of scientific explanation without turning one’s attention from the structure of representations to the basic commitments about the worldly structures that plausibly count as explanatory. A philosophical theory of scientific explanation should achieve two goals. The first is explanatory demarcation. It should show how explanation relates with other scientific achievements, such as control, description, measurement, prediction, and taxonomy. The second is explanatory normativity. It should say when putative explanations succeed and fail. One cannot achieve these goals without undertaking commitments about the kinds of ontic structures that plausibly count as explanatory. Representations convey explanatory information about a phenomenon when and only when they describe the ontic explanations for those phenomena. (shrink)

In this paper, I want to address once more the venerable problem of intentional identity, the problem of how different thoughts can be about the same thing even if this thing does not exist. First, I will try to show that antirealist approaches to this problem are doomed to fail. For they ultimately share a problematic assumption, namely that thinking about something involves identifying it. Second, I will claim that once one rejects this assumption and holds instead that thoughts are (...) constituted either by what they are about, their intentional objects, or by what determines their proposition-like intentional contents, one can address the problem of intentional identity in a different way. One can indeed provide a new solution to it that basically relies on two factors: a) what sort of metaphysical nature intentional objects effectively possess, once they are conceived as schematic objects à la Crane (2001, 2013); b) whether such objects really belong to the overall ontological inventory of what there is. According to this solution, two thoughts are about the same nonexistent intentional object iff i) that object satisfies the identity criterion for objects of that metaphysical kind and ii) objects of that kind belong to the overall ontological inventory of what there is, independently of whether they exist (in a suitable first-order sense of existence). As such, this solution is neither realist nor antirealist: only if condition ii) is satisfied, different thoughts can be about the same nonexistent intentionale; otherwise, they are simply constituted by the same intentional content (provided that this content is not equated with that intentionale). Third, armed with this solution, I will hold that one can find a suitable treatment of the specific and related problem of whether different people may mock-think about the same thing, even if there really is no such thing. Finally, I will try to show that this treatment can be also applied to the case in which different thoughts are, according to phenomenology, about the same intentionale and yet this intentionale is of a kind such that there really are no things of that kind. For in this case, such thoughts are about the same intentionale only fictionally. (shrink)

The recent use of typicality in statistical mechanics for foundational purposes has stirred an important debate involving both philosophers and physicists. While this debate customarily focuses on technical issues, in this paper I try to approach the problem from an epistemological angle. The discussion is driven by two questions: (1) What does typicality add to the concept of measure? (2) What kind of explanation, if any, does typicality yield? By distinguishing the notions of `typicality-as-vast-majority' and `typicality-as-best-exemplar', I argue that the (...) former goes beyond the concept of measure. Furthermore, I also argue that typicality aims at providing us with a form of causal explanation of equilibrium. (shrink)

Aaccording to D. K. lewis (1973), would-couterfactuals and might-counterfactuals are duals. from this, it follows that the negation of a would-counterfactual is equiv- alent to the corresponding “might-not”-counterfactual and that the negation of a might-counterfactual is equivalent to the corresponding “would-not”- counterfactual. there are cases, however, where we seem to be entitled to accept the would- counterfactual and we are also equally entitled to accept the corresponding might-not-counterfactual and cases where we seem to be entitled to accept the might-counterfactual without (...) being equally entitled to reject the corresponding would-not-counterfactual. In this paper, I will show that a distinction between two types of rejections for counterfactuals (p-rejection and s-rejection) and the recognition that might-not-counterfactuals may play the role of p-rejections (by an application to counterfactuals of the lewisian approach to conversational scores) could explain why the problematic cases should not be seen as cases where the duality of would- and might-counterfactuals fails. (shrink)

This thesis in an invistigation into the concept of "harm" and its moral relevance. A common view is that an analysis of harm should include a counterfactual condition: an act harms a person iff it makes that person worse off. A common objection to the moral relevance of harm, thus understood, is the non-identity problem. -/- This thesis criticises the counterfactual condition, argues for an alternative analysis and that harm plays two important normative roles. -/- The main ground for rejecting (...) the counterfactual condition is that it has unacceptable consequences in cases of overdetermination and pre-emption. Several modifications to the condition are considered but all fail to solve this problem. -/- According to the alternative analysis to do harm is to perform an act which is responsible for the obtaining of a state of affairs which makes a person’s life go worse. It is argued that should be understood in terms of counterfactual dependence. This claim is defended against counterexamples based on redundant causation. An analysis of is also provided using the notion of a well-being function. It is argued that by introducing this notion it is possible to analyse contributive value without making use of counterfactual comparisons and to solve the non-identity problem. -/- Regarding the normative importance of harm, a popular intuition is that there is an asymmetry in our obligations to future people: that a person would have a life worth living were she to exist is not a reason in favour of creating that person while that a person would have a life not worth living is a reason against creating that person. It is argued that the asymmetry can be classified as a moral option grounded in autonomy. Central to this defence is the suggestion that harm is relevant to understanding autonomy. Autonomy involves partly the freedom to pursue one’s own aims as long as one does no harm. (shrink)

According to necessitarianism, all truths are logically necessary, and the modal doctrine of a necessitarian philosopher is in a sharp contrast with something that seems manifest—the view that there are contingent truths. At least on the face of it, then, necessitarianism is highly implausible. René Descartes is usually not regarded as a necessitarian philosopher, but some of his philosophical views raise the worry as to whether he is committed to the necessity of all truths. This paper is an appraisal of (...) this worry. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore semantics for comparative epistemic modals that avoid the entailment problems shown to result from Kratzer’s (1991) semantics by Yalcin (2006, 2009, 2010). In contrast to the alternative semantics presented by Yalcin and Lassiter (2010, 2011), based on finitely additive probability measures, we introduce semantics based on qualitatively additive measures, as well as semantics based on purely qualitative orderings, including orderings on propositions derived from orderings on worlds in the tradition of Kratzer (1991). All of these (...) semantics avoid the entailment problems that result from Kratzer’s semantics. Our discussion focuses on methodological issues concerning the choice between different semantics. (shrink)

Conditional logics were originally developed for the purpose of modeling intuitively correct modes of reasoning involving conditional—especially counterfactual—expressions in natural language. While the debate over the logic of conditionals is as old as propositional logic, it was the development of worlds semantics for modal logic in the past century that catalyzed the rapid maturation of the field. Moreover, like modal logic, conditional logic has subsequently found a wide array of uses, from the traditional (e.g. counterfactuals) to the exotic (e.g. conditional (...) obligation). Despite the close connections between conditional and modal logic, both the technical development and philosophical exploitation of the latter has outstripped that of the former, with the result that noticeable lacunae exist in the literature on conditional logic. My dissertation addresses a number of these underdeveloped frontiers, producing new technical insights and philosophical applications. -/- I contribute to the solution of a problem posed by Priest of finding sound and complete labeled tableaux for systems of conditional logic from Lewis' V-family. To develop these tableaux, I draw on previous work on labeled tableaux for modal and conditional logic; errors and shortcomings in recent work on this problem are identified and corrected. While modal logic has by now been thoroughly studied in non-classical contexts, e.g. intuitionistic and relevant logic, the literature on conditional logic is still overwhelmingly classical. Another contribution of my dissertation is a thorough analysis of intuitionistic conditional logic, in which I utilize both algebraic and worlds semantics, and investigate how several novel embedding results might shed light on the philosophical interpretation of both intuitionistic logic and conditional logic extensions thereof. -/- My dissertation examines deontic and connexive conditional logic as well as the underappreciated history of connexive notions in the analysis of conditional obligation. The possibility of interpreting deontic modal logics in such systems (via embedding results) serves as an important theoretical guide. A philosophically motivated proscription on impossible obligations is shown to correspond to, and justify, certain (weak) connexive theses. Finally, I contribute to the intensifying debate over counterpossibles, counterfactuals with impossible antecedents, and take—in contrast to Lewis and Williamson—a non-vacuous line. Thus, in my view, a counterpossible like "If there had been a counterexample to the law of the excluded middle, Brouwer would not have been vindicated" is false, not (vacuously) true, although it has an impossible antecedent. I exploit impossible (non-normal) worlds—originally developed to model non-normal modal logics—to provide non-vacuous semantics for counterpossibles. I buttress the case for non-vacuous semantics by making recourse to both novel technical results and theoretical considerations. (shrink)

En este artículo se revisa la hipótesis sobre la transparencia de las imágenes de Kendall Walton y sus diferentes críticas. Propongo que la imagen fotográfico-cinematográfica solo puede ser potencialmente transparente. Debería, así, hablarse de grados de transparencia. La transparencia de la imagen se divide en umbrales que dependen de la fase de producción en la que esté. De esta forma tenemos transparencia en el registro, de representación, de enunciación y epistémica.