Some people think that grounding is a type of identity. And some people think that grounding connections hold necessarily. I show that, under plausible assumptions, if grounding is a type of identity, then grounding connections hold necessarily.

Philosophers have debated whether it is possible to knowledgeably infer a conclusion from a false premise. For example, if a fan believes that the actress’s dress is blue, but the dress is actually green, can the fan knowledgeably infer “the dress is not red” from “the dress is blue?” One aspect of this debate concerns what the intuitively correct verdict is about specific cases such as this. Here, I report a simple behavioral experiment that helps answer this question. The main finding is that people attribute knowledge in cases where a true conclusion is inferred from a false premise. People did this despite judging that the premise was false and unknown. People also viewed the agent as inferring the conclusion from the premise. In closely matched conditions where the conclusion was false, people did not attribute knowledge of the conclusion. These results support the view that the ordinary knowledge concept includes in its extension cases of knowledge inferred from false premises.

Coordination games show that all individuals can do what is right according to act-consequentialism, even if they do not bring about the best outcome as a group. This creates two problems for act-consequentialism. First, it cannot accommodate the intuition that there is some moral failure in these cases. Second, its formulation as a criterion of rightness conflicts with the underlying act-consequentialist concern that the best outcome is brought about. The collectivist view solves these problems by holding that any group of two or more individual agents, and only individual agents, is a collective agent who itself can act rightly or wrongly. When such a collective agent does what is wrong, there is a moral failure. When all collective agents do what is right, the best outcome is brought about. In this paper, I defend the collectivist view against the No Act Objection, according to which the doings of many so called disunified collectives are not acts.

Recent work on essence describes essence as assimilated to definition. It also posits a plurality of kinds of essence.Howdoes assimilation relate to pluralism? According to one view, a kind of essence is adequate only if it is definitional: something is essential to an item, in the relevant sense, only if it is part of what it is to be that item. In this paper, I argue that assimilation and pluralism are in tension with respect to consequentialist essence. This is problematic given that, as a methodological prescription, some philosophers advise us to work with consequentialist essence. In this paper, I develop a theory of constitutive essence and use it to resolve the problem by defining an adequate notion of consequentialist essence that preserves the methodological prescription.

This paper addresses a recent debate as to whether logical anti-exceptionalists should understand logical theories in syntactic or semantic terms. InWigglesworth (2017), I propose a purely semantic approach, while Woods (2018) has argued in favor of a purely syntactic approach. Here, I argue that neither of these approaches is satisfactory, as both treat arguably distinct logics as equivalent logical theories. I argue instead for an approach that combines syntactic and semantic components. The specific approach to a combined account of logical theories is based on the category-theoretic notion of an institution.

Michael Dummett famously asked how the serpent of inconsistency entered Frege’s paradise. He himself blamed the impredicative nature of second-order quantification, while many others focused on the inflationary nature of the axiom. Axiom V is, after all, the denial of a higher-order generalization of Cantor’s theorem. Predicativists do not deny this, but they block the derivation of the relevant generalization in predicative fragments of second-order logic. Unfortunately, there is more than one higher-order generalization of Cantor’s theorem, and one of them remains a theorem in predicative fragments of higher-order logic. Our recommendation to predicativists is to respond that only one of them supports the cardinality gloss we associate with Cantor’s theorem and that it is, in fact, false. The other remains a theorem of predicative fragments of higher-order logic but its derivability seemsmore closely related to the Grelling’s paradox than to cardinality considerations.

In this note I defend nonreductionism about understanding by arguing that knowledge is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding. To this end, I examine Paulina Sliwa’s (2015, 2017) novel defence of knowledge-based Reductionism (Reductionism for short). Sliwa claims that one understands why p if and only if one has a sufficient amount of knowledge why p. Sliwa contends that Reductionism is supported by intuitive verdicts about our uses of ‘understanding why’ and ‘knowing why’. In reply, I first argue that Sliwa’s Reductionism leads to a vicious infinite regress. Secondly, I defuse the motivation in favour of Reductionism by showing how the linguistic data can be accommodated within a Nonreductionist framework.

Wellman defends what he calls a "stark" conclusion on the ethics of immigration. This paper presents a dilemma for Wellman. His conclusion can be interpreted in two ways. On one interpretation, the conclusion is not really stark, but rather uncontroversial. On the other interpretation, the conclusion is not supported by his arguments.