My thesis is that you can lie with ‘ P therefore Q ’ without P or Q being lies. For you can lie by virtue of not believing that P supports Q. My thesis is reconciled with the principle that all lies are assertions through H. P. Grice’s account of conventional implicatures. These semantic cousins of conversational implicatures are secondary assertions that clarify the speaker’s attitude toward his primary assertions. The meaning of ‘therefore’ commits the speaker to an entailment thesis (...) even though the speaker does not enter that commitment into the text. Insincere conventional implicatures are akin to insincerely asserted footnotes. An absence of lies in the text is compatible with the presence of lies in the meta-text. (shrink)

In previous published research (“Conditionals and Inferential Connections: A Hypothetical Inferential Theory,” Cognitive Psychology, 2018), we investigated experimentally what role the presence and strength of an inferential connection between a conditional’s antecedent and consequent plays in how people process that conditional. Our analysis showed the strength of that connection to be strongly predictive of whether participants evaluated the conditional as true, false, or neither true nor false. In this article, we re-analyse the data from our previous research, now focussing on (...) the semantics of conditionals rather than on how they are processed. Specifically, we use those data to compare the main extant semantics with each other and with inferentialism, a semantics according to which the truth of a conditional requires the presence of an inferential connection between the conditional’s component parts. (shrink)

Counterfactual Entailment is the view that a counterfactual conditional is true just in case its antecedent entails its consequent. I present an argument for Counterfactual Entailment, and I develop a strategy for explaining away apparent counterexamples to the view. The strategy appeals to the suppositional view of counterfactuals, on which a counterfactual is essentially a statement, made relative to the supposition of its antecedent, of its consequent.

Cet article présente, contre le physicalisme, un argument métaphysique fondé sur la distinction entre les propriétés intrinsèques et extrinsèques. Il soutient que le physique, comme le physicalisme doit le comprendre, comprend uniquement des propriétés extrinsèques, tandis que la conscience implique au moins certaines propriétés intrinsèques. Il conclut que la conscience a des propriétés non-physiques et que le physicalisme est faux. L’article défend ensuite ses prémisses contre la pensée physicaliste actuelle. Autant que possible, il offre des arguments métaphysiques portant sur les (...) propriétés physiques et conscientes plutôt que des arguments épistémologiques portant sur nos concepts physiques et phénoménaux. (shrink)

Many powers metaphysicians postulate both active and passive powers, understood as distinct kinds of intrinsic causal properties of objects. I argue that the category of passive power is superfluous. I also offer a diagnosis of how philosophers are misled to postulate passive powers.

One of the most unsettling problems in the history of philosophy examines how mathematics can be used to adequately represent the world. An influential thesis, stated by Eugene Wigner in his paper entitled "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences," claims that "the miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve." Contrary to this view, this thesis delineates and implements (...) a strategy to show that the applicability of mathematics is very reasonable indeed. I distinguish three forms of the problem of the applicability of mathematics, and focus on one I call the problem of uncanny accuracy: Given that the construction and manipulation of mathematical representations is pervaded by uncertainty, error, approximation, and idealization, how can their apparently uncanny accuracy be explained? I argue that this question has found no satisfactory answer because our rational reconstruction of scientific practice has not involved tools rich enough to capture the logic of mathematical modelling. Thus, I characterize a general schema of mathematical analysis of real systems, focusing on the selection of modelling assumptions, on the construction of model equations, and on the extraction of information, in order to address contextually determinate questions on some behaviour of interest. A concept of selective accuracy is developed to explain the way in which qualitative and quantitative solutions should be utilized to understand systems. The qualitative methods rely on asymptotic methods and on sensitivity analysis, whereas the quantitative methods are best understood using backward error analysis. The basic underpinning of this perspective is readily understandable across scientific fields, and it thereby provides a view of mathematical tractability readily interpretable in the broader context of mathematical modelling. In addition, this perspective is used to discuss the nature of theories, the role of scaling, and the epistemological and semantic aspects of experimentation. In conclusion, we argue for a method of local and global conceptual analysis that goes beyond the reach of the tools standardly used to capture the logic of science; on their basis, the applicability of mathematics finds itself demystified. (shrink)