In Heck (2012), Richard Heck presents variants on the familiar liar paradox, intended to reveal limitations of theories of transparent truth. But all existing theories of transparent truth can respond to Heck’s variants in just the same way they respond to the liar. These new variants thus put no new pressure on theories of transparent truth.

Richard Heck has recently drawn attention on a new version of the Liar Paradox, one which relies on logical resources that are so weak as to suggest that it may not admit of any ‘‘truly satisfying, consistent solution’’. I argue that this conclusion is too strong. Heck’s Liar reduces to absurdity principles that are already rejected by consistent paracomplete theories of truth, such as Kripke’s and Field’s. Moreover, the new Liar gives us no reasons to think that (versions of) these principles cannot be consistently retained once the structural rule of contraction is restricted. I suggest that revisionary logicians have independent reasons for restricting such a rule.

A natural way of understanding (non-epistemic) looks talk in natural language is phenomenalist: to ascribe looks to objects is to say something about the way they strike us when we look at them. This explains why the truth values of looks-sentences intuitively vary with the circumstances with respect to which they are evaluated. ButMikeMartin (2010) argues that there is no semantic reason to prefer a phenomenalist understanding of looks to ‘‘Parsimony’’, the position according to which looks are basic visible properties. He suggests a semantics for looks-sentences that explains their intuitive truth values and is compatible with Parsimony. I argue that there is semantic reason to prefer a phenomenalist understanding of looks to a parsimonious one since there is a simpler semantics compatible with a phenomenalist understanding of looks, but not with Parsimony. This semantics provides a better explanation of the relevant truth value distribution.

This article considers three recent attempts by David Armstrong, Ross Cameron, and Jonathan Schaffer to provide truthmakers for negative existential truths. It is argued that none of the proposed truthmakers are up to the task of making any negative existential truth true and, it will turn out, for the same reason.

A new semantic paradox developed by Richard Heck and relying on very minimal logical and truth-theoretic resources is rehearsed. A theory of truth restricting the structural metarule of contraction is presented and some of the theory’s relevant features are made explicit. It is then shown how the theory provides a principled solution to the paradox while preserving the extremely compelling truth-theoretic principles at stake, thus bringing out a significant advantage that the theory enjoys over virtually all other non-dialetheic theories. It is finally argued that such advantage is amplified by theoretical considerations made available by the adoption of a correspondentist perspective in the philosophy of truth.

Epistemicism about vagueness is the view that vagueness, or indeterminacy, is an epistemic matter. Truthmaker-gap epistemicism is the view that indeterminate truths are indeterminate because their truth is not grounded by any worldly fact. Both epistemicism in general and truthmaker-gap epistemicism originated in Roy Sorensen’s work on vagueness. My aim in this paper is to give a characterization of truthmaker-gap epistemicism and argue that the view is incompatible with higher-order vagueness: vagueness in whether some case of the form ‘it is determinate that A’ or ‘it is indeterminate whether A’ is true. Since it is highly likely that there is higher-order vagueness (and indeed, Sorensen is adamant that there is higher-order vagueness), truthmaker-gap epistemicism is in an uncomfortable position.

Cook argues that impure sets are not located. But ‘location’ is an ambiguous word and when we resolve those ambiguities it turns out that on no resolution is Cook’s argument compelling.

This paper considers a view according to which there are certain symmetries between the nature of belief and that of intention. I do not defend this Symmetry View in detail, but rather try to adjudicate between different versions of it: what I call Evaluative, Normative and Teleological versions. I argue that the centralmotivation for the Symmetry View in fact supports only a specific Teleological version of the view.

Some say the swamping problem confronts all who believe that true belief is the sole fundamental epistemic value (‘‘T-Monism’’, to use Duncan Pritchard’s term). This, I say, is mistaken. The problem only confronts T-Monists if they grant two teleological claims: (i) that all derived epistemic value is instrumental, and (ii) that it is the state of believing truly rather than the standard of truth in belief that is fundamentally epistemically valuable. T-Monists should reject (i) and (ii), and appeal to a non-teleological form of value derivation I call Fitting Response Derivation that obviates swamping. Since, alas, simple reliabilists can’t apply this model to knowledge, the problem remains for them, and is local.

Often when there is no attention to an object, there is no conscious perception of it either, leading some to conclude that conscious perception is an attentional phenomenon. There is a well-known perceptual phenomenon—visuo-spatial crowding, in which objects are too closely packed for attention to single out one of them. This article argues that there is a variant of crowding—what I call ‘‘identity-crowding’’—in which one can consciously see a thing despite failure of attention to it. This conclusion, together with new evidence that attention to an object occurs in unconscious perception, suggests there may be a double dissociation between conscious perception of an object and attention to that object, constraining the extent to which consciousness can be constitutively attentional. The argument appeals to a comparison between the minimal resolution (or ‘‘grain’’) of object-attention and object-seeing.

We present a family of counter-examples to David Christensen’s Independence Criterion, which is central to the epistemology of disagreement. Roughly, independence requires that, when you assess whether to revise your credence in P upon discovering that someone disagrees with you, you shouldn’t rely on the reasoning that lead you to your initial credence in P. To do so would beg the question against your interlocutor. Our counter-examples involve questions where, in the course of your reasoning, you almost fall for an easy-to-miss trick. We argue that you can use the step in your reasoning where you (barely) caught the trick as evidence that someone of your general competence level (your interlocutor) likely fell for it. Our cases show that it’s permissible to use your reasoning about disputed matters to disregard an interlocutor’s disagreement, so long as that reasoning is embedded in the right sort of explanation of why she finds the disputed conclusion plausible, even though it’s false.

Dylan Dodd (2011) offers a simple, yet forceful, argument for infallibilism. The argument relies upon two assumptions concerning the relationship between knowledge, epistemic possibility, and epistemic probability. We argue below that by endorsing a particular conception of epistemic possibility, a fallibilist can both plausibly reject one of Dodd’s assumptions and mirror the infallibilist’s explanation of the linguistic data. In fact, such a fallibilist may even be able to offer a more comprehensive explanation than the infallibilist. Our discussion is of interest due in part to the fact that many fallibilists have rejected the conception of epistemic possibility employed in our response to Dodd.

Stephen Yablo (2001) argues that traditional fictionalist strategies run into trouble due to a mismatch between the modal status of a claim like ‘2+3=5’ and the modal status of its fictionalist paraphrase. I argue here that Yablo is best seen as confronting the fictionalist with a dilemma, and then go on to show how this dilemma can be resolved.

In this paper, I will provide a counterexample to Recanati’s account of first-person communication (1995, 2010, 2012). In particular, I will show that Recanati’s constraints are not sufficient for the success of first-person communication. My argument against Recanati’s account is parallel to Recanati’s argument against neo-Russellian accounts, and shows that the same problem resurfaces even in the presence of linguistically encoded mode of presentation in a neo-Fregean framework of mental files.

It is sometimes suggested that impure sets are spatially co-located with their members (and hence are located in space). Sets, however, are in important respects like numbers. In particular, sets are connected to concepts in much the same manner as numbers are connected to concepts—in both cases, they are fundamentally abstracts of (or corresponding to) concepts. This parallel between the structure of sets and the structure of numbers suggests that the metaphysics of sets and the metaphysics of numbers should parallel each other in relevant ways. This entails, in turn, that impure sets are not co-located with their members (nor are they located in space).

Recent discussion of the problem of negative existentials for truthmaker theory suggests a modest solution to the problem: fully general negative truths like <there are no unicorns> do not require truthmakers, whereas partially general negative truths like <there are no unicorns in the Sydney Opera House> do. This modest solution provides a third alternative to the two standard solutions to the problem of negative existentials: the endorsement of truthmaker gaps, and the appeal to contentious ontological posits.We argue that this modest, middle-ground position is inconsistent with certain plausible general principles for truthmaking. The only stable positions are to treat all negative truths as requiring truthmakers, or admit that no negative truths require truthmakers. Along the way, we explore some previously unaddressed questions for nonmaximalist truthmaker theory.