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.

I discuss an old problem with first degree entailment (FDE), namely the unintuitive way disjunctions and conjunctions between statements with values B and N are defined. I supply a solution to this problem that involves a modification of FDE that leaves the philosophical motivation for the logic unharmed. Furthermore, I argue that this modification allows us to incorporate the philosophical core idea of exactly true logic without leading to the unusual inferential behavior of that logic.

In its simplest form, a Spritz is an aperitif made with (sparkling) water and (white) wine. A ‘gunky Spritz’, as I will call it, is a Spritz in which the water and the wine are mixed through and through, so that every proper part of the Spritz has a proper part containing both water and wine. In the literature on the notion of location the possibility of mixtures like a gunky Spritz has been thought of as either threatening seemingly intuitive locative principles, or as requiring the position of multiple primitive locative relations. In this paper I present a new theory of location which assumes as primitive only the notion of pervasive location and show that it can account for the possibility of gunky Spritz in an intuitive and adequate way.

The standard case of weakness of will involves a strong temptation leading us to reconsider or act against our judgments. Here, however, I consider cases of what I call ‘habitual weakness’, where we resolve to do one thing yet do another not to satisfy any grand desire, but out of habit. After giving several examples, I suggest that habitual weakness has been under-discussed in the literature and explore why. These cases are worth highlighting for their ubiquity, and I show three further advantages of appreciating habitual weakness as a kind of weakness: It challenges purportedly necessary conditions on akrasia, it side-steps outstanding skeptical concerns, and it provides a new model for considering the weak-willed behavior of group agents. I conclude by arguing that cases of habitual weakness are genuine cases of akrasia and weakness of will. Rather than lacking strength of will, habitual weakness involves lacking diligence, vigilance, or fortitude.

In this paper, I defend Peter Geach’s theory of Relative Identity against the charge that it cannot make sense of basic semantic notions.

According to contingentism, laws of nature hold contingently. An objection to contingentism is that it implies quidditism, and therefore inherits its implausible consequences. This paper argues that this objection is misguided. Understood one way, quidditism is not an implication of contingentism, hence even if it has implausible consequences, these are not relevant to contingentism. Understood another way, quidditism is implied by contingentism, but it is less clear if this version of quidditism has the same implausible consequences. Whatever the merits of contingentism, the argument from anti-quidditism is not successful in showing that it is false.

Several contributors to the burgeoning literature on individual character traits have recently given their attention to a contrast between so-called objective and subjective accounts of salient features of these traits. In this paper, I tease apart two different kinds of subjectivism which have not clearly been distinguished from one another thus far in the literature: doxastic subjectivism and epistemic subjectivism. I then argue that epistemic subjectivism marks an attractivemiddle position between objectivism and doxastic subjectivism, as it is less vulnerable to some of the most significant objections facing each of these alternative approaches. On this basis, I recommend that virtue theorists consider adopting epistemically subjective accounts of the features of character traits they theorize about.

This short paper has two parts. First,we prove a generalisation of Aumann’s surprising impossibility result in the context of rational decision making. We then move, in the second part, to discuss the interpretational meaning of some formal setups of epistemic models, and we do so by means of presenting an interesting puzzle in epistemic logic. The aim is to highlight certain problematic aspects of these epistemic systems concerning first/third-person asymmetry which underlies both parts of the story. This asymmetry, we argue, reveals certain limits of what epistemic models can be.

Sebastian Watzl has recently presented an attentional account of consciousness, on which it essentially involves subjects attending to the world as it appears to them. On this conception, consciousness has three structural features: unity, subjectivity and perspectivity. Watzl argues that the attentional account provides the best explanation of these features, and thus of consciousness conceived in this way. I outline problems with Watzl’s proposed explanation of each of these structural features, and argue that these undermine his attentional theory of consciousness.

Here, I examine the connective called Knot, which may be considered a threat to semanticists, but not to inferentialists. I argue that it constitutes a problem for neither, by showing, first, how to characterize it proof-theoretically, and second, by showing how the issues it allegedly poses for the semanticist rest on an imprecise understanding of metainferences. I conclude that one should be careful in grounding philosophical disputes merely on formal tools.

Fine, Lowe and Hale accept the view that necessity is to be explained by essences: Necessarily p iff, and because, there is some x whose essence ensures that p. Hale, however, believes that this strategy is not universally applicable; he argues that the necessity of essentialist truths cannot itself be explained by once again appealing to essentialist truths. As a consequence, Hale holds that there are basic necessities that cannot be explained.Thus,Hale style essentialism falls short of what Wilsch calls the explanation-challenge (EC) for the metaphysics of necessity. Without endorsing the EC, I argue that Hale’s argument for basic, unexplained necessities fails due to a misunderstanding of the structure of essentialist explanations. Getting clear about the structure of essentialist explanations of necessity leads to a re-evaluation of crucial circularity- and regress-arguments that have been discussed in the debate about essentialism.

Work on the nature and scope of formal logic has focused unduly on the distinction between logical and extra-logical vocabulary; which argument forms a logical theory countenances depends not only on its stock of logical terms, but also on its range of grammatical categories and modes of composition. Furthermore, there is a sense in which logical terms are unnecessary. Alexandra Zinke has recently pointed out that propositional logic can be done without logical terms. By defining a logical-term-free language with the full expressive power of first-order logic with identity, I show that this is true of logic more generally. Furthermore, having, in a logical theory, non-trivial valid forms that do not involve logical terms is not merely a technical possibility. As the case of adverbs shows, issues about the range of argument forms logic should countenance can quite naturally arise in such a way that they do not turn on whether we countenance certain terms as logical.

The central claim of this paper is that people who ignore recherche cases might actually understand ethics better than those who focus on them. In order to establish this claim, I employ a relatively new account of understanding, to the effect that one understands to the extent that one has a representation/process pair that allows one to efficiently compress and decode useful information. I argue that people who ignore odd cases have compressed better, understand better, and so can be just as ethical (if not more so) as those who focus on such cases. The general idea is that our intuitive moral judgments only imprecisely track the moral truth—the function that maps possible decisions onto moral valuations—and when we try to specify the function precisely we end up overfitting what is basically a straightforward function to accommodate irrelevant data points.

Doxastic normativism is the thesis that norms are constitutive of or essential to belief, such that no mental state not subject to those norms counts as a belief. A common normativist view is that belief is essentially governed by a norm of truth. According to Krister Bykvist and Anandi Hattiangadi, truth norms for belief cannot be formulated without unpalatable consequences: they are either false or they impose unsatisfiable requirements on believers. I propose that we construe the fundamental norm of belief as a knowledge norm, rather than a truth norm. I argue that a specific kind of knowledge norm—one that has a subject's obligation to believe that p depend on her being in a position to know that p—might avoid the well-known formulation problems with truth norms.

A world is gunky iff every object that exists according to it has others as proper parts. A world is junky iff every object that exists according to it is a proper part of some others. Several philosophers have followed (Bohn, 2009a) in then saying that a world is “hunky” just in case it is both gunky and junky. The present note explains a need to clarify the determinative criteria for being hunky. It then provides the needed clarification and explains why the issue, though subtle, is not merely pedantic.