In this note, I discuss David Enoch’s influential deliberative indispensability argument for metanormative realism, and contend that the argument fails. In doing so, I uncover an important disanalogy between explanatory indispensability arguments and deliberative indispensability arguments, one that explains how we could accept the former without accepting the latter.

The Consequence Argument is sound only if no one has a choice about the laws of nature, and one prominent compatibilist reply to the argument—championed by David Lewis (1981)—begins by claiming that there is a sense in which we do have such a choice, and a sense in which we don’t. Lewis then insists that the sense in which we do have such a choice is the only sense required by compatibilism. Peter van Inwagen (2004) has responded that even if Lewis’s distinction between two senses of having a choice about the laws is accepted, compatibilists are still committed to the incredible view that free will requires the ability to perform miracles. In this paper, I offer a reply to van Inwagen on Lewis’s behalf.

Addressing the ‘virtue conflation’ problem requires the preservation of intuitive distinctions between virtue types, that is, between intellectual and moral virtues. According to one influential attempt to avoid this problem proposed by Julia Driver (2003), moral virtues produce benefits to others—in particular, they promote the well-being of others—while the intellectual virtues, as such, produce epistemic good for the agent. We show that Driver’s demarcation of intellectual virtue, by adverting to the self-/other distinction, leads to a reductio, and ultimately, that the prospects for resolving the virtue conflation problem look dim within an epistemic consequentialist approach to the epistemic right and the epistemic good.

According to the indiscernibility characterization of the distinction between particulars and universals, only and all the former have possible numerically distinct indiscernible intrinsic qualitative duplicates. It is argued here that both the sufficiency and the necessity directions are defective and that indiscernibility thus does not distinguish particularity. Against sufficiency: universals may lack intrinsic qualitative character and thus be trivially indiscernible from one another. Against necessity: pluralities of duplicate-less entities are at once duplicate-less and particular.

Extended simples are fruitfully discussed in metaphysics. They are entities which are located in a complex region of space but do not themselves have parts. In this paper, I will discuss unextended complexes: entities which are not located at a complex region of space but do themselves have parts. In particular, I focus on one type of unextended complex: pointy complexes (entities that have parts but are located at a single point of space). Four areas are indicated where pointy complexes might prove philosophically useful. Unextended complexes are therefore philosophically fruitful, in much the same way as extended simples.

Neutral Counterpart Theories of slurs hold that the truth-conditional contribution of a slur is the same as the truth-conditional contribution of its neutral counterpart. In (2015), DiFranco argues that these theories, even if plausible for single-word slurs like ‘kike’ and ‘nigger’, are not suitable for complex slurs such as ‘slanty-eyed’ and ‘curry muncher’, figurative slurs like ‘Jewish American Princess’, or iconic slurring expressions like ‘ching chong’. In this paper, we argue that these expressions do not amount to genuine counterexamples to neutral counterpart theories of slurs. We provide a positive characterization of DiFranco’s examples that doesn’t deviate from the core of those theories.

Speaks (2014) defends the view that propositions are properties: for example, the proposition that grass is green is the property being such that grass is green. We argue that there is no reason to prefer Speaks’s theory to analogous but competing theories that identify propositions with, say, 2-adic relations. This style of argument has recently been deployed by many, including Moore (1999) and King (2007), against the view that propositions are n-tuples, and by Caplan and Tillman (2013) against King’s view that propositions are facts of a special sort.We offer our argument as an objection to the view that propositions are unsaturated (non-0-adic) relations.

Vann McGee has argued that, given certain background assumptions and an ought-implies-can thesis about norms of rationality, Bayesianism conflicts globally with computationalism due to the fact that Robinson arithmetic is essentially undecidable. I show how to sharpen McGee’s result using an additional fact from recursion theory—the existence of a computable sequence of computable realswith an uncomputable limit (a Specker sequence). In conjunction with the countable additivity requirement on probabilities, such a sequence can be used to construct a specific proposition to which Bayesianism requires an agent to assign uncomputable credence—yielding a local conflict with computationalism.

I recommend three revisions to experimental philosophy’s ‘self-image’ which I suggest will enable experimentalist critics of intuition to evade several important objections to the ’negative’ strand of the experimental philosophy research project. First, experimentalists should avoid broad criticisms of ‘intuition’ as a whole, instead drawing a variety of conclusions about a variety of much narrower categories of mental state. Second, experimentalists should state said conclusions in terms of epistemic norms particular to philosophical inquiry, rather than attempting to, for example, deny that intuitions produce justified belief. Third, experimentalists should acknowledge the limitations of the ‘method of cases’ model of philosophical inquiry, and expand their experimental work accordingly.

Many expressions intuitively have different epistemic andmodal profiles. For example, co-referring proper names are substitutable salva veritate in modal contexts but not in belief-contexts. Two-dimensional semantics, according to which terms have both a so-called primary and a secondary intension, is a framework that promises to accommodate and explain these diverging intuitions. The framework can be applied to indexicals, proper names or predicates. Graeme Forbes (2011) argues that the two-dimensional semantics of David Chalmers (2011) fails to account for so-called nested contexts. These are linguistic contexts where a sentence is embedded under both epistemic and modal operators. Chalmers and Rabern (2014) suggest a two-dimensional solution to the problem. Their semantics solves the nesting-problem, but at the cost of invalidating certain plausible principles.We suggest a solution that is both simpler and avoids this cost.

It is widely agreed that properties play causal roles: they capture the causal powers of things. But do properties have their causal roles essentially? David Lewis did not think so. He adhered to the doctrine of quidditism, namely the doctrine that the identity of properties is primitive and that they can trade their causal roles. Quidditism is controversial. But Lewis did not see why he should want to reject it. He knew that he could avoid quidditism on the cheap by treating individuals and properties alike in rejecting transworld multilocation of properties and endorsing a counterpart theory for properties. But he did not see why he should want to do so. In this article, I argue that Lewis should have wanted to endorse a counterpart theory for properties in order to reject quidditism. My argument concerns resemblance relations among properties. Another constitutive role of properties is that they capture objective resemblances between their instances. The premises of my argument are intuitive claims about resemblances among some properties that Lewis held on Humean grounds.

McTaggart’s argument against the reality of the A series (or some variation on that argument) poses a serious problem for the moving-now block theory of time (MNBT). A defender of MNBT can respond along lines suggested by Broad: by denying that we should understand ‘e was present’ as saying that e is present at some past moment t. There is, however, a serious—plausibly defeating—objection to this type of response: it implicitly denies a non-negotiable platitude about time. As a result, MNBT is not tenable. Growing block theories are also defeated by a similar objection.

Some essence facts have metaphysical explanations. Some metaphysical explanations for essence facts consist in nonessential facts.

Kris McDaniel has argued that strong composition as identity entails a principle he calls the Plural Duplication Principle (PDP), and that (PDP) is inconsistent with the possibility of strongly emergent properties. Theodore Sider has objected that this possibility is only inconsistent with a closely analogous principle he calls the Set Duplication Principle (SDP). According to Sider, however, the friend of strong composition as identity is under no pressure to accept (SDP). In this paper, I argue that she has strong reason to accept either (SDP) or a principle that is also inconsistent with the possibility of strongly emergent properties.

Miranda Fricker has influentially discussed testimonial injustice: the injustice done to a speaker S by a hearer H when H gives S less-than-merited credibility. Here, I explore the prospects for a novel form of testimonial injustice, where H affords S due credibility, that is, the amount of credibility S deserves. I present two kinds of cases intended to illustrate this category, and argue that there is presumptive reason to think that testimonial injustice with due credibility exists. I show that if it is denied that ultimately these cases exemplify testimonial injustice without credibility deficit, then either they must be taken to exemplify a novel kind of epistemic, non-testimonial injustice, or they bring to light a significant exegetical result.

Researchers recently demonstrated a strong direct relationship between judgments about what a person knows (“knowledge judgments”) and judgments about how a person should act (“actionability judgments”). But it remains unknown whether actionability judgments cause knowledge judgments, or knowledge judgments cause actionability judgments. This paper uses causal modeling to help answer this question. Across two experiments, we found evidence that actionability judgments cause knowledge judgments.