In recent years, an active research program has emerged that aims to develop a Humean best-system account (BSA) of laws of nature that improves on Lewis’s canonical articulation of the view. Its guiding idea is that the laws are cognitive tools tailored to the specific needs and limitations of creatures like us. While current versions of this “pragmatic Humean” research program fare much better than Lewis’s account along many dimensions, I will argue that they have trouble making sense of certain (...) key features of the practice of fundamental physics. Indeed, these features seem to go against the very idea that laws are useful for agents like us. In my view, Humeans can address these issues by paying more attention to the explanatory role of laws. Following this idea, I will propose an account on which what makes a systematization the best is a kind of explanatory power, understood along the lines of the unificationist theory of explanation. The resulting view, I will argue, can make sense of those features of laws that other pragmatic accounts of laws have trouble explaining. (shrink)

Our universe features a harmonious match between laws and states: applying its laws to its states generates other states. This is a striking fact. Matters might have been otherwise. The universe might have been stillborn in a state unengaged by its laws. The problem of nomological harmony is that of explaining the noted striking fact. After introducing and developing this problem, we canvass candidate solutions and identify some of their virtues and vices. Candidate solutions invoke the likes of a designer, (...) axiarchic meta-laws, multiverses, essential causal powers, and Humean laws. (shrink)

On a highly influential way to think of modality, that I call ‘relationalism’, the modality of a state is explained by its being composed of properties, and these properties being related by a higher-order and primitively modal relation. Examples of relationalism are the Dretske-Tooley-Armstrong account of natural necessity, many dispositional essentialist views, and Wang’s incompatibility primitivism. I argue that relationalism faces four difficulties: that the selection between modal relations is arbitrary, that the modal relation cannot belong to any logical order, (...) that to explain how the modal relation can relate properties of different adicities additional ideological complexity has to be introduced, and that not all modal constraints are relational. From the discussion, I will extract desiderata for a successor theory of modality. (shrink)

Chance both guides our credences and is an objective feature of the world. How and why we should conform our credences to chance depends on the underlying metaphysical account of what chance is. I use considerations of accuracy (how close your credences come to truth-values) to propose a new way of deferring to chance. The principle I endorse, called the Trust Principle, requires chance to be a good guide to the world, permits modest chances, tells us how to listen to (...) chance even when the chances are modest, and entails but is not entailed by the New Principle. As I show, a rational agent will obey this principle if and only if she expects chance to be at least as accurate as she is on every good way of measuring accuracy. Much of the discussion, and the technical results, extend beyond chance to deference to any kind of expert. Indeed, you will trust someone about a particular question just in case you expect that person to be more accurate than you are about that question. (shrink)

This paper defines and defends a notion of teleological function which is fit to figure in explanations concerning how organic systems, and the items which compose them, are able to perform certain activities, such as surviving and reproducing or pumping blood. According to this notion, a teleological function of an item (such as the heart) is a typical way in which items of that type contribute to some containing system's ability to do some activity. An account of what it is (...) for an item to contribute to a containing system's ability to perform an activity is provided. I argue that the view acquires its normative status in virtue of the fact that it obeys a function-accident distinction and obeys a function-dysfunction distinction; that the view is ahistorical; and, that its ahistoricity provides it with an advantage over one of its main competitors. (shrink)

In this chapter, I make the case for platonic realism, the thesis that there are properties that lack spatial locations. After criticizing the one-over-many argument for realism and Lewis's argument for realism, I endorse a modal argument that derives the existence of platonic properties from considerations involving necessary truth. I then defend this argument from various objections. Finally, I argue that epistemic considerations and considerations of parsimony favor a weak form of platonic realism on which there are platonic properties, but (...) each property could have had an instance, and would have been located in its instances if it had any. (shrink)

The paper proposes a simple method for constructing ontological theories—an ‘ontology generator’. It shows that such a generator manages to produce major existing ontological theories, e.g., Realism, Nominalism, Trope theory, Bundle theory, Perdurantism, Endurantism, Possibilism, Actualism and more. It thus turns out, surprisingly, that all these seemingly unrelated different ontological theories that were designed by thinkers hundreds of years apart, can all be generated using the same simple mechanism. Moreover, this same generator manages to produce entirely novel ontological theories, that (...) fare no worse than existing ones in meeting the same common metaphysical challenges. (shrink)

Reasoning from inconclusive evidence, or ‘induction’, is central to science and any applications we make of it. For that reason alone it demands the attention of philosophers of science. This Element explores the prospects of using probability theory to provide an inductive logic, a framework for representing evidential support. Constraints on the ideal evaluation of hypotheses suggest that overall support for a hypothesis is represented by its probability in light of the total evidence, and incremental support, or confirmation, indicated by (...) an increased probability given the evidence than otherwise. This proposal is shown to have the capacity to reconstruct many canons of the scientific method and inductive inference. Along the way, significant objections are discussed, such as the challenge from inductive scepticism and the objection that the probabilistic approach makes evidential support arbitrary. (shrink)

Formal ontology as a main branch of metaphysics investigates categories of being. In the formal ontological approach to metaphysics, these ontological categories are analysed by ontological forms. This analysis, which we illustrate by some category systems, provides a tool to assess the clarity, exactness and intelligibility of different category systems or formal ontologies. We discuss critically different accounts of ontological form in the literature. Of ontological form, we propose a character- neutral relational account. In this metatheory, ontological forms of entities (...) are their standings in internal relations whose holding is neutral on the character of their relata. These relations are “formal ontological relations”. Entities belong to ontological categories because they stand in the same formal ontological relations. We hold a nominalist relationalism about ontological categories and forms. We conclude by showing that our metatheory is useful for understanding categorial fundamentality/non- fundamentality, different formal ontologies, and for unifying metaphysical questions. (shrink)

Many philosophers have recently been impressed by an argument to the effect that all grounding facts about “derivative entities”—e.g. the facts expressed by the (let us suppose) true sentences ‘the fact that Beijing is a concrete entity is grounded in the fact that its parts are concrete’ and ‘the fact that there are cities is grounded in the fact that p’, where ‘p’ is a suitable sentence couched in the language of particle physics—must themselves be grounded. This argument relies on (...) a principle, _Purity_, which states that facts about derivative entities are non-fundamental. Purity is questionable. In this paper, I introduce a new argument—the argument from _Settledness_—for a similar conclusion but which does not rely on Purity. The conclusion of the new argument is that every “thick” grounding fact is grounded, where a grounding fact [F is grounded in G, H, …] is said to be thick when at least one of F, G, H, … is a fact—a condition that is automatically satisfied if grounding is factive. After introducing the argument, I compare it with the argument from Purity, and I assess its cogency relative to the relevant accounts of the connections between grounding and fundamentality that are available in the literature. (shrink)

We argue that Lewis would have rejected recent appeals to the notions of ‘metaphysical dependency’, ‘grounding’ and ‘ontological priority’, because he would have held that they’re not needed and they’re not intelligible. We argue our case by drawing upon Lewis’s views on supervenience, the metaphysics of singletons and the dubiousness of Kripke’s essentialism.

Ontološki pluralizam je gledište prema kojemu postoje različiti načini postojanja. Povijesno gledano, načini postojanja su usklađeni s ontološkim kategorijama. Ovaj rad istražuje zašto postoji takva veza i kako je treba shvatiti. Ontološki pluralizam pati od prigovora prema kojem se ontološki pluralizam urušava u ontološki monizam, tj. u gledište da postoji samo jedan način postojanja. Priznavanje ontoloških kategorija može spasiti ontološki pluralizam od ovog prigovora ako načini postojanja utemeljuju ontološke kategorije.

Is well-being the kind of thing that can be summed across individuals? This paper takes a measurement-theoretic approach to answering this question. To make sense of adding well-being, we would need to identify some natural "concatenation" operation on the bearers of well-being that satisfies the axioms of extensive measurement and can therefore be represented by the arithmetic operation of addition. I explore various proposals along these lines, involving the concatenation of segments within lives over time, of entire lives led alongside (...) one another or in sequence, and of evaluatively basic propositions via conjunction. All of these proposals turn out to carry highly controversial commitments about the good. I do not claim that these commitments are unacceptable. But they suggest that we cannot simply take for granted, as many philosophers do, that there is any such thing as the sum of well-being. (shrink)

According to an influential view, when it comes to representing reality, some words are better suited for the job than others. This is elitism. There is reason to believe that the set of the best, or elite, words should not be redundant or arbitrary. However, we are often forced to choose between these two theoretical vices, especially in cases involving theories that seem to be mere notational variants. This is the riddle of redundancy: both redundancy and arbitrariness are vicious, but (...) there are cases in which one must be picked. Logical realists admit that there are some logical constants among the elite words. This leads to awkward questions, such as which among conjunction and disjunction is elite. In this paper, I show how the riddle of redundancy arises for logical realists, and offer a solution. This approach requires us to change how we represent negation. Instead of using some particular symbol, we represent negation by flipping formulae over the horizontal axis. (shrink)

An attractive picture of the world is that some features are metaphysically fundamental and others are derivative, with the derivative features grounded in the fundamental features. But how do we have justified beliefs about which features are fundamental? What is the epistemology of fundamentality? I sketch a response in this paper. The guiding idea is that the same properties cause the same experiences. I argue that a probabilistic connection between epistemic fundamentality and metaphysical fundamentality is sufficient for justified beliefs about (...) the metaphysically fundamental. (shrink)

The bulk of the literature concerning the governing role of non-Humean laws has been concentrated on the alleged incapability of higher order nomic facts to determine the regularities in the behaviour of actual objects, the so-called Inference Problem. Most recently Ioannidis, Livanios and Psillos (2021) argue that an adequate solution to the Inference Problem requires an answer to the question of how nomic relations manage to ‘tell’ properties what to do. Ioannidis et al. dub the difficulty that all extant accounts (...) of governing laws face to give such an answer, the Governing Problem and introduce a Dualist Model, according to which the specific behaviour of things in the world is the outcome of both the thin powers things have to be subjected to laws, and certain nomic features of the world. The aim of this paper is to show that the most plausible form of the Dualist Model can provide the basis for a novel version of the Powerful Qualities View about properties. To this end it presents ways of developing two aspects of the Dualist Model. It defends the view that nomic relations must be relata-specific in order to play their theoretical role within the Model and provides arguments for the view that natural properties should have the minimum (compatible with the core tenets of the Model) modal strength. (shrink)

This paper provides an exposition and defence of Lewis' theory of radical interpretation. The first part explains what Lewis' theory was; the second part explains what it wasn't, and in so doing addresses a number of common objections that arise as a result of widespread myths and misunderstandings about how Lewis' theory is supposed to work.

In the last 35 years many philosophers have appealed to reference magnetism to explain how it is that we mean what we mean. The idea is that it is a constitutive principle of metasemantics that the interpretation that assigns the more natural meanings is correct, ceteris paribus. Among other things, magnetism has been used to answer the challenges of grue and quus, Quine’s indeterminacy of translation argument, and Putnam’s model-theoretic argument against realism. Critics of magnetism have usually objected to the (...) base notion of naturalness. Here I assume naturalness for the sake of argument, but argue that even still, reference magnetism should be rejected. The supposed force of reference magnetism is arbitrarily weak, and the best explanation of this is that it simply does not exist. (shrink)

This article investigates the causal efficacy of social properties, which faces the following puzzle. First, for both intuitive and scientific reasons, it seems social properties have causal import. But, second, social properties are also characteristically extrinsic: to have some social property depends, in typical cases, on what one’s society is like around them. And, third, there is good reason to doubt that extrinsic properties make a genuine causal contribution. After elaborating on these three claims, I defend the following resolution to (...) the puzzle: social causation occurs at the level at which social properties are intrinsic. (shrink)

There is an unresolved stand-off between ontological naturalism and phenomenological thought regarding the question whether normativity can be reduced to physical entities. While the ontological naturalist line of thought is well established in analytic philosophy, the phenomenological reasoning for the irreducibility of normativity has been largely left ignored by proponents of naturalism. Drawing on the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Schütz, Stein and others, I reconstruct a phenomenological argument according to which natural science (as the foundation of naturalization projects) is itself (...) a part of the essentially normative life-world to the effect that ontological naturalism faces a bootstrapping problem. I aim to demonstrate that this stand-off is grounded in a deep disagreement about the possibility of reduction. I close by arguing that this deep disagreement turns on the question which conception about the nature of (natural) science is true. This result pits a perfectionist model of science (implied by ontological naturalism) against a pragmatist conception of science (in favour of the phenomenological argument). The motivation is that transforming the disagreement about the controversial principle into a disagreement about conceptions of science may help to offer a foundation for different attempts at solving the stand-off. (shrink)

This paper defends an account of the laws of nature in terms of irreducibly modal properties (aka powers) from the threat posed by functional laws, conservation laws and symmetries. It thus shows how powers theorists can avoid ad hoc explanations and resist an inflated ontology of powers and governing laws. The key is to understand laws not as flowing from the essences of powers, as per Bird (2007), but as features of a description of how powers are possibly distributed, as (...) per Demarest (2017), Kimpton-Nye (2017, 2021) and Williams (2019); call this the Powers-BSA. This underappreciated powers-based account of laws is continuous with actual scientific practice and thereby quite naturally accommodates functional laws, conservation laws and symmetries. This paper thus positions the Powers-BSA as the leading anti-Humean account of the relationship between laws and properties. (shrink)

It is a metaphysical orthodoxy that interesting non-symmetric relations cannot be reduced to symmetric ones. This orthodoxy is wrong. I show this by exploring the expressive power of symmetric theories, i.e. theories which use only symmetric predicates. Such theories are powerful enough to raise the possibility of Pythagrapheanism, i.e. the possibility that the world is just a vast, unlabelled, undirected graph.

The problem of mental causation epitomizes problems in the metaphysics of mind. Tyler Burge once suggested that it could be solved by taking ordinary explanatory practice more seriously. Jaegwon Kim criticized this suggestion: a solution to the problem requires a workable metaphysics of mental causation, and taking ordinary explanatory practice seriously falls short of providing that. Burge replied by gesturing toward a metaphysics that takes mental and physical causation to be different, noncompeting forms of causation. But what does it mean (...) for there to be different forms of causation? How are they identified and distinguished? And what ensures that mental and physical causation are different and noncompeting? I attempt to answer these questions by appeal to hylomorphism, a metaphysical framework that takes structure to be a basic ontological and explanatory principle. I argue that hylomorphism enables us to develop Burge’s basic insights into a workable metaphysics of mental causation that solves the problem. (shrink)

I articulate a Global Best-System Account (GBSA) of laws of nature along broadly Mill–Ramsey–Lewis lines. The guiding idea is that the job of laws is to capture real patterns across time—where a pattern is real if it allows to compress information about matters of particular fact. The GBSA’s key ingredient is a definition of ‘best system’ in terms of a ranking method that meets a number of desiderata: it is rigorously defined; it outputs the ranking based on the candidate systems’ (...) epistemic virtues; it is objective, in that the output does not depend on one’s choice of basic concepts; it avoids two trivialization results (by Lewis, and Arrow-Okasha); and it does not appeal to naturalness, or other metaphysical notions in that vicinity. Although the GBSA is independent of the controversial thesis of Humean Supervenience, it satisfies the weaker thesis that laws of nature supervene on the total physical state of the world. Moreover, the resulting notion of lawhood is hyperintensional, unlike the neighboring notion of nomological necessity. Finally, GBSA-laws do not track naturalness, contra the Lewisian orthodoxy. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue that there is no unproblematic way of delineating perceptual beliefs from non-perceptual beliefs. The concept of perceptual belief is one of the central concepts not only of philosophy of perception but also of epistemology in a broad foundationalist tradition. Philosophers of perception talk about perceptual belief as the interface between perception and cognition and foundationalist epistemologists understand perceptual justification as a relation between perceptual states and perceptual beliefs. We consider three ways of (...) cashing out the difference between perceptual and non-perceptual beliefs (semantic, justificatory, and etiological) and argue that none of them works. Finally, we explore the possibility of understanding perceptual justification without relying on the concept of perceptual beliefs. (shrink)

The epistemological debate about radical skepticism has focused on whether our beliefs in apparently obvious claims, such as the claim that we have hands, amount to knowledge. Arguably, however, our concept of knowledge is only one of many knowledge-like concepts that there are. If this is correct, it follows that even if our beliefs satisfy our concept of knowledge, there are many other relevantly similar concepts that they fail to satisfy. And this might give us pause. After all, we might (...) wonder: What is so great about the concept of knowledge that we happen to have? Might it be more important, epistemically speaking, to investigate whether our beliefs satisfy some other relevantly similar concept instead? And how should questions such as these even be understood? This paper discusses the epistemological significance of these issues. In particular, a novel skeptical stance called ‘meta-skepticism’ is introduced, which is a kind of skepticism about the idea that some knowledge-like concepts are epistemically more important than others. It suggested that it is unclear whether this form of skepticism can be avoided. (shrink)

Science and mathematics continually change in their tools, methods, and concepts. Many of these changes are not just modifications but progress---steps to be admired. But what constitutes progress? This dissertation addresses one central source of intellectual advancement in both disciplines: reformulating a problem-solving plan into a new, logically compatible one. For short, I call these cases of compatible problem-solving plans "reformulations." Two aspects of reformulations are puzzling. First, reformulating is often unnecessary. Given that we could already solve a problem using (...) an older formulation, what do we gain by reformulating? Second, some reformulations are genuinely trivial or insignificant. Merely replacing one symbol with another does not lead to intellectual progress. What distinguishes significant reformulations from trivial ones? According to what I call "conceptualism" (or "conceptual empiricism"), reformulations are intellectually significant when they provide a different plan for solving problems. Significant reformulations provide inferentially different routes to the same solution. In contrast, trivial reformulations provide exactly the same problem-solving plans, and hence they do not change our understanding. This answers the second question about what distinguishes trivial from significant reformulations. However, the first question remains: what makes a new way of solving an old problem valuable? Here, a bevy of practical considerations come to mind: one formulation might be faster, less complicated, or use more familiar concepts. According to "instrumentalism," these practical benefits are all there is to reformulating. Some reformulations are simply more instrumentally valuable for meeting the aims of science than others. At another extreme, "fundamentalism" contends that a reformulation is valuable when it provides a more fundamental description of reality. According to this view, some reformulations directly contribute to the metaphysical aim of carving reality at its joints. Conceptualism develops a middle ground between instrumentalism and fundamentalism, preserving their benefits without their costs. I argue that the epistemic value of significant reformulations does not reduce to either practical or metaphysical value. Reformulations are valuable because they are a constitutive part of problem-solving. Both science and mathematics aim at solving all possible problems within their respective domains. Meeting this aim requires being able to plan for any possible problem-solving context, and this requires reformulating. By reformulating, we clarify what we need to know to solve problems. Still, one might wonder whether the value of reformulations requires underlying differences in explanatory power. According to "explanationism," a reformulation is valuable only when it provides a better explanation. Explanationism stands as a rival middle ground position to my own. However, it faces numerous counterexamples. In many cases, two reformulations provide the same explanation while nonetheless providing different ways of understanding a phenomenon. Hence, reformulating can be valuable even when neither formulation is more explanatory. Methodologically, I draw on a variety of case studies to support my account of reformulation. These range from classical mechanics to quantum chemistry, along with examples from mathematics. Symmetry arguments provide a paradigmatic example: the mathematics of symmetry groups radically recasts quantum mechanics and quantum chemistry. Nevertheless, elementary approaches exist that eschew this additional mathematical apparatus, solving problems in a more tedious but less mathematically-demanding manner. Further examples include reformulations of quantum field theory, Arabic vs. Roman numerals, and Fermat's little theorem in number theory. In each case, my account identifies how reformulations change and improve our understanding of science and mathematics. (shrink)

Haecceities are non-qualitative properties for individuation but the current theories about haecceities are still to be much more explored. This paper aims to develop a “haecceity mereology” – that is, an ontological system that understands substances as mereological combinations of haecceities and qualitative properties. In this way, the view developed is an alternative to Paul’s : 578–96; 2006. “Coincidence as Overlap.” Noûs 40 : 623–59) mereological approach. Three rules are proposed: If S is a substance, then there is one and (...) only one haecceity which is S’s qualitative part; For all the fusions with the same haecceity, at most only one of those fusions is a substance; When all the relevant elements are abundant, every element must overlap at least one substance. This is the first ontology of haecceities in the recent literature and would be a model for systematic metaphysics. (shrink)

Although contemporary powers metaphysics largely understands itself as a metaphysical realist undertaking, recently powers have come to the surface also within an idealist context. This paper aims to characterize and motivate an absolute idealist conception of powers. I compare realist and idealist powers metaphysics in their respective responses to Humean scepticism concerning powers, thereby motivating the claim that the very idea of a power is actually best understood as an idealist idea. I continue to characterize the absolute idealist’s understanding of (...) power, for which it is necessary to see that the content of her power notion is inseparable from the way in which she arrives at that notion. I close with a brief reflection on the absolute idealist’s understanding of the power of thought, which is where idealist and realist powers metaphysics diverge most radically. (shrink)

This paper shows how a niche account of the metaphysics of laws of nature and physical properties—the Powers-BSA—can underpin both a sense in which the laws are metaphysically necessary and a sense in which it is true that the laws could have been different. The ability to reconcile entrenched disagreement should count in favour of a philosophical theory, so this paper constitutes a novel argument for the Powers-BSA by showing how it can reconcile disagreement about the laws’ modal status. This (...) paper also constitutes a defence of modal necessitarianism, the interesting and controversial view according to which all worlds are nomologically identical, because it shows how the modal necessitarian can appease the orthodox contingentist about laws. (shrink)

Some philosophers maintain that physical properties are irreducibly modal: that properties are powers. Powers are then employed to provide explanations of other phenomena of philosophical interest such as laws of nature and modality. There is, however, a dispute among powers theorists about how far the powers ontology extends: are all manner of properties at all levels of fundamentality powers or are powers only to be found among the fundamental properties? This paper argues that the answer to this question depends on (...) the details of the metaphysics of powers. More specifically, this paper argues that if one understands powers as qualitative grounds of dispositions, as opposed to properties whose essences are constituted by dispositions, then all properties, be they fundamental or macro, are powers, i.e., pandispositionalism is true. The Conclusion: If qualitative dispositional essentialism is true, then pandispositionalism is true, is significant because there is increasing concern that orthodox dispositional essentialism is explanatorily deficient and perhaps even incoherent, meaning that qualitative dispositional essentialism is gaining increasing support in the literature on powers. All things considered, then, it is beginning to look more likely that pandispositionalism is true simpliciter. (shrink)

Recently, a number of metaphysicians have been working on the issue of the metaphysical grounds of identity facts. In this paper, I will survey a variety of accounts of identity facts through a particular lens. These accounts will be examined in light of the so-called ‘purity’ principle, a principle intriguing many discussions on metaphysical grounding in recent literature. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, I will indicate what sorts of accounts of identity facts the purity principle rules out (...) and what sorts of accounts it allows. Secondly, I will pinpoint some patterns of how the purity principle may interact with first-order metaphysical inquiries in general. (shrink)

This article (in Finnish) discusses Seppo Albert Kivinen's (1933-2021) views on identity and existence conditions of universals. Moreover, the article puts the views to larger context.

In this paper, I defend a version of the medical model of disability, which defines disability as an enduring biological dysfunction that causes its bearer a significant degree of impairment. We should accept the medical model, I argue, because it succeeds in capturing our judgments about what conditions do and do not qualify as disabilities, because it offers a compelling explanation for what makes a condition count as a disability, and because it justifies why the federal government should spend hundreds (...) of billions of dollars, annually, on aid and accommodations for disabled people. After responding to a pair of objections Elizabeth Barnes has raised against the medical model, I contrast it with Guy Kahane and Julian Savulescu's welfarist account of disability, and with Barnes's own mere-difference view. Both of these accounts face serious challenges, although elements of Barnes's view can—and, in my opinion, should—be adopted by proponents of the medical model. (shrink)

A central question in the philosophy of science is: What is a law of nature? Different answers to this question define an important schism: Humeans, in the wake of David Hume, hold that the laws of nature are nothing over and above what actually happens and reject irreducible facts about natural modality (Lewis, 1983, 1994; cf. Miller, 2015). According to Non-Humeans, by contrast, the laws are metaphysically fundamental (Maudlin, 2007) or grounded in primitive modal structures, such as dispositional essences of (...) powerful properties (Bird, 2007), necessitation relations (Armstrong, 1983), or primitive subjunctive facts (Lange, 2009). This volume focuses on recent developments in the discussion of Humeanism, specifically on pragmatic versions of the view that put the needs of limited agents like us front and center. (shrink)

Finean essentialists take metaphysical necessity to be metaphysically explained by essence. But whence the explanatory power of essence? A recent wave of criticism against the Finean account has put pressure on essentialists to answer this question. Wallner and Vaidya (2020) have responded by offering an axiomatic account of the explanatory power of essence. This paper discusses their account in light of some recent criticism by Bovey (2022). Building on work by Glazier (2017), Bovey succeeds in showing that Wallner and Vaidya’s (...) account is in need of modification and clarification. In this paper, I take up Bovey’s challenge and argue that Wallner and Vaidya have the resources available to incorporate the necessary modifications. I discuss the details of this modification, specifically, the question of what kind of metaphysical explanation is at work in the explanation of the necessity of essence itself. To get clear on this, I will introduce the distinction between generative and non-generative metaphysical explanation. In this way the paper contributes to both, the debate about whether essences can explain necessity and to the ongoing debate about metaphysical explanation. (shrink)

According to Sider, a question is metaphysically substantive just in case it has a single most natural answer. Recently, Barnes and Mikkola have argued that, given this notion of substantivity, many of the central questions in the metaphysics of gender are nonsubstantive. Specifically, it is plausible that gender pluralism—the view that there are multiple, equally natural gender kinds—is true, but this view seems incompatible with the substantivity of gender. The goal of this paper is to argue that the notion of (...) substantivity can be understood in a way that accommodates gender pluralism. First, I claim that gender terms (at least as used in the ontology room) are referentially indeterminate, where referential indeterminacy holds in virtue of the way the world is. Second, I propose a degree-theoretic (or scalar) account of metaphysical substantivity; genders are substantial to the degree that they are determinate. I conclude that gender is relatively, although not absolutely, substantial. (shrink)

The intuitive distinction between natural and unnatural properties (e.g., green vs. grue) informs our theorizing not only in fundamental physics, but also in non-fundamental domains. This paper develops a reductive account of this broad notion of naturalness that covers non-fundamental properties: for a property to be natural, I propose, is for it to figure in a law of nature. After motivating the account, I defend it from a potential circularity charge. I argue that a suitably broad notion of lawhood can (...) be defined independently of naturalness, if we help ourselves to the notion of a fundamental physical property. I end by showing how the notions of naturalness and lawhood that my account delivers help illuminate a number of other important philosophical notions, like causation, reference/meaning, and rational induction. (shrink)

On a simple and neat view, sometimes called the Relational Analysis of Attitude Ascriptions, a belief ascription on the form ‘S believes that x is F’ is correct if, and only if, S stands in the belief-relation to the proposition designated by ‘that x is F’, i.e., the proposition that x is F. It follows from this view that, for a person to believe, say, that x is a boat, there is one unique proposition that she has to believe. This (...) paper argues against this view. It fails, I contend, to make sense of peripheral concept variation. As we attribute and individuate concepts, two people’s concepts C1 and C2 count as e.g., concepts of boats even if their concepts have different extensions in peripheral, or borderline, cases of boats. Thus, A and B can believe that x is a boat through believing peripherally different propositions. It follows that there is no unique proposition that a person has to believe in order to believe e.g., that x is a boat. (shrink)

David Lewis may be regarded as an antiessentialist. The reason is that he is said to believe that individuals do not have essential properties independent of the ways they are represented. According to him, indeed, the properties that are determined to be essential to individuals are a matter of which similarity relations among individuals are salient, and salience, in turn, is a contextual matter also determined to some extent by the ways individuals are represented. Todd Buras argues that the acknowledgment (...) of natural properties in counterpart theoretic ontology affects Lewis’s theory with regard to essentialism. Buras’s reasoning is appealing. He claims that, since natural properties determine the existence of similarity relations among individuals that are salient independent of context, Lewis can no longer be claimed to be an antiessentialist. The aim of this paper is to argue, against Buras, that if counterpart theory was antiessentialist before natural properties were taken into account, then it remains so afterwards. (shrink)

Bird reveals an important problem at the heart of Armstrong’s theory of laws of nature: to explain how a law necessitates its corresponding regularity, Armstrong is committed to a vicious regress. In his very brief response, Armstrong gestures towards an argument that, as he admits, is more of a “speculation.” Later, Barker and Smart argue that a very similar problem threatens Bird’s dispositional monist theory of laws of nature and he is committed to a similar vicious regress. In this paper, (...) first, I construct Armstrong’s would-be argument in response to Bird. Second, I argue that his response makes his account of laws and natural properties incompatible with science. Finally, I argue that Armstrong’s strategy to address Bird’s criticism can be used, quite ironically, to defuse Barker and Smart’s argument against Bird. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a theory on which each of a thing’s abundant properties is immanent in that thing. On the version of the theory I will propose, universals are abundant, each instantiated universal is immanent, and each uninstantiated universal is such that it could have been instantiated, in which case it would have been immanent. After setting out the theory, I will defend it from David Lewis’s argument that such a combination of immanence and abundance is absurd. I (...) will then advocate the theory on the grounds that it accomplishes all of Lewis’s “new work” while providing a gain in parsimony and a new account of fine-grained content. I will close with a discussion of how the theory also affords a new reply to two objections to uninstantiated universals: Armstrong’s charge that they are inconsistent with naturalism, and a Benacerraf-Field-style objection about epistemic access. (shrink)

According to the Best System Account of lawhood, laws of nature are theorems of the deductive systems that best balance simplicity and strength. In this paper, I advocate a different account of lawhood which is related, in spirit, to the BSA: according to my account, laws are theorems of deductive systems that best balance simplicity, strength, and also calculational tractability. I discuss two problems that the BSA faces, and I show that my account solves them. I also use my account (...) to illuminate the nomological character of special science laws. (shrink)

Nonnaturalist realism is the view that normative properties are unique kind of stance-independent properties. It has been argued that such views fail to explain why two actions that are exactly alike otherwise must also have the same normative properties. Mark Schroeder and Knut Olav Skarsaune have recently suggested that nonnaturalist realists can respond to this supervenience challenge by taking the primary bearers of normative properties to be action kinds. This paper develops their response in two ways. First, it provides additional (...) motivation for the previous claim about the bearers of normative properties by drawing from the work of H. A. Prichard. Second, and more importantly, it formulates a plausible metaphysical framework based on the contemporary trope theory to explain why action kinds would have their second-order properties, including their normative properties, necessarily. (shrink)

Erik Wielenberg [2014] and Mark Murphy [2017], [2018] have defended a series of arguments for the conclusion that creatures are not good intrinsically. In response, I take two steps. First, I introduce a conception of intrinsic value that makes created intrinsic value unproblematic. Second, I respond to their arguments in turn. The first argument is from the sovereignty-aseity intuition and an analysis of intrinsicality that makes derivative good extrinsic. I challenge the analysis. The second comes from a conception of perfection (...) where God exhausts all possibilities for goodness. I challenge this conception. The third comes from the contingency of creation and the internal logic of intrinsic value. I challenge the assumption that connects the two. I then present an argument from reference magnetism that the only conception of God, God's perfections, and religious language that makes it plausible that the sentence "God is intrinsically good and creatures are not" is true involves a strongly univocalist position. A view that is either unstatable or places strong demands on our conception of God, God's perfections and religious language thereby loses plausibility. (shrink)

Recently, an information-theoretic structural realist theory of the self and consciousness has been put forward (Beni, M. D. 2019. Structuring the Self, Series New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science. Palgrave Macmillan). The theory is presented as a form of panpsychism. I argue against this interpretation and show that Beni’s structuralist theory runs into the hard problem of consciousness, in a similar way as the Integrated Information theory of consciousness. Since both of these theories are structuralist and based on the (...) notion of information, I propose to use a solution that has been employed for Integrated Information Theory, namely introducing the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic structure and dynamics (intrinsic information and intrinsic structure). Making these metaphysical enhancements to Beni’s structuralist theory of consciousness will give the theory a better chance of overcoming the hard problem. In terms of the metaphysics of consciousness, it takes us beyond physicalism. I then suggest that the information-theoretic structuralist theory of consciousness should, instead of panpsychism and physicalism, be combined with neutral monist ontology which is a better fit. These reworkings could lead to an improved naturalistic account of consciousness – the neutral-structuralist theory of consciousness and the self. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century, many philosophers in America thought that time should be taken seriously in one way or another. George P. Adams (1882-1961) argued that the past, present and future are all real but only the present is actual. I call this theory ‘actualist eternalism’. In this paper, I articulate his novel brand of eternalism as one piece of his metaphysical system and I explain how he argued for the view in light of the best explanations of temporal (...) experience and the present. I argue that his exploitation of analogies between time and modality offer some lessons for current debates about time such as the importance of providing a temporal epistemology. I also extract what I call the temporal boundary problem and argue that it gives rise to an unaddressed challenge for presentists and growing block theorists. (shrink)

According to Satosi Watanabe's "theorem of the ugly duckling", the number of predicates satisfied by any two different particulars is a constant, which does not depend on the choice of the two particulars. If the number of predicates satisfied by two particulars is their number of properties in common, and the degree of resemblance between two particulars is a function of their number of properties in common, then it follows that the degree of resemblance between any two different particulars is (...) also constant, which is absurd. Avoiding this absurd conclusion requires questioning assumptions about infinity in the proof or interpretation of the theorem, adopting a sparse conception of properties, or denying degree of resemblance is a function of number of properties in common. After arguing against both the first two options, this paper argues for a version of the third which analyses degree of resemblance as a function of properties in common, but weighted by their degree of naturalness or importance. (shrink)

The main idea of this thesis is multi-descriptional physicalism. According to it, only physical entities are elements of our ontology, and there are different ways to describe them. Higher-level vocabularies (e.g., mental, neurological, biological) truly describe reality. Sentences about higher-level entities are made true by physical entities. Every chapter will develop multi-descriptional physicalism or defend it from objections. In chapter 1, I will propose a new conceptual reductive account that conceptually reduces higher-level entities to physical entities. This conceptual reductive account (...) combines resources from Heil’s truthmaker theory and either a priori physicalism or a posteriori physicalism. In chapter 2, I apply this conceptual reductive account to various debates. Physicalism, the multiple-realisability argument, the prototype theory of concepts, and truthmaker explanations will be discussed. In chapter 3, I will argue that a major aim of metaphysics should be to discover which entities are fundamental and explain why they suffice for the existence of derivative entities. In chapter 4, I will propose a new way to explain why sentences apparently about composite objects are true even though there are no composite objects. It combines resources from Cameron’s truthmaker theory and van Inwagen’s paraphrase strategy. In chapter 5, I will argue that the intuition that the mind and the body are very different does not show that the mind is distinct from the body. This intuition can be explained away by mentioning our dispositions to give non-physical explanations when we are ignorant of physical facts. In chapter 6, I will examine two arguments for the existence of a metaphysically independent level, and I will argue that only a modified version of one of them succeeds. I will argue that methodological principles support the view that there is a metaphysically independent level. (shrink)