For sentences such as "(1) Columbus knows that the sea is unpredictable" there is a face-value theory, according to which ‘that’-clauses are singular terms denoting propositions. Famously, Prior raised an objection to the theory, but defenders of the face-value theory such as Forbes, King, Künne, Pietroski and Stanley urged that the objection could bemet by maintaining that in (1) ‘to know’ designates a complex relation along the lines of being in a state of knowledge having as content. Is the theory safe, then? The aim of this paper is to show that a new problem for the theory arises if we consider some clauses other than ‘that’-clauses.

Imposing pure risks—risks that do not materialise into harm—is sometimes wrong. The Harm Account explains this wrongness by claiming that pure risks are harms. By contrast, The Autonomy Account claims that pure risks impede autonomy. We develop two objections to these influential accounts. The Separation Objection proceeds from the observation that, if it is wrong to v then it is sometimes wrong to risk v-ing. The intuitive plausibility of this claim does not depend on any account of the facts that ground moral wrongness. This suggests a close relationship between the factors that make an act wrong and the factors that make risking that act wrong, which both accounts fail to recognise. The Determinism Objection holds that both accounts fail to explain the wrongness of pure risks in a deterministic world. We then develop an alternative—The Buck-Passing Account—that withstands both objections.

In this paper, I present a novel paradox that pertains to a variety of representational states and activities. I begin by proving that there are certain contingently true propositions that no one can occurrently believe.Then, I use this to develop a further proof by which I derive a contradiction, thus giving us the paradox. Next, I differentiate the paradox fromthe Liar Paradox, and I show how a common response to the different variations of the Liar Paradox fails to avoid the type of paradox provided in this paper. Finally, I demonstrate how the general ideas behind the paradox regarding occurrent belief can be extended to a wide range of other representational states and activities.

The Mystery Room problem is a close variant of the Mystery Bag scenario (due to Titelbaum). It is argued here that dealing with this problem requires no revision of the Bayesian formalism, since there exists a solution to this problem in which indexicals or demonstratives play no essential role. The solution does require labels, which are internal to the probabilistic model. While there needs to be a connection between at least one label and one indexical or demonstrative, that connection is external to the probabilistic model that is used to determine the relevant conditional probability; hence, it does not complicate the update procedure.

According to all varieties of virtue reliabilism, knowledge is always gained through the exercise of epistemic competences.These competences can be conceived as competences to form true beliefs, or as competences to know. I will present a short but decisive argument against the idea that knowledge is always gained through the exercise of competences to know.The competence to know isn’t necessary for gaining knowledge.

Hedonism claims that all and only pleasure is intrinsically good. One worry about Hedonism focuses on the “only” part: Are there not things other than pleasure, such as personal projects and relationships, that are intrinsically good? If so, it can be objected that Hedonism is incomplete. In this paper, I defend Hedonism against this objection by arguing for a distinction between goodness and desirability that understands “desirability” as a deontic concept, in terms of “reason to desire”, but goodness as an evaluative concept. Based on this distinction, I attempt to show that Hedonists should accept that things other than pleasure, such as personal projects and relationships, are desirable for their own sakes but deny that these things are intrinsically good [Corrections added on 3 May 2019 after first online publication: The original abstract text is now the first paragraph of the paper’s introduction. An updated abstract has been added.]

Agnieszka Jaworska and Julie Tannenbaum recently developed the ingenious and novel person-rearing account of moral status, which preserves the commonsense judgment that humans have a higher moral status than nonhuman animals. It aims to vindicate speciesist judgments while avoiding the problems typically associated with speciesist views. We argue, however, that there is good reason to reject person-rearing views. Person-rearing views have to be coupled with an account of flourishing, which will (according to Jaworska and Tannenbaum) be either a species norm or an intrinsic potential account of flourishing. As we show, however, person-rearing accounts generate extremely implausible consequences when combined with the accounts of flourishing Jaworska and Tannenbaum need for the purposes of their view.

We propose an analysis of backward causation in terms of interventionism that can avoid several problems typically associated with backward causation. Its main advantage over other accounts is that it allows for reducing the problematic task of supporting backward causal claims to the unproblematic task of finding evidence for several ordinary forward directed causal hypotheses.

According to a view that goes by “Humeanism,” causal facts supervene on patterns of worldly entities.The simplest form of Humeanism is the constant conjunction theory: a particular type-F thing causes a particular type-G thing iff (i) that type-F is conjoined with that type-G thing and (ii) all F’s are conjoined with G’s. The constant conjunction theory implies that all causation is extrinsic, in the following sense: for all positive causal facts pertaining to each possible region, it’s extrinsic to that region that those causal facts pertain to it. Actual Humeans don’t accept the constant conjunction theory; they accept more sophisticated versions of Humeanism. But I argue that they, too, are committed to the thesis that all causation is extrinsic. In arguing for this claim, I use a discussion from Brian Weatherson as a springboard. Weatherson argues that on a plausible Humean view, some regions are such that all of their possible duplicates have the same or similar natural laws. I show that this is false. If Humeanism is true, then for every possible region, there are possible duplicates of that region with utterly alien natural laws. As a consequence, no causal facts pertain intrinsically to any region.

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.

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.