Nelson et al.(2023) argue that the inclusion of personal experience in bioethical debates has significant benefits and liabilities, illustrating their claim with two examples: unproven medical treatments and disability bioethics. We believe that the benefits of including personal experience in disability bioethics far exceed its liabilities. The absence of participants with relevant experience impoverishes and biases bioethical debates, while the biases risked by their inclusion are hardly unique to personal experiences and are readily mitigated.

In a recent article, Ethan Bradley and Mark Navin (2021) argue that vaccine refusal is not akin to free riding. Here, I defend one connection between vaccine refusal and free riding and suggest that, when viewed in conjunction with their other arguments, this might constitute a reason to mandate Covid-19 vaccination.

I present unexplored and unaccounted for uses of 'wants'. I call them advisory uses, on which information inaccessible to the desirer herself helps determine what she wants. I show that extant theories by Stalnaker, Heim, and Levinson fail to predict these uses. They also fail to predict true indicative conditionals with 'wants' in the consequent. These problems are related: intuitively valid reasoning with modus ponens on the basis of the conditionals in question results in unembedded advisory uses. I consider two (...) fixes, and end up endorsing a relativist semantics, according to which desire attributions express information-neutral propositions. On this view, 'wants' functions as a precisification of 'ought', which exhibits similar unembedded and compositional behavior. I conclude by sketching a pragmatic account of the purpose of desire attributions that explains why it made sense for them to evolve in this way. (shrink)

Standard semantic theories predict that non-deictic readings for complex demonstratives should be much more widely available than they in fact are. If such readings are the result of a lexical ambiguity, as Kaplan (in: Almog, Perry, Wettstein (eds) Themes from Kaplan, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977) and others suggest, we should expect them to be available wherever a definite description can be used. The same prediction follows from ‘hidden argument’ theories like the ones described by King (Complex Demonstratives: a Quantificational (...) Account, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2001) and Elbourne (Situations and Individuals, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2005). Wolter (That’s That; the Semantics and Pragmatics of Demonstrative Noun Phrases. Ph.D. thesis, University of California at Santa Cruz, 2006), however, has shown that complex demonstratives admit non-deictic interpretations only when a precise set of structural constrains are met. In this paper, I argue that Wolter’s results, properly understood, upend the philosophical status quo. They fatally undermine the ambiguity theory and demand a fundamental rethinking of the hidden argument approach. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the ‘social meanings’ associated with sociolinguistic variation put pressure on the standard philosophical conception of language, according to which the foremost thing we do with words is exchange information. Drawing on parallels with the explanatory challenge posed by slurs and pejoratives, I argue that the best way to understand social meanings is to think of them in speech act theoretic terms. I develop a distinctive form of pluralism about the performances realized by means of (...) sociolinguistic variants, and I claim that engagement with such performances is an utterly pervasive feature of our linguistic activity. (shrink)

Most philosophers recognize that applying the standard semantics for complex demonstratives to non-deictic instances results in truth conditions that are anomalous, at best. This fact has generated little concern, however, since most philosophers treat non-deictic demonstratives as marginal cases, and believe that they should be analyzed using a distinct semantic mechanism. In this paper, I argue that non-deictic demonstratives cannot be written off; they are widespread in English and foreign languages, and must be treated using the same semantic machinery that (...) is applied to deictic instances. (shrink)

Recently, philosophers have offered compelling reasons to think that demonstratives are best represented as variables, sensitive not to the context of utterance, but to a variable assignment. Variablists typically explain familiar intuitions about demonstratives—intuitions that suggest that what is said by way of a demonstrative sentence varies systematically over contexts—by claiming that contexts initialize a particular assignment of values to variables. I argue that we do not need to link context and the assignment parameter in this way, and that we (...) would do better not to. (shrink)

What determines the meaning of a context-sensitive expression in a context? It is standardly assumed that, for a given expression type, there will be a unitary answer to this question; most of the literature on the subject involves arguments designed to show that one particular metasemantic proposal is superior to a specific set of alternatives. The task of the present essay will be to explore whether this is a warranted assumption, or whether the quest for the one true metasemantics might (...) be a Quixotic one. We argue that there are good reasons—much better than are commonly appreciated—for thinking the latter, but that there nevertheless remains significant scope for metasemantic theorizing. We conclude by outlining our preferred option, metasemantic pluralism. (shrink)

This paper aims to clear up the epistemology of learning morality from Artificial Moral Advisors (AMAs). We start with a brief consideration of what counts as moral enhancement and consider the risk of deskilling raised by machines that offer moral advice. We then shift focus to the epistemology of moral advice and show when and under what conditions moral advice can lead to enhancement. We argue that people’s motivational dispositions are enhanced by inspiring people to act morally, instead of merely (...) telling them how to act. Drawing upon these insights, we claim that if AMAs are to genuinely enhance people morally, they should be designed as inspiration and not authority machines. In the final section, we evaluate existing AMA models to shed light on which holds the most promise for helping to make users better moral agents. (shrink)

The twenty-first century will witness an unprecedented decline in the diversity of the world’s languages. While most philosophers will likely agree that this decline is lamentable, the question of what exactly is lost with a language has not been systematically explored in the philosophical literature. In this paper, I address this lacuna by arguing that language loss constitutes a problematic form of illocutionary silencing. When a language disappears, past and present speakers lose the ability to realize a range of speech (...) acts that can only be realized in that language. With that ability, speakers lose something in which they have a fundamental interest: their standing as fully empowered members of a linguistic community. (shrink)

The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic offers a unique case study for understanding conceptual and linguistic propagation. In early 2020, scientists, politicians, journalists, and other public figures had to, with great urgency, propagate several public health-related concepts and terms to every person they could. This paper examines the propagation of coronavirus and social distancing and develops a framework for understanding how the language used to express a notion can help or hinder propagation. I argue that anyone designing a representational device (...) for propagation needs to appreciate the three-way causal relationship between language, people’s mental representations, and the extramental world. Using this framework, I explore what makes “social distancing” a bad name for social distancing and why it is unproblematic that “coronavirus” is a scientifically loose way of speaking about the virus. Through this and further study of the many historical examples of linguistic and conceptual propagation, conceptual engineers can better understand the complex challenges facing people who want to propagate representational devices. (shrink)

Much has been written on whether practical knowledge (knowledge-how) reduces to propositional knowledge (knowledge-that). Less attention has been paid to what we call deliberative knowledge (knowledge-to), i.e., knowledge ascriptions embedding other infinitival questions, like _where to meet_, _when to leave_, and _what to bring_. We offer an analysis of knowledge-to and argue on its basis that, regardless of whether knowledge-how reduces to knowledge-that, no such reduction of knowledge-to is forthcoming. Knowledge-to, unlike knowledge-that and knowledge-how, requires the agent to have formed (...) certain conditional intentions. We discuss the philosophical implications for knowledge-how, deliberative questions, and virtue. (shrink)

It is increasingly common for philosophers to rely on the notion of an idealised listener when explaining how the semantic values of context-sensitive expressions are determined. Some have identified the semantic values of such expressions, as used on particular occasions, with whatever an appropriately idealised listener would take them to be. Others have argued that, for something to count as the semantic value, an appropriately idealised listener should be able to recover it. Our aim here is to explore the range (...) of ways that such idealisation might be worked out, and then to argue that none of these results in a very plausible theory. We conclude by reflecting on what this negative result reveals about the nature of meaning and responsibility. (shrink)

In this paper, I show how a novel treatment of speech acts can be combined with a well-known liberal argument for multiculturalism in a way that will justify claims about the preservation, protection, or accommodation of minority languages. The key to the paper is the claim that every language makes a distinctive range of speech acts possible, acts that cannot be realized by means of any other language. As a result, when a language disappears, so does a class of speech (...) acts. If we accept that our social identities are in large part constituted by the decisions we make about how to speak, language loss, then, will amount to a substantial infringement on our autonomy in a particularly important domain. (shrink)

The Knower paradox purports to place surprising a priori limitations on what we can know. According to orthodoxy, it shows that we need to abandon one of three plausible and widely-held ideas: that knowledge is factive, that we can know that knowledge is factive, and that we can use logical/mathematical reasoning to extend our knowledge via very weak single-premise closure principles. I argue that classical logic, not any of these epistemic principles, is the culprit. I develop a consistent theory validating (...) all these principles by combining Hartry Field's theory of truth with a modal enrichment developed for a different purpose by Michael Caie. The only casualty is classical logic: the theory avoids paradox by using a weaker-than-classical K3 logic. I then assess the philosophical merits of this approach. I argue that, unlike the traditional semantic paradoxes involving extensional notions like truth, its plausibility depends on the way in which sentences are referred to--whether in natural languages via direct sentential reference, or in mathematical theories via indirect sentential reference by Gödel coding. In particular, I argue that from the perspective of natural language, my non-classical treatment of knowledge as a predicate is plausible, while from the perspective of mathematical theories, its plausibility depends on unresolved questions about the limits of our idealized deductive capacities. (shrink)

Stojnić et al. (2013, 2017) argue that the reference of demonstratives is fixed without any contribution from the extra-linguistic context. On their `prominence/coherence' theory, the reference of a demonstrative expression depends only on its context-independent linguistic meaning. Here, we argue that Stojnić et al.’s striking claims can be maintained in only the thinnest technical sense. Instead of eliminating appeals to the extra-linguistic context, we show how the prominence/coherence theory merely suppresses them. Then we ask why one might be tempted to (...) try and offer such a view. Since we are rather sympathetic to the motivations we find, we close by sketching a more plausible alternative. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering is a philosophical method that aims to design and spread conceptual and linguistic devices to cause meaningful changes in the world. So far, however, conceptual engineers have struggled to successfully spread the conceptual and linguistic entities they have designed to their target communities. This paper argues that conceptual engineering is far more likely to succeed if it incorporates empirical data and empirical methods. Because the causal factors influencing successful propagation of linguistic or conceptual devices are as complicated and (...) interwoven as they are, proper empirical research will greatly boost the likelihood that propagation is successful. In arguing for the superiority of empirical conceptual engineering over armchair-based conceptual engineering, this paper proposes a framework for understanding the causal forces at play in propagation. This is a three-part framework between the label of a lexical item, the psychological states associated with the lexical item, and the worldly things associated with the lexical item. By understanding the way causal forces affecting propagation play out at these three levels, conceptual engineers can better conceptualize, study, and harness the different causal forces affecting the success of their conceptual engineering projects. (shrink)

The question of Absolute Generality is whether quantifiers are ever as general as can be. Absolutists claim that quantifiers sometimes are absolutely general, while Relativists claim that quantifiers are never absolutely general. Although diverse philosophers have found the Relativist ethos compelling, it has been hard to articulate a consistent thesis which says what the Relativist seems to want to say. In this paper, I offer Relativists a way forward: I argue that what is needed to successfully state Relativism is a (...) way of generalizing that is non-quantificational. After showing how to define such a device of generalization in terms of identity between properties in a higher-order logical language, I use the device to articulate a form of Relativism which I prove to be consistent and which I argue captures the intuitive vision of the Relativist. (shrink)

I have two aims for the present paper, one narrow and one broad. The narrow aim is to show that a class of data originally described by Lynsey Wolter empirically undermine the leading treatments of complex demonstratives that have been described in the literature. The broader aim of the paper is to show that Wolter demonstratives, as I will call the constructions I focus on, are a threat not just to existing treatments, but to any possible theory that retains the (...) uncontroversial assumptions that relative clauses always form a constituent with the nouns they modify, and that semantic composition proceeds sequentially and locally, with the inputs to interpretation having the structure syntax tells us they do. (shrink)

According to intensional approaches to modeling content (such as "possible worlds semantics"), sentences which are logically equivalent express the same proposition. Partisans of hyperintensionality think this is too coarse-grained. Though there has been substantial interest recently in developing hyperintensional approaches to modeling content, we are still in early days: it is not clear how fine-grained propositions are on the various approaches, and we do not have a systematic map of how the various approaches relate to each other. In this paper, (...) I begin to sketch that map: I show that two prominent hyperintensional approaches can be seen not as rivals but, in large part, as two sides of the same coin. One is the truthmaker semantics, and the other, the "two-component" approach, models propositions as ordered pairs of "truth-conditional content'' and "subject matter''. I show, in particular, that certain versions of the two approaches approaches actually converge when it comes to these questions of fineness of grain. (shrink)

Gerald Gaus argued in his 1996 book Justificatory Liberalism that proponents of public reason liberalism should attempt to ground their position in a specific epistemology. Critics of public reason liberalism such as David Enoch have also argued that public reason liberals need to elucidate their epistemic claims. Surprisingly, few public reason liberals have taken up Gaus and Enoch on their challenge. This paper will interact with the epistemological position undergirding the public justification principle, access internalism, arguing that it fails. In (...) its place, I put forward and defend proper functionalism as the better grounding epistemology, and then defend the new theory from possible objections. The result will be a synthesis of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s version of liberalism and an externalist version of convergence public reason liberalism. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering is the practice of revising concepts to improve how people talk and think. Its ability to improve talk and thought ultimately hinges on the successful dissemination of desired conceptual changes. Unfortunately, the field has been slow to develop methods to directly test what barriers stand in the way of propagation and what methods will most effectively propagate desired conceptual change. In order to test such questions, this paper introduces the masked time-lagged method. The masked time-lagged method tests people's (...) conceptual understanding at two different points in time without their knowledge of being tested, allowing us to measure conceptual revision in action. Using a masked time-lagged design on a content internalist framework, we attempted to revise PLANET and DINOSAUR in online participants to match experts' concepts. We successfully revised PLANET but not DINOSAUR, demonstrating some of the difficulties conceptual engineers face. Nonetheless, this paper provides conceptual engineers, regardless of framework, with the tools to tackle questions related to implementation empirically and head-on. (shrink)

It is impossible to study philosophical methodology without being struck by the state of absolute chaos of the field’s methodological practices, methodological norms, and metaphilosophical beliefs. Not only are the methods of formal epistemology nothing like the methods of aesthetics, but even within specific debates and subfields, there are often significant disagreements about standards of proof, to say nothing about disagreements about the ultimate nature of the debate. The question facing metaphilosophers is whether this chaos is a feature or a (...) bug. Is the chaos a part of philosophy’s value as an incubator for new ideas or a sign that many philosophers have lost their way and are holding back philosophical progress? (shrink)

The last two decades have seen the proliferation of the empirical study of philosophy. This dissertation defends the practice and argues that to understand the way contingent features of the practice of philosophy affect the epistemic standing of philosophers, we need to draw upon a wider and more varied set of empirical data than is sometimes supposed. To explore this, the dissertation focuses on two places where the practices of the discipline of philosophy have an effect on the epistemology of (...) philosophy. -/- First, the dissertation discusses the interaction between notable works of philosophy and their readers. In particular, it critiques the method of defending the epistemic standing of philosophers through careful examination of notable works of philosophy to discern the methods in the text. Ultimately this method is epistemically unmotivated. It is instead far more important to study how people have interacted and reacted to works of philosophy. -/- Second, the dissertation defends the use of lexicography in philosophy. Using "intuition" as a case study, the dissertation argues metasemantically and lexicographically that philosophers often use common words with meanings unique to philosophy. -/- Through both discussions it is argued that experimental philosophers and epistemologists of philosophy need to drastically expand the sorts of data they collect and consider in their theorizing. -/- ​. (shrink)

I present a paradoxical combination of desires. I show why it's paradoxical, and consider ways of responding. The paradox saddles us with an unappealing trilemma: either we reject the possibility of the case by placing surprising restrictions on what we can desire, or we deny plausibly constitutive principles linking desires to the conditions under which they are satisfied, or we revise some bit of classical logic. I argue that denying the possibility of the case is unmotivated on any reasonable way (...) of thinking about mental content, and rejecting those desire-satisfaction principles leads to revenge paradoxes. So the best response is a non-classical one, according to which certain desires are neither determinately satisfied nor determinately not satisfied. Thus, theorizing about paradoxical propositional attitudes helps constrain the space of possibilities for adequate solutions to semantic paradoxes more generally. (shrink)

It is hardly a novel claim that the work of Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) contains influences from philosophical Daoism, but I argue that this influence has yet to be fully understood. Several scholars criticize Le Guin for misrepresenting Daoist ideas as they appear in ancient Chinese philosophical texts, particularly the Dao De Jing and the Zhuangzi. While I have sympathy for this charge, especially as it relates to Le Guin’s translation of the Dao De Jing, I argue that it (...) fails to understand the extent to which her fiction contains her own philosophical development of Daoist ideas. Looking at some of her most influential works (e.g., The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, The Lathe of Heaven, A Wizard of Earthsea, etc.), I suggest that Le Guin’s fiction is better seen as a refocusing of Daoist concepts such as complementary contrasts and non-action (wu wei) in the contexts of modern feminism, modern anarchism, science fiction, and fantasy. Le Guin was not trying to represent ancient Daoism as a scholar. Rather, she was trying to reimagine Daoism as a creative artist and philosopher in her own right. This way of viewing Le Guin’s work does not fully exorcise the specter of the possibility of Orientalist cultural appropriation, but it does make the issue more complex in a way that can deepen further conversations. To what extent can an artist be guilty of misrepresentation if representation was not, strictly speaking, her goal? I end with a brief reflection on what is perhaps the deepest philosophical lesson of Le Guin’s work: everything is more complicated than it first appears. On that note, the present article is an attempt not just to do philosophy about Le Guin, but to do philosophy in a Le Guinian fashion, which requires rethinking the metaphor of combat that guides much academic philosophy today. (shrink)

According to a prevailing view, conceptual engineering introduces a revolutionary philosophical methodology, challenging traditional conceptual analysis. However, in our paper, we argue that closer scrutiny reveals not only the falsity but also the inherent ambiguity of this narrative. We explore four interpretations of the "Anti-Novelty Claim", the claim that conceptual engineering is not a new way of doing philosophy. Discussing the Anti-Novelty Claim from the perspective of a text’s producer, the text’s consumers, and the exegetical potential of the text, we (...) examine each perspective’s metaphilosophical implications and demonstrate that taking each perspective requires different methods. Adopting these different methods, we argue that the different interpretations of the Anti-Novelty Claim range from nearly trivially true to unlikely but untested. Importantly, we emphasize that each interpretation offers unique philosophical insights, yet addressing them requires diverse types of evidence, preventing a singular, straightforward answer to whether conceptual engineering is new. (shrink)

We describe a method, based on Jennifer Nado’s proposal for classification procedures as targets of conceptual engineering, that implements such procedures by prompting a large language model. We apply this method, using data from the Wikidata knowledge graph, to evaluate stipulative definitions related to two paradigmatic conceptual engineering projects: the International Astronomical Union’s redefinition of PLANET and Haslanger’s ameliorative analysis of WOMAN. Our results show that classification procedures built using our approach can exhibit good classification performance and, through the generation (...) of rationales for their classifications, can contribute to the identification of issues in either the definitions or the data against which they are being evaluated. We consider objections to this method, and discuss implications of this work for three aspects of theory and practice of conceptual engineering: the definition of its targets, empirical methods for their investigation, and their practical roles. The data and code used for our experiments, together with the experimental results, are available in a Github repository. . (shrink)

Many epistemological problems can be solved by the objective Bayesian view that there are rationality constraints on priors, that is, inductive probabilities. But attempts to work out these constraints have run into such serious problems that many have rejected objective Bayesianism altogether. I argue that the epistemologist should borrow the metaphysician’s concept of naturalness and assign higher priors to more natural hypotheses.

Advocates of the Respect Model of moral status have expressed skepticism about the possibility that radically enhanced persons will have a higher threshold of moral status over non-radically enhanced persons. While several philosophers have already argued that advocates of the Respect Model of moral status should recognize such a possibility in a world with radically enhanced persons, I make room for a stronger claim: advocates of the Respect Model of moral status should not only recognize the possibility of higher thresholds (...) of moral status, but in fact are committed to the normative view that radically enhanced persons should have a higher threshold of moral status over non-radically enhanced persons. This stronger claim induces both rational and self-interested worries about the sacrificeability of non-radically enhanced persons, which takes the form of the inequality of immunity problem. While this problem need not rationally worry the advocate of the Respect Model of moral status, I provide some exploratory solutions that can be implemented now to assuage future self-interested fears so that advocates of the Respect Model may learn to respect the dignity of radically enhanced persons. (shrink)

What does logic tells us how about we ought to reason? If P entails Q, and I believe P, should I believe Q? I will argue that we should embed the issue in an independently motivated contextualist semantics for ‘ought’, with parameters for a standard and set of propositions. With the contextualist machinery in hand, we can defend a strong principle expressing how agents ought to reason while accommodating conflicting intuitions. I then show how our judgments about blame and guidance (...) can be handled by this machinery. (shrink)

Metaphysicians sometimes appeal to physics to establish claims about the fundamental nature of the world. But given the current state of inquiry in physics, where there are two most fundamental theories that are incompatible, such arguments of physics-based metaphysics are problematic. I support this line of thought by focussing on two sorts of problematic arguments, special-relativity-based arguments against presentism and big-bang-based arguments in favor of the existence of God. I am not arguing that physics-based metaphysics can’t be done; I am (...) just arguing that extant examples of physics-based metaphysics are flawed. I close by considering various ways that future versions of physics-based metaphysics could potentially be successful. (shrink)

Monism about being says that there is one way to be. Pluralism about being says that there are many ways to be. Recently, Trenton Merricks and David Builes have offered arguments against Pluralism. In this paper, I show how Pluralists who appeal to the relative naturalness of quantifiers can respond to these arguments.

Adam Elga takes the Sleeping Beauty example to provide a counter-example to Reflection, since on Sunday Beauty assigns probability 1/2 to H, and she is certain that on Monday she will assign probability 1/3. I will show that there is a natural way for Bas van Fraassen to defend Reflection in the case of Sleeping Beauty, building on van Fraassen’s treatment of forgetting. This will allow me to identify a lacuna in Elga’s argument for 1/3. I will then argue, however, (...) that not all is well with Reflection: there is a problem with van Fraassen’s treatment of forgetting. Ultimately I will agree with Elga’s 1/3 answer. David Lewis maintains that the answer is 1/2; I will argue that cases of forgetting can be used to show that the premiss of Lewis’s argument for 1/2 is false. (shrink)

On Hume’s account of motivation, beliefs and desires are very different kinds of propositional attitudes. Beliefs are cognitive attitudes, desires emotive ones. An agent’s belief in a proposition captures the weight he or she assigns to this proposition in his or her cognitive representation of the world. An agent’s desire for a proposition captures the degree to which he or she prefers its truth, motivating him or her to act accordingly. Although beliefs and desires are sometimes entangled, they play very (...) different roles in rational agency. In two classic papers (Lewis 1988, 1996), David Lewis discusses several challenges to this Humean picture, but ultimately rejects them. We think that his discussion of a central anti-Humean alternative – the desire-as-belief thesis – is in need of refinnement. On this thesis, the desire for proposition p is given by the belief that p is desirable. Lewis claims that ‘[e]xcept in trivial cases, [this thesis] collapses into contradiction’(Lewis 1996, p. 308). The problem, he argues, is that the thesis is inconsistent with the purportedly plausible requirement that one’s desire for a proposition should not change upon learning that the proposition is true; call this the invariance requirement. In this paper, we revisit Lewis’s argument. We show that, if one carefully distinguishes between non-evaluative and evaluative propositions, the desire-asbelief thesis can be rendered consistent with the invariance requirement. Lewis’s conclusion holds only under certain conditions: the desire-as-belief thesis conflicts with the invariance requirement if and only if there are certain correlations between non-evaluative and evaluative propositions. But when there are such correlations, we suggest, the invariance requirement loses its plausibility. Thus Lewis’s argument against the desire-as-belief thesis appears to be valid only in cases in which it is unsound. (shrink)

In his 1955 essay "Meaning and synonymy in natural languages", Rudolf Carnap presents a thought experiment wherein an investigator provides a hypothetical robot with a definition of a concept together with a description of an individual, and then asks the robot if the individual is in the extension of the concept. In this work, we show how to realize Carnap's Robot through knowledge probing of an large language model (LLM), and argue that this provides a useful cognitive tool for conceptual (...) engineers to compare the extension of a proposed concept definition to the extensional knowledge represented as facts in a given knowledge base, providing a possible solution to the implementation problem in conceptual engineering. (shrink)

Contrary to Block's assertion, “identity-crowding” does not provide an interesting instance of object-seeing without object-attention. The successful judgments and unusual phenomenology of identity-crowding are better explained by unconscious perception and non-perceptual phenomenology associated with cognitive states. In identity-crowding, as in other cases of crowding, subjects see jumbled textures and cannot individuate the items contributing to those textures in the absence of attention. Block presents an attenuated sense in which identity-crowded items are seen, but this is irrelevant to the debate about (...) phenomenal experience of an object in the absence of object-attention. Finally, even unconscious object perception in identity-crowding likely involves an attention-like selective process. (shrink)

There is a divide in epistemology between those who think that, for any hypothesis and set of total evidence, there is a unique rational credence in that hypothesis, and those who think that there can be many rational credences. Schultheis offers a novel and potentially devastating objection to Permissivism, on the grounds that Permissivism permits dominated credences. I will argue that Permissivists can plausibly block Schultheis' argument. The issue turns on getting clear about whether we should be certain whether our (...) credences are rational. (shrink)

The fundamental constants that are involved in the laws of physics which describe our universe are finely-tuned for life, in the sense that if some of the constants had slightly different values life could not exist. Some people hold that this provides evidence for the existence of God. I will present a probabilistic version of this fine-tuning argument which is stronger than all other versions in the literature. Nevertheless, I will show that one can have reasonable opinions such that the (...) fine-tuning argument doesn’t lead to an increase in one’s probability for the existence of God. (shrink)

The desirability of what actually occurs is often influenced by what could have been. Preferences based on such value dependencies between actual and counterfactual outcomes generate a class of problems for orthodox decision theory, the best-known perhaps being the so-called Allais Paradox. In this paper we solve these problems by extending Richard Jeffrey's decision theory to counterfactual prospects, using a multidimensional possible-world semantics for conditionals, and showing that preferences that are sensitive to counterfactual considerations can still be desirability maximising. We (...) end the paper by investigating the conditions necessary and sufficient for a desirability function to be an expected utility. It turns out that the additional conditions imply highly implausible epistemic principles. (shrink)

There is a philosophical tradition of arguing against presentism, the thesis that only presently existing things exist, on the basis of its incompatibility with fundamental physics. I grant that presentism is incompatible with special and general relativity, but argue that presentism is not incompatible with quantum gravity, because there are some theories of quantum gravity that utilize a fixed foliation of spacetime. I reply to various objections to this defense of presentism, and point out a flaw in Gödel's modal argument (...) for the ideality of time. This paper provides an interesting case study of the interplay between physics and philosophy. (shrink)

We develop and defend a new approach to counterlogicals. Non-vacuous counterlogicals, we argue, fall within a broader class of counterfactuals known as counterconventionals. Existing semantics for counterconventionals, 459–482 ) and, 1–27 ) allow counterfactuals to shift the interpretation of predicates and relations. We extend these theories to counterlogicals by allowing counterfactuals to shift the interpretation of logical vocabulary. This yields an elegant semantics for counterlogicals that avoids problems with the usual impossible worlds semantics. We conclude by showing how this approach (...) can be extended to counterpossibles more generally. (shrink)

I argue that space has three dimensions, and quantum mechanics does not show otherwise. Specifically, I argue that the mathematical wave function of quantum mechanics corresponds to a property that an N-particle system has in three-dimensional space.

In this paper, I articulate and argue for a new truthmaker view of ontological commitment, which I call the “General Truthmaker View”: when one affirms a sentence, one is ontologically committed to there being something that makes true the proposition expressed by the sentence. This view comes apart from Quinean orthodoxy in that we are not ontologically committed to the things over which we quantify, and it comes apart from extant truthmaker views of ontological commitment in that we are not (...) ontologically committed to the truthmakers of our sentences. (shrink)

The UK has been ‘following the science’ in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in line with the national framework for the use of scientific advice in assessment of risk. We argue that the way in which it does so is unsatisfactory in two important respects. Firstly, pandemic policy making is not based on a comprehensive assessment of policy impacts. And secondly, the focus on reasonable worst-case scenarios as a way of managing uncertainty results in a loss of decision-relevant information and (...) does not provide a coherent basis for policy making. (shrink)

In reply to the problem of evil, some suggest that God created an infinite number of universes—for example, that God created every universe that contains more good than evil. I offer two objections to these multiverse theodicies. First, I argue that, for any number of universes God creates, he could have created more, because he could have created duplicates of universes. Next, I argue that multiverse theodicies can’t adequately account for why God would create universes with pointless suffering, and hence (...) they don’t solve the problem of evil. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom has it that truth is always evaluated using our actual linguistic conventions, even when considering counterfactual scenarios in which different conventions are adopted. This principle has been invoked in a number of philosophical arguments, including Kripke’s defense of the necessity of identity and Lewy’s objection to modal conventionalism. But it is false. It fails in the presence of what Einheuser (2006) calls c-monsters, or convention-shifting expressions (on analogy with Kaplan’s monsters, or context-shifting expressions). We show that c-monsters naturally (...) arise in contexts, such as metalinguistic negotiations, where speakers entertain alternative conventions. We develop an expressivist theory—inspired by Barker (2002) and MacFarlane (2016) on vague predications and Einheuser (2006) on counterconventionals—to model these shifts in convention. Using this framework, we reassess the philosophical arguments that invoked the conventional wisdom. (shrink)

This article articulates and assesses an imperatival approach to the foundations of mathematics. The core idea for the program is that mathematical domains of interest can fruitfully be viewed as the outputs of construction procedures. We apply this idea to provide a novel formalisation of arithmetic and set theory in terms of such procedures, and discuss the significance of this perspective for the philosophy of mathematics.

Mereological nihilism is the view that no objects have proper parts. Despite how counter‐intuitive it is, it is taken quite seriously, largely because it solves a number of puzzles in the metaphysics of material objects – or so its proponents claim. In this article, I show that for every puzzle that mereological nihilism solves, there is a similar puzzle that (a) it doesn’t solve, and (b) every other solution to the original puzzle does solve. Since the solutions to the new (...) puzzles apply just as well to the old puzzles, the old puzzles provide no motivation to be a mereological nihilist. (shrink)