Jonathan Schaffer has provided three putative counterexamples to the transitivity of grounding, and has argued that a contrastive treatment of grounding is able to provide a resolution to them, which in turn provides some motivation for accepting such a treatment. In this article, I argue that one of these cases can easily be turned into a putative counterexample to a principle which Schaffer calls differential transitivity. Since Schaffer’s proposed resolution rests on this principle, this presents a dilemma for the contrastivist: either he dismisses the third case, which weakens the motivation for accepting his treatment of grounding, or else he accepts it, in which case he is faced with a counterexample to a principle that his proposed resolution to the original cases depends on. In the remainder of the article, I argue that the prima faciemost promising strategy the contrastivist could take,which is to place some restriction onwhich contrastive facts are admissible so as to rule out the purported counterexample to differential transitivity, faces some important difficulties. Although these difficulties are not insurmountable, they do pose a substantial challenge for the contrastivist.

Some truthmaker theorists posit a distinctive kind of entity to solve the problem of providing ontological grounding for negative truths. Recently, A. M. Griffith has raised a general objection against these alleged truthmakers based on an explanatory constraint on truthmaking and the existence condition of these entities. This paper counters the objection by placing it on the horns of a dilemma: the argument must either specify that the existence condition in question is a conceptual matter or insist that the condition is of properly metaphysical substance. I first argue that the former horn cannot be pursued because it makes the objection irrelevant to the alleged claims of truthmaking. I then argue that the latter horn is also highly problematic because simply insisting on the claim begs the question; appreciating this point leads proponents and opponents of the alleged truthmakers to a substantial debate about the metaphysical nature of these entities and the overall theoretical benefit of their postulation. The discussion shows that Griffith’s argument fails to establish its conclusion and reveals what is actually required to argue for/against a particular proposal to provide ontological grounding for negative truths.

We argue elsewhere that explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant (Roche and Sober 2013). Let H be some hypothesis, O some observation, and E the proposition that H would explain O if H and O were true. Then O screens-off E from H: Pr(H | O & E)=Pr(H | O). This thesis, hereafter “SOT” (short for “Screening-OffThesis”), is defended by appeal to a representative case.The case concerns smoking and lung cancer. McCain and Poston grant that SOT holds in cases, like our case concerning smoking and lung cancer, that involve frequency data. However, McCain and Poston contend that there is a wider sense of evidential relevance—wider than the sense at play in SOT—on which explanatoriness is evidentially relevant even in cases involving frequency data. This is their main point, but they also contend that SOT does not hold in certain cases not involving frequency data. We reply to each of these points and conclude with some general remarks on screening-off as a test of evidential relevance.

Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum have argued that a theory of free will that appeals to a powers-based ontology is incompatible with causal determinism. This is a surprising conclusion since much recent work on the intersection of the metaphysics of powers and free will has consisted of attempts to defend compatibilism by appealing to a powers-based ontology. In response I show that their argument turns on an equivocation of ‘all events are necessitated’.

This short paper follows up on the exchange between Ray Buchanan and Wayne Davis (this journal) concerning the theory of speaker meaning put forward by Davis in previous work. I briefly present Davis’ main tenets, Buchanan’s objections, Davis’ replies, and then offer a new case that enforces the problem raised by Buchanan to Davis’ theory for speaker meaning.

In recent work, E. J. Lowe presents an essence-based account of our knowledge of metaphysical modality that he claims to be superior to its main competitors. I argue that knowledge of essences alone, without knowledge of a suitable bridge principle, is insufficient for knowing that something is metaphysically necessary or metaphysically possible. Yet given Lowe’s other theoretical commitments, he cannot account for our knowledge of the needed bridge principle, and so his essence-basedmodal epistemology remains incomplete. In addition to that, Lowe’s account implies a psychologically unrealistic reconstruction of how we ordinarily acquire knowledge of metaphysical modalities. The discussion of Lowe’s suggestive essence-based account is also intended as a case study that illustrates amore general problem in the epistemology ofmodality: the great difficulty of explaining ourmodal knowledge in terms of a single overtly nonmodal kind of knowledge.The failure of Lowe’s account suggests that such a sweeping reductive explanation of ourmodal knowledge might simply not be available. This should be good news for those philosophers who champion less reductive or more pluralistic accounts of our modal knowledge.

In his paper “Flaws of Formal Relationism”,Mahrad Almotahari argues against the sort of response to Frege’s Puzzle I have defended elsewhere, which he dubs ‘Formal Relationism’. Almotahari argues that, because of its specifically formal character, this view is vulnerable to objections that cannot be raised against the otherwise similar Semantic Relationism due to Kit Fine. I argue in response that Formal Relationism has neither of the flaws Almotahari claims to identify.

In this discussion paper I argue that Max Black’s well-known bilking argument does not succeed in showing the impossibility of backwards causation.

In “Reactive Attitudes as Communicative Entities” (2013b), Coleen Macnamara argues that the reactive attitudes—a class of moral emotions that includes indignation, resentment, and gratitude—are essentially communicative entities. She argues that this conclusion follows from the premises that (1) the reactive attitudes aremessages, which (2) have the proper function of eliciting uptake from others. In response, I argue that while the expressions of these emotions may fit this description, the emotions themselves do not. The reactive attitudes neither are messages nor have the proper function of eliciting uptake from others, and thus Macnamara is mistaken to conclude that the reactive attitudes are essentially communicative entities.

I argue against a simple contextualist account of epistemic modals. My argument, like the argument on which it is based (von Fintel and Gillies 2011 and MacFarlane 2011), charges that simple contextualism cannot explain all of the conversational data about uses of epistemic modals. My argument improves on its predecessor by insulating itself from recent contextualist attempts by Janice Dowell (2011) and Igor Yanovich (2014) to get around that argument. In particular, I use linguistic data to show that an utterance of an epistemic modal sentence can be warranted, while an utterance of its suggested simple contextualist paraphrase is not.

The Knowledge Normof Assertion (KNA) claims that it is proper to assert that p only if one knows that p. Though supported by a wide range of evidence, it appears to generate incorrect verdicts when applied to utterances of “I don’t know.” Instead of being an objection to KNA, I argue that this linguistic data shows that “I don’t know” does not standardly function as a literal assertion about one’s epistemic status; rather, it is an indirect speech act that has the primary illocutionary force of opting out of the speaker’s conversational responsibilities. This explanation both reveals that the opt-out is an under-appreciated type of illocutionary act with a wide range of applications, and shows that the initial data in fact supports KNA over its rivals.

The speech act of bragging has never been subjected to conceptual analysis until now. We argue that a speaker brags just in case she makes an utterance that (1) is an assertion and (2) is intended to impress the addressee with something about the speaker via the belief produced by the speaker’s assertion. We conclude by discussing why it is especially difficult to cancel a brag by prefacing it with, ‘I’m not trying to impress you, but…’ and connect this discussion withMoore’s paradox and the recent neologism ‘humblebrag’.

Hartry Field has argued that mathematical realism is epistemologically problematic, because the realist is unable to explain the supposed reliability of our mathematical beliefs. In some of his discussions of this point, Field backs up his argument by saying that our purely mathematical beliefs do not ‘counterfactually depend on the facts’. I argue that counterfactual dependence is irrelevant in this context; it does nothing to bolster Field’s argument.

Jago (2012) argues that truthmaker non-maximalism, the view that some but not all truths require truthmakers, is vulnerable to a challenge from truths which ascribe knowledge of propositions about things which don’t exist. Such truths, Jago argues, can only be dealt with using maximalist resources. I argue that Jago’s point relies on the claim that the relevant truths require truthmakers, a point that non-maximalists can coherently and plausibly deny. Moreover, I argue that by making use of a safety account of knowledge, non-maximalists can fully answer Jago’s challenge.

J.C. Beall and Greg Restall’s (2006) Generalised Tarski Thesis (GTT) is a generalisation of the seemingly diverse conceptions of logical consequence. However, even their apparently general account of consequence makes necessary truth-preservation a necessary condition. Sentences in the imperative mood pose a problem for any truth-preservationist account of consequence, because imperatives are not truth-apt but seem to be capable of standing in the relation of logical consequence. In this paper, I show that an imperative logic can be formulated that solves the problem of imperative consequence by leading naturally to a further generalisation of the GTT.

Propositional attitude sentences, such as "John believes that snow is white," are traditionally taken to express the holding of a relation between a subject and what ‘that’-clauses like ‘that snow is white’ denote, i.e. propositions. On the traditional account, propositions are abstract, mind- and language-independent entities. Recently, some have raised some serious worries for the traditional account and thought that we were mistaken about the kind of entities propositions are. Over the last ten years there has then been a boom of accounts of propositions in terms of (types of) mental acts (Burge 2007; Hanks 2011; Soames 2010). But Friederike Moltmann (2013; 2014) has recently suggested that in accounting for attitudes we should forget about mindand language-independent entities and (types of) acts and follow Twardowski (1912) in focusing instead on attitudinal objects, which are the products of our mental life. In this paper, I will focus on some semantic problems that any product-based account seems to face. Moreover, I will show that product-based accounts may be also criticised on ontological grounds. My conclusion will be that we lack a reason to think that in accounting for propositional attitudes we should focus on the alleged products of our mental lives.

It seems that we should want to avoid becoming intellectually disabled. It is common for philosophers to infer from this that those of us without intellectual disabilities are intrinsically better off than individuals with intellectual disabilities, and that there are consequently stronger moral reasons for others to preserve our lives than to preserve the lives of intellectually disabled individuals. In this article, I argue against this inference from what states we should prefer for ourselves to how much moral reason others have to maintain these states on our behalves. I argue that there is an important sense in which an outcome contributes to our well-being to a certain degree, namely the extent to which others should want it out of care for us, which plays a central role in determining the moral priority of ensuring the outcome for us over ensuring distinct outcomes for others. But an outcome’s contribution to our well-being in this sense can come apart from the extent to which we should prefer it for ourselves.

One longstanding problem for glut theorists (also known as dialetheists) is the problem of ‘just true.’ On Beall’s conservative version of glut theory advanced in Spandrels of Truth (2009), he addresses the problem in two steps. The first is a rejection of the problem: he claims that the only general notion of ‘just true’ is just truth itself. On that view, the alleged problem of ‘just true’ is reduced to the problem of truth itself, which (according to glut theorists) has a solution—glut theory.The second step is to acknowledge that there is a notion of ‘just true’ which is more limited but nonetheless meets all reasonable criteria demanded by those who advance the longstanding just-true objection. Marcus Rossberg (Thought 2013) disagrees. According to Rossberg, a just-true operator ought to iterate and be non-arbitrary in ways that Beall’s proposed just-true operator is not. My aim in this paper is to construct a new conditional in terms of which a new just-true operator may be defined, a necessity operator, and to show that it meets all of the target desiderata of the debate. I then use that new operator to address the arbitrariness worries raised by Rossberg.