The Surprise Exam Paradox is well-known: a teacher announces that there will be a surprise exam the following week; the students argue by an intuitively sound reasoning that this is impossible; and yet they can be surprised by the teacher. We suggest that a solution can be found scattered in the literature, in part anticipated by Wright and Sudbury, informally developed by Sorensen, and more recently discussed, and dismissed, by Williamson. In a nutshell, the solution consists in realising that the teacher's announcement is a blindspot that can only be known if the week is at least 2 days long. Along the way, we criticise Williamson's own treatment of the paradox. In Williamson's view, the Surprise is similar to the Paradox of the Glimpse and, because of their similarities, both these paradoxes ought to receive a uniform treatment—one that involves locating an illicit application of the KK Principle. We argue that there's no deep analogy between the Surprise and the Glimpse and that, even if there were, the Surprise reasoning reaches a paradoxical conclusion before the KK Principle is used. Rather, in both the Surprise and the Glimpse, the blame should be put on other epistemic principles—respectively, a knowledge retention and a margin for error principle.

Two popular views are prima facie incompatible. First is Attributivism, whereby there is nothing better than being a good member of one's kind; second is Hierarchy, whereby being one kind of thing can be, ceteris paribus, worse than being another. The unchallenged assumption is that those two views are at odds. As both are plausible and influential, that they conflict is a problem. In this paper, I argue that they are not incompatible, and that appearances to the contrary owe to a naïve view of kinds and kindhood, held by participants on both sides of the debate. Once we adopt a more sophisticated view of kindhood, the apparent incompatibility dissolves. Here I present such a view, and argue that Hierarchy can be captured within Attributivism, when candidate kinds share characteristic features which produce overlapping requirements of self-maintenance.

We discuss the problem of self-reference in Yablo's paradox from the point of view of the relationship between names and objects. For this end, we introduce a forcing version of the paradox and try to understand its implication on the self-referential component of the paradox.

In the paraconsistent tradition, it is fairly well-known how difficult it is to advance a theory containing a naive truth predicate together with a (classical, consistent) consistency operator. Recently, a number of theorists have risen up to the challenge by attempting to articulate such a theory. These theorists either tinker with the idea of semantic naivety, thereby imposing restrictions on the principles governing the truth predicate, or they substantially weaken the underlying syntax theory. My aim in this paper is to offer arguments against these two proposals.

The trivalent, truth-functional theory of conditionals proposed by de Finetti in 1936 and developed in a scattered literature since has enjoyed a recent revival in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. However, several theorists have argued that this approach is fatally flawed in that it cannot correctly account for nested conditionals and compounds of conditionals. Focusing on nested conditionals, we observe that the problem cases uniformly involve generic predicates, and that the inference patterns claimed to be problematic are very plausible when we ensure that only non-generic (episodic and stative) predicates are used. In addition, the trivalent theory makes correct predictions about the original, generic counter-examples when combined with an off-the-shelf theory of genericity. The ability of the trivalent semantics to account for this complex interaction with genericity thus appears as a strong argument in its favor.

The core doctrine of supersubstantivalism is that material objects are identical to their spacetime locations. One powerful consideration for the view is the argument from harmony—supersubstantivalism, it is claimed, is in a position to offer an elegant explanation of a number of platitudes concerning objects and their locations. However, I will argue that identifying material objects with their locations does not provide a satisfying explanation of harmony. What the supersubstantivalist needs is not a theory about the identity of objects, but another theory about the identity of some relations. This paper proposes such a theory and shows that with it in place, the argument from harmony can be repaired.

Some philosophers contend that concomitant ignorance preserves moral responsibility for wrongdoing. An agent is concomitantly ignorant with respect to wrongdoing if and only if her ignorance is non-culpable, but she would freely have performed the same action if she were not ignorant. I, however, argue that concomitant ignorance excuses. I show that leading accounts of moral responsibility imply that concomitant ignorance excuses, and I debunk the view that concomitant ignorance preserves moral responsibility.

Definite group nouns, such as “the deck of cards,” raise two important kinds of problems. Philosophically, they raise the ancient Problem of the Many: How can one deck be many cards? Linguistically, they threaten paradox: If such expressions singularly refer to groups as set-like entities, then analyses employing such entities threaten to be incoherent, due to Russell's paradox. On the other hand, no paradox is threatened if, per the suggestion of Alex Oliver and Timothy Smiley, “the deck of cards” is a pseudo-singular term, that is, a term which is syntactically singular but semantically plural, exploiting the primitive relation of plural reference. Against this, we argue that pseudo-singularity is linguistically and logically untenable. As such, it will not plausibly solve either kind of problem raised by definite group nouns.