In recent years, metaphysics has undergone what some describe as a revolution: it has become standard to understand a vast array of questions as questions about grounding, a metaphysical notion of determination. Why should we believe in grounding, though? Supporters of the revolution often gesture at what I call the Argument from Explanatoriness: the notion of grounding is somehow indispensable to a metaphysical type of explanation. I challenge this argument and along the way develop a “reactionary” view, according to which (...) there is no interesting sense in which the notion of grounding is explanatorily indispensable. I begin with a distinction between two conceptions of grounding, a distinction which extant critiques of the revolution have usually failed to take into consideration: grounding qua that which underlies metaphysical explanation and grounding qua metaphysical explanation itself. Accordingly, I distinguish between two versions of the Argument from Explanatoriness: the Unexplained Explanations Version for the first conception of grounding, and the Expressive Power Version for the second. The paper’s conclusion is that no version of the Argument from Explanatoriness is successful. (shrink)

The Argument from Vagueness for Universalism contends that any non-arbitrary restriction on composition must be vague, but that vague composition leads to unacceptable count indeterminacy. One common response to the argument is that borderline cases of composition don’t necessarily lead to count indeterminacy because a determinately existing thing may be a borderline case of a presently existing concrete composite object. We can collectively refer to such views as versions of the Status Response. This paper argues that the Status Response cannot (...) handle count indeterminacy about various categories of things, such as events, states of affairs, tropes, holes, shadows, and created abstracta, when these are understood in the right way. This makes the Status Response objectionablfy ad hoc, which should lead us to look for alternative ways of resisting the Argument from Vagueness. (shrink)

How is grounding related to metaphysical explanation? The standard view is that the former somehow “backs”, “undergirds” or “underlies” the latter. This view fits into a general picture of explanation, according to which explanations in general hold in virtue of a certain elite group of “explanatory relations” or “determinative relations” that back them. This paper turns the standard view on its head: grounding doesn't “back” metaphysical explanation but is in an important sense downstream from it. I call this view “grounding (...) idealism”, since it structurally resembles an analogous view about causation that is known as “causal idealism” and has been endorsed by philosophers like Michael Scriven and Philip Kitcher. I formulate a specific version of grounding idealism, Metaphysical Explanation‐First Idealism (MEFI), according to which the semantic value of ‘grounding’ is an abundant, gerrymandered relation settled by the metaphysical explanation facts. Then I offer some theoretical considerations that support MEFI over rival accounts of the relation between grounding and metaphysical explanation. Finally, I address the question of what role is left for grounding to play, if not that of “backing” metaphysical explanations. (shrink)

In his excellent book, Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time (Sider, 2001), Theodore Sider defends a version of four-dimensionalism which he calls the ‘stage-theory’. This paper focuses on Sider's argument from vagueness and argues that, due to the problematic nature of the argument from vagueness, Sider’s case in favor of four-dimensionalism is in the end not successful.

Words, languages, symphonies, fictional characters, games, and recipes are plausibly abstract artifacts— entities that have no spatial location and that are deliberately brought into existence as a result of creative acts. Many accept that composition is unrestricted: for every plurality of material objects, there is a material object that is the sum of those objects. These two views may seem entirely unrelated. I will argue that the most influential argument against restricted composition—the vagueness argument—doubles as an argument that there can (...) be no abstract artifacts. There is no way to resist the vagueness argument against abstract artifacts that does not also undermine the vagueness argument against restricted composition. (shrink)

Many of those who accept the universalist thesis that mereological composition is unrestricted also maintain that the folk typically restrict their quantifiers in such a way as to exclude strange fusions when they say things that appear to conflict with universalism. Despite its prima facie implausibility, there are powerful arguments for universalism. By contrast, there is remarkably little evidence for the thesis that strange fusions are excluded from the ordinary domain of quantification. Furthermore, this reconciliatory strategy seems hopeless when applied (...) to the more fundamental conflict between universalism and the intuitions that tell against it. (shrink)

Nihilism is the thesis that no composite objects exist. Some ontologists have advocated abandoning nihilism in favor of deep nihilism, the thesis that composites do not existO, where to existO is to be in the domain of the most fundamental quantifier. By shifting from an existential to an existentialO thesis, the deep nihilist seems to secure all the benefits of a composite-free ontology without running afoul of ordinary belief in the existence of composites. I argue that, while there are well-known (...) reasons for accepting nihilism, there appears to be no reason at all to accept deep nihilism. In particular, deep nihilism draws no support either from the usual arguments for nihilism or from considerations of parsimony. (shrink)

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)

An Aristotelian philosophy of nature rejects the modern prejudice in favor of the microscopic, a rejection that is crucial if we are to penetrate the mysteries of the quantum world. I defend an Aristotelian model by drawing on both quantum chemistry and recent work on the measurement problem. By building on the work of Hans Primas, using the distinction between quantum and classical properties that emerges in quantum chemistry at the thermodynamic or continuum limit, I develop a new version of (...) the Copenhagen interpretation, a version that is realist, holistic, and hylomorphic in character, allowing for the attribution of fundamental causal powers to human observers and their instruments. I conclude with a critique of non-hylomorphic theories of primitive ontology, including Bohmian mechanics, Everettianism, and GRW mass-density. (shrink)

To understand Aristotle’s conception of form, we have to see clearly the relationship between his account and Plato’s Theory of Forms. I offer a novel interpretation of Aristotle’s Moderate Realism, in which forms are simple particulars that ground the character and mutual similarity of the entities they inform. Such an account has advantages in three areas: explaining (1) the similarity of particulars, (2) the synchronic unity of composite particulars, and (3) the diachronic unity or persistence of intrinsically changing particulars.

An introduction to the Synthese topical collection "Humeanisms".

Unlike conceptual analysis, conceptual engineering does not aim to identify the content that our current concepts do have, but the content which these concepts should have. For this method to show the results that its practitioners typically aim for, being able to change meanings seems to be a crucial presupposition. However, certain branches of semantic externalism raise doubts about whether this presupposition can be met. To the extent that meanings are determined by external factors such as causal histories or microphysical (...) structures, it seems that they cannot be changed intentionally. This paper gives an extended discussion of this ‘externalist challenge’. Pace Herman Cappelen’s recent take on this issue, it argues that the viability of conceptual engineering crucially depends on our ability to bring about meaning change. Furthermore, it argues that, contrary to first appearance, causal theories of reference do allow for a sufficient degree of meaning control. To this purpose, it argues that there is a sense of what is called ‘collective long-range control’, and that popular versions of the causal theory of reference imply that people have this kind of control over meanings. (shrink)

Verbal disputes are often seen as closely related to a lack of substantivity. However, a systematic and comprehensive investigation of how verbalness relates to substantivity is still missing. The present paper attempts to close this gap. In addition to offering different conceptions of verbalness, the paper further develops Sider’s (Writing the Book of the World, OUP, Oxford, 2011) notion of substantivity. Ultimately, I argue for a more careful choice of terminology when it comes to assessing a dispute as “(merely) verbal” (...) or “nonsubstantive”. While the paper shows that there is no strict logical relation between mere verbalness and nonsubstantivity construed along the lines set out by Sider, it also demonstrates that further notable notions of (mere) verbalness and substantivity are in fact closely intertwined. (shrink)

Antihaecceitists believe that all facts about specific individuals—such as the fact that Fred exists, or that Katie is tall—globally supervene on purely qualitative facts. Haecceitists deny that. The issue is not only of interest in itself, but receives additional importance from its intimate connection to the question of whether all fundamental facts are qualitative or whether they include facts about which specific individuals there are and how qualitative properties and relations are distributed over them. Those who think that all fundamental (...) facts are qualitative are arguably committed to antihaecceitism. The goal of this paper is to point out some problems for antihaecceitism (and therefore for the thesis that all fundamental facts are qualitative). The article focuses on two common assumptions about possible worlds: (i) Sets of possible worlds are the bearers of objective physical chance. (ii) Counterfactual conditionals can be defined by appeal to a relation of closeness between possible worlds. The essay tries to show that absurd consequences ensue if either of these assumptions is combined with antihaecceitism. Then it considers a natural response by the antihaecceitist, which is to deny that worlds play the role described in (i) and (ii). Instead, the reply continues, we can introduce a new set of entities that are defined in terms of worlds and that behave the way worlds do on the haecceitist position. That allows the antihaecceitist to formulate antihaecceitist friendly versions of (i) and (ii) by replacing the appeal to possible worlds with reference to the newly introduced entities. This maneuver invites an obvious reply, however. If the new entities are the things that play the role we typically associate with worlds, as partially described by (i) and (ii), then it is natural to conclude that they really are the entities we talk about when we speak of worlds, so that haecceitism is true after all. (shrink)

Metaphysics should follow science in postulating laws alongside properties. I defend this claim against the claim that natural properties conceived as powers make laws of nature redundant. Natural properties can be construed in a “thin” or a “thick” way. If one attributes a property in the thin sense to an object, this attribution does not conceptually determine which other properties the object possesses. The thin construal is underlying the scientific strategy for understanding nature piecemeal. Science explains phenomena by cutting reality (...) conceptually in properties attributed to space-time points, where these properties are conceived of independently of each other, to explore then, in a separate step, how the properties are related to each other; those determination relations between properties are laws. This is compatible with the thesis that laws are metaphysically necessary. According to the thick conception, a property contains all its dependency relations to other properties. The dependency relationships between properties (which appear as laws in the thin conception) are parts of the properties they relate. There are several reasons to resist the thick conception of properties. It makes simple properties “holistic”, in the sense that each property contains many other properties as parts. It cannot account for the fact that properties constrain each other’s identity; it can neither explain why natural properties are linked to a unique set of dispositions, nor why and how this set is structured nor why the truth-maker of many disposition attributions is relational although the disposition is grounded on a monadic property. (shrink)

Dispositional Essentialism is a unified anti-Humean account of the metaphysics of low-level physical properties and laws of nature. In this paper, I articulate the view that I label Canonical Dispositional Essentialism, which comprises a structuralist metaphysics of properties and an account of laws as relations in the property structure. I then present an alternative anti-Humean account of properties and laws. This account rejects CDE’s structuralist metaphysics of properties in favour of a view of properties as qualitative grounds of dispositions and (...) it rejects CDE’s view of laws as relations in favour of a view of laws as features of an efficient description of possible property distributions. I then defend this view over CDE on the grounds that it can overcome an explanatory shortcoming of CDE and that it achieves a level of continuity with science that CDE fails to achieve. The upshot of this paper is a significant narrowing of the range of possibilities in which the absolutely best unified account of laws and properties resides. (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)

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)

I argue that an unHumean ontology of irreducibly dispositional properties might be fruitfully combined with what has typically been thought of as a Humean account of laws, namely, the best-system account, made popular by David Lewis (e.g., 1983, 1986, 1994). In this paper I provide the details of what I argue is the most defensible account of Humean laws in an unHumean world. This package of views has the benefits of upholding scientific realism while doing without any suspect metaphysical entities (...) to account for natural law. I conclude by arguing that the Humean laws-unHumean ontology package is well placed to provide an account of objective, nontrivial chances, a famous stumbling block for the Humean laws-Humean ontology package developed by Lewis. (shrink)

Stephen Mumford and Alexander Bird disagree about which properties are powers and, correspondingly, about the extent of the philosophical work to which powers may be put. Unfortunately, there is an important respect in which these authors are talking past each other and so the reason for their disagreement remains obscured. I highlight what has gone wrong in their recent exchange, attempt to clear up the confusion and pinpoint the true source of their disagreement. My hope is to redirect the efforts (...) of these authors and their followers onto more pressing foundational issues in the metaphysics of powers. (shrink)

Michael Martin aims to affirm a certain pattern of first-person thinking by advocating disjunctivism, a theory of perceptual experience which combines naive realism with the epistemic conception of hallucination. In this paper I argue that we can affirm the pattern of thinking in question without the epistemic conception of hallucination. The first part of my paper explains the link that Martin draws between the first-person thinking and the epistemic conception of hallucination. The second part of my paper explains how we (...) can achieve Martin’s ambition without Martin’s theory. One resource that I enlist for this purpose is a naive-realist friendly conception of first-person access to experience. The metaphysical theory that I enlist is a form of naive realism that endorses an intentionalist or representationalist “common-factor” approach to veridical and hallucinatory experience. The third part of my paper briefly develops this theory. (shrink)

There is a puzzle about the use of paraphrase in philosophy, presented most famously in Alston's [1958] ‘Ontological Commitments’, but found throughout the literature. The puzzle arises from the fact that a symmetry required for a paraphrase to be successful seems to necessitate a symmetry sufficient for a paraphrase to fail, since any two expressions that stand in the means the same as relation must also stand in the has the same commitments as relation. I show that, while this problem (...) does undermine some conceptions of paraphrase, on a proper understanding of paraphrase the puzzle gets no purchase. Since paraphrase is an important component of Quinean approaches to meta-ontology, this paper constitutes a partial defence of Quinean meta-ontology. Since paraphrase is an important component of traditional methods of philosophical inquiry, this paper constitutes a partial defence of traditional modes of philosophizing as well. (shrink)

In the first part ("Determination"), I consider different notions of determination, contrast and compare modal with non-modal accounts and then defend two a-modality theses concerning essence and supervenience. I argue, first, that essence is a a-modal notion, i.e. not usefully analysed in terms of metaphysical modality, and then, contra Kit Fine, that essential properties can be exemplified contingently. I argue, second, that supervenience is also an a-modal notion, and that it should be analysed in terms of constitution relations between properties. (...) In the second part ("A Theory of Truthmaking"), I first review the literature on ontological commitment, and argue that the notion of truthmaking is better suited to play its explanatory rôle. I then argue that we should take truthmaker theory seriously, and that we should provide actual truthmakers for all truths there are. In the last chapter of this part, I review Armstrong's truthmaker theories and argue that they are unsatisfactory. I generalise my criticism to an argument against truthmaker necessitarianism, the view that truthmakers necessarily make true the truths they are truthmakers of. In the third part ("Properties and their Kind(s)"), I discuss qualitative determination. I present and endorse the truthmaker argument for universals, and defend universalism against friends of tropes, states of affairs and facts. I then give a novel characterisation of the important class of intrinsic properties, building on Lewis' work. With a workable notion of intrinsicness at hand, I argue that relations are ontologically – but not "ideologically" – dispensable: qualitative determination in general is a matter of intrinsic structure. In the future, I plan to add two parts and to publish my thesis as a book: In the fourth part ("Exemplification"), I argue for the existence of an exemplification relation tying universals and particulars together. I derive theoretical benefits from this relation by providing adverbialist theories of modality and tense and identify exemplification with a type of parthood. In the fifth part ("Qua qua qua"), I investigate the curious and interesting ontological category of so-called "qua-objects" (Picasso-as-a-painter, for example) and argue that they exist, are not identical with transworld indidivuals or modal parts and that they provide (contingent) truthmakers for all true predications. (shrink)

The proper function of the heart is pumping the blood. According to what we call the type etiological view, this is because previous tokens of the type HEART were selected for pumping the blood. Nanay :412–431, 2010) argues that the type etiological view is viciously circular. He claims that the only plausible accounts of trait type individuation use proper functions, such that whenever the type etiological view is supplemented with a plausible account of trait type individuation, the result is a (...) view that uses proper functions to explain proper functions. We refine this objection, and argue that Nanay at most establishes a potentially benign definitional circularity. However, we show that the type etiological view’s reliance on types nevertheless generates a vicious regress. Hence the type etiological view is false. We reject dispositional and modal alternatives to the type etiological view for the reason that they either cannot accommodate malfunction, or do so at the cost of proliferation; and then formulate a novel token etiological view that overcomes both problems because it makes no reference to trait types. (shrink)

My aim is to argue for the incompatibility of one of the central principles of physics, namely the principle of least action (PLA), with the increasingly popular view that the world is, ultimately, merely something like a con- glomerate of objects and irreducible dispositions. First, I argue that the essentialist implications many suppose this view has are not compatible with the PLA. Second, I argue that, irrespective of whether this view has any essentialist implications, it is not compatible with the (...) kind of explanation that the PLA affords. (shrink)

Recently, there have been several attempts to generalize the counterfactual theory of causal explanations to mathematical explanations. The central idea of these attempts is to use conditionals whose antecedents express a mathematical impossibility. Such countermathematical conditionals are plugged into the explanatory scheme of the counterfactual theory and—so is the hope—capture mathematical explanations. Here, I dash the hope that countermathematical explanations simply parallel counterfactual explanations. In particular, I show that explanations based on countermathematicals are susceptible to three problems counterfactual explanations do (...) not face. These problems seriously challenge the prospects for a counterfactual theory of explanation that is meant to cover mathematical explanations. (shrink)

It is shown that Lewis’ ontological doctrine of Humean supervenience incorporates at its foundation the so-called separability principle of classical physics. In view of the systematic violation of the latter within quantum mechanics, the claim that contemporary physical science may posit non-supervenient relations beyond the spatiotemporal ones is reinforced on a foundational basis concerning constraints on the state representation of physical systems. Depending on the mode of assignment of states to quantum systems — unit state vectors versus statistical density operators (...) — we distinguish between strongly and weakly non-Humean, non-supervenient relations. It is demonstrated that in either case, the relations of quantum entanglement constitute prototypical examples of irreducible physical relations that do not supervene upon a spatiotemporal arrangement of Humean qualities, weakening, thereby, the thesis of Humean supervenience. In this respect, the status of Lewis’ recombination principle is examined, whereas his conception of lawhood is critically investigated. It is concluded that the assumption of ontological reductionism, as expressed in Lewis’ Humean doctrine, cannot be regarded as a reliable code of the nature of the physical world and its contents. It is proposed instead that due to the undeniable existence of non-supervenient relations, a metaphysic of relations of a moderate kind ought to be acknowledged as an indispensable part of our understanding of the natural world at a fundamental level. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that the intelligibility of modal metaphysics has been vindicated. Quine's arguments to the contrary supposedly confused analyticity with metaphysical necessity, and rigid with non-rigid designators.2 But even if modal metaphysics is intelligible, it could be misconceived. It could be that metaphysical necessity is not absolute necessity – the strictest real notion of necessity – and that no proposition of traditional metaphysical interest is necessary in every real sense. If there were nothing otherwise “uniquely metaphysically significant” about (...) metaphysical necessity, then paradigmatic metaphysical necessities would be necessary in one sense of “necessary”, not necessary in another, and that would be it. The question of whether they were necessary simpliciter would be like the question of whether the Parallel Postulate is true simpliciter – understood as a pure mathematical conjecture, rather than as a hypothesis about physical spacetime. In a sense, the latter question has no objective answer. In this article, I argue that paradigmatic questions of modal metaphysics are like the Parallel Postulate question. I then discuss the deflationary ramifications of this argument. I conclude with an alternative conception of the space of possibility. According to this conception, there is no objective boundary between possibility and impossibility. Along the way, I sketch an analogy between modal metaphysics and set theory. (shrink)

Semantic theories based on a hierarchy of types have prominently been used to defend the possibility of unrestricted quantification. However, they also pose a prima facie problem for it: each quantifier ranges over at most one level of the hierarchy and is therefore not unrestricted. It is difficult to evaluate this problem without a principled account of what it is for a quantifier to be unrestricted. Drawing on an insight of Russell’s about the relationship between quantification and the structure of (...) predication, we offer such an account. We use this account to examine the problem in three different type-theoretic settings, which are increasingly permissive with respect to predication. We conclude that unrestricted quantification is available in all but the most permissive kind of type theory. (shrink)

This paper explores the impact of quantification into predicate position on the metaphysics of properties, arguing that two familiar debates about properties are fundamentally altered by recasting them in a second-order setting. Two theories of properties are outlined, differing over whether the existence of properties is expressed using first-order or second-order quantifiers. It is argued that the second-order theory: provides good reason to regard debate about the locations of properties as contentless; resolves debate about whether properties are particulars or universals (...) in favour of universals. (shrink)

This paper outlines a novel solution to the problem of the many and a conception of ordinary objects that implies it. The solution is that many collections of particles can simultaneously constitute a single object. The proposed conception of ordinary objects maintains that they are fundamentally subjects of change: the changes an object is able to survive explain its constitution.

In this introductory article we reconstruct several broad developments in the scholarship on Kant’s theory of natural science with a particular focus on the Anglophone context over the past half-century. Our goal is to illuminate the co-development of Kant scholarship and the philosophy of science during this period and to identify points of influence in both directions. In section 2 we present an overview of the scholarship on Kant’s account of natural laws. In section 3 we survey the diverse interpretations (...) of Kant’s views on biology and consider recent appeals to Kant by philosophers of biology. In section 4 we explore several recent developments in philosophy of science that have potential synergies with Kant scholarship. Our aim is not simply to establish that Kant’s philosophy can have relevance for philosophy of science but also to point out where it has been and continues to be relevant. Appreciating this relevance, we suggest, can help identify productive lines of inquiry for Kant studies. (shrink)

This paper evaluates the argument for the contradictoriness of unity, that be- gins Priest’s recent book One. The argument is seen to fail because it does not adequately differentiate between different forms of unity. This diagnosis of the argument’s failure is used as a basis for two consistent accounts of unity. The paper concludes by arguing that reality contains two absolutely fundamental and unanalysable forms of unity, which are in principle presupposed by any theory of anything. These fundamental forms of (...) unity are closely related to the unity of propositions and facts. (shrink)

With his new riddle of induction, Goodman raised a problem for enumerative induction which many have taken to show that only some ‘natural’ properties can be used for making inductive inferences. Arguably, however, (i) enumerative induction is not a method that scientists use for making inductive inferences in the first place. Moreover, it seems at first sight that (ii) Goodman’s problem does not affect the method that scientists actually use for making such inferences—namely, classical statistics. Taken together, this would indicate (...) that (iii) ‘naturalness’ is not such a relevant concept for the problem of induction, after all. I have no objections against (i) and (iii). But, contrary to (ii), I argue that classical statistics does face a version of Goodman’s problem, which I call the statistical riddle of induction. Given that his problem merely is an instance of the more general problem of underdetermination, this is hardly surprising. Perhaps more importantly, I also show how my riddle can be used for exposing a common fallacy in probabilistic reasoning, without relying on Bayesian assumptions. (shrink)

Epistemic theories of objective chance hold that chances are idealised epistemic probabilities of some sort. After giving a brief history of this approach to objective chance, I argue for a particular version of this view, that the chance of an event E is its epistemic probability, given maximal knowledge of the possible causes of E. The main argument for this view is the demonstration that it entails all of the commonly-accepted properties of chance. For example, this analysis entails that chances (...) supervene on the physical facts, that the chance function is an expert probability, that the existence of stable frequencies results from invariant chances in repeated experiments, and that chances are probably close to long-run relative frequencies in repeated experiments. Despite these virtues, epistemic approaches to chance have been neglected in recent decades, on account of their conflict with accepted views about closely related topics such as causation, laws of nature, and epistemic probability. However, existing views on these topics are also very problematic, and I believe that the epistemic view of chance is a key piece of this puzzle that, once in place, allows all the other pieces to fit together into a new and coherent way. I also respond to some criticisms of the epistemic theory that I favour. (shrink)

In this article I argue for an empiricist view on laws. Some laws are fundamental in the sense that they are the result of inductive generalisations of observed regularities and at the same time in their formulation contain a new theoretical predicate. The inductive generalisations simul- taneously function as implicit definitions of these new predicates. Other laws are either explicit definitions or consequences of other previously established laws. I discuss the laws of classical mechanics, relativity theory and electromagnetism in detail. (...) Laws are necessary, whereas acciden- tal generalisations are not. But necessity here is not a modal concept, but rather interpreted as short for the semantic predicate “... is necessarily true”. Thus no modal logic is needed. The neces- sity attributed to law sentences is in turn interpreted as “necessary condition for the rest of the the- ory”, which is true since fundamental laws are implicit definitions of theoretical predicates use in the theory. (shrink)

In this article I intend to show that the inference problem, one of the main objections raised against the anti-Humean theory of natural laws defended by Dretske, Tooley and Armstrong (?DTA theory? for short), can be successfully answered. First, I argue that a proper solution should meet two essential requirements that the proposals made by the DTA theorists do not satisfy. Then I state a solution to the inference problem that assumes a local immanentistic view of universals, a partial definition (...) of the nomic necessitation relation as a relation of existential dependence, and a principle constraining multiple occupancy. I also argue that my solution meets the two requirements. Finally, I deal with non-standard laws such as exclusion laws, causal laws and laws involving spatiotemporal parameters. (shrink)

Hirsch advocates a certain kind of metaontological deflationism. He believes that, sometimes, metaphysicians are talking past each other. In his opinion, the debate between compositional organicists and compositional universalists is a prototypical verbal dispute. I argue that his diagnosis is wrong especially with regard to this central case. My argument also weakens his deflationist position in general.

David Lewis is associated with the controversial thesis that some properties are more eligible than others to be the referents of our predicates solely in virtue of those properties’ being more natural; independently, that is, of anything to do with our patterns of usage of the relevant predicates. On such a view, the natural properties act as ‘reference magnets’. In this paper I explore (though I do not endorse) a related thesis in epistemology: that some propositions are ‘justification magnets’. According (...) to the doctrine of justification magnetism, we have better justification for some propositions than for others solely in virtue of certain features of those propositions; independently, that is, of anything to do with evidential support or cognitive accomplishment. In the course of discussing an objection to justification magnetism I describe (though I do not endorse) a novel approach to epistemology akin to interpretationism in the theory of reference. (shrink)

Hylomorphism claims that structure is a basic ontological and explanatory principle; it accounts for what things are and what they can do. My goal is to articulate a metaphysic of hylomorphic structure different from those currently on offer. It is based on a substance-attribute ontology that takes properties to be powers and tropes. Hylomorphic structures emerge, on this account, as powers to configure the materials that compose individuals.

The hard problem of consciousness has held center stage in the philosophy of mind for the past two decades. It claims that the phenomenal character of conscious experiences—what it’s like to be in them—cannot be explained by appeal to the operation of physiological subsystems. The hard problem arises, however, only given the assumption that hylomorphism is false. Hylomorphism claims that structure is a basic ontological and explanatory principle. A human is not a random collection of physical materials, but an individual (...) composed of physical materials with a structure that accounts for what it is and what it can do—the powers it has. What is true of humans is true of their activities as well. The latter are not random physiological changes, but structured ones: we engage in them by coordinating the ways our parts manifest their powers. Structured activities include perceptual experiences. Consequently, everything about a perceptual experience, including its phenomenal character, can be explained by describing the perceiver’s perceptual subsystems, the powers of those subsystems, and the coordination that unifies their activities into the activity of the perceiver as a whole. Conscious experiences thus fit unproblematically into the natural world—just as unproblematically as the phenomenon of life. Even exponents of the hard problem of consciousness agree that there is no hard problem of life. Consequently, if hylomorphism is true, there can be no hard problem of consciousness. To insist that there is such a problem, then, is implicitly to reject hylomorphism. The concept of consciousness that motivates the hard problem is as much a theoretical construct, therefore, as the concept of life that motivates an obstinate vitalist. (shrink)