There is a growing literature in philosophy dealing with the phenomenon of inner speech, that is, the activity of speaking to oneself in one’s mind. This paper highlights a feature of inner speech which has not yet been noticed in this literature: that there is something distinctive that it is like to make a sincere assertion in inner speech (and, indeed, in external speech). The paper then traces out two implications of this observation. The first relates to the question of how we should characterise inner speech; the second relates to the question of how inner speech may play a role in self-attributions of belief.

In Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit (1984) observed that most people are biased towards the future at least when it comes to pain and pleasure. That is, they regard a given amount of pain as less bad when it is in the past than when it is in the future, and a given amount of pleasure as less good. While Parfit (implicitly) held that this bias is rational, it has recently come under effective attack by temporal neutralists, who have offered cases that with plausible auxiliary assumptions appear to be counterexamples to the rationality claim. I’m going to argue that these cases and the rationale behind them only suffice to motivate a more limited rejection of future bias, and that constrained future bias is indeed rationally permissible. My argument turns on the distinct rational implications of action-guiding and pure temporal preferences. I’ll argue that future bias is rational when it comes to the latter, even if not the former. As I’ll say, Only Action Fixes Utility: it is only when you act on the basis of assigning a utility to an outcome that you rationally commit to giving it the same value when it is past as when it is in the future.

‘Radical enactivism’ (Hutto and Myin 2013, 2017) eschews representational content for all ‘basic’ mental activities. Critics have argued that this view cannot make sense of the workings of the imagination. In their recent book (2017), Hutto and Myin respond to these critics, arguing that some imaginings can be understood without attributing them any representational content. Their response relies on the claim that a system can exploit a structural isomorphism between two things without either of those things being a semantically evaluable representation of the other. I argue that even if this claim is granted, there remains a problem for radically enactive accounts of imagining, namely that the active establishing and maintenance of a structural isomorphism seems to require representational content even if the exploitation of such an isomorphism, when established, does not.

The question whether Frege’s theory of indirect reference enforces an infinite hierarchy of senses has been hotly debated in the secondary literature. Perhaps the most influential treatment of the issue is that of Burge (1979), who offers an argument for the hierarchy from rather minimal Fregean assumptions. I argue that this argument, endorsed by many, does not itself enforce an infinite hierarchy of senses. I conclude that whether or not the theory of indirect reference can avail itself of only finitely many senses is pending further theoretical development.

A common assumption in contemporary debates about normative reasons is that ‘subjective’ and ‘possessed’ are two names for the same sort of reason. This paper challenges that assumption. Given our cognitive limitations, it is unsurprising that normative reasons that derive from what we know and reasons that we are in a position to use in our deliberation are not always one and the same.

There is an interesting puzzle about the interaction between mereology, topology, and dependence. It is not only interesting in and on itself, but also reveals subtleties about the aforementioned interaction that have gone unnoticed. The puzzle has it that the following plausible claims are jointly inconsistent: (i) wholes depend on their parts; (ii) boundaries are parts; (iii) boundaries depend on the whole they are part of. In the paper, I first argue that claims (i)–(iii) are not as a matter of fact inconsitent insofar as further assumptions are needed to get the puzzle off the ground. I consider several such assumptions, somemore plausible than others. Though I do not take any definite stance as to whether the plusibility of the assumptions considered trump that of claims (i)–(iii), I set forth a suggestion to replace (iii) with something similar yet interestingly different.

Elizabeth Barnes and Robert Williams have developed a theory of metaphysical indeterminacy, via which they defend the theoretical legitimacy of vague objects. In this paper, we argue that while the Barnes–Williams theory supplies a viable account of genuine metaphysical vagueness, it cannot underwrite an account of genuinely vague objects. First we clarify the distinction between these two key theses. Then we argue that the Barnes–Williams theory of metaphysical vagueness not only fails to deliver genuinely vague objects, it in fact provides grounds for rejecting them.

Are counterfactuals with true antecedents and consequents trivially true? The principle of Conjunction Conditionalization ((A˄C)→(A>C)) is highly controversial. Many philosophers view it as an attractive feature of Lewis’s semantics for counterfactuals that it can easily be modified to avoid this principle. However, Walters and Williams (2013) beg to differ. They argue that Conjunction Conditionalization is an indispensable ingredient of any Lewisian semantics, since CC is entailed by standard Lewisian theorems and a plausible semantic claim about irrelevant semifactuals. If this is true, the entire tradition of revisionist counterfactual semantics is misguided, and so are many philosophical theories in which counterfactuals play a role. We argue, in defense of the revisionist tradition, that Walters and Williams’ ‘plausible semantic claim’ is in fact anything but plausible. It turns out to entail semantic principles far more controversial than Conjunction Conditionalization.