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.

It is almost universally assumed that the indicative conditional connective is stronger than the material conditional connective. In the logic of certainty, however, the deduction theorem for the material conditional connective fails, and consequently the material conditional connective is stronger than the indicative conditional connective. One implication of this is that the import–export rule and modus ponens for the indicative conditional connective can both hold, without the indicative conditional connective collapsing into material conditional connective.

Recently in Analysis, Ned Markosian has argued that a popular theory in the metaphysics of time—the Spacetime Thesis—falsely predicts that a normal musical performance is just as aesthetically valuable if it is rotated “sideways,” that is, if it is made to occur all at once. However, this argument falsely assumes that changing how something is oriented in space, and changing its duration in time, are analogous. That said, assuming they were analogous, Markosian's argument is still unsuccessful. For the analogy on which Markosian's argument depends entails that if one can experience sideways music as it was originally, then one can prove that sideways music is just as aesthetically valuable.

We uncover a surprising discovery about the basis of thoughts. We begin by giving some plausible axioms about thoughts and their grounds. We then deduce a theorem, which has dramatic ramifications for the basis of all thoughts. The theorem implies that thoughts cannot come deterministically from any purely “thoughtless” states. We expect this result to be too dramatic for many philosophers. Hence, we proceed to investigate the prospect of giving up the axioms. We show that each axiom's negation itself has dramatic consequences that should be of interest to philosophers of mind. Our proof of the theorem provides a new guiderail for thinking about the nature and origin of thoughts.

This article takes a critical look at four instances of a similar idea: that the normativity of a sentence is a matter of what it rules out semantically. These views aim to give both stand-alone conceptions of normativity and solutions to a dilemma that A. N. Prior raised against Hume's no ought from is doctrine. First, I argue that acknowledged adequacy problems with the approach have not been sufficiently explained away. Second, I raise some new concerns, which create additional barriers to defending Hume using the approach. To conclude, I suggest an alternative way of understanding Hume's doctrine that avoids the need for a sentence-level account, and opens up avenues for preserving the insight behind the ruling-out approach.

According to a simple formulation of doxasticism about propositional faith, necessarily faith that p requires belief that p. Support of doxasticism is long-standing and was rarely a matter of dispute until William Alston (1996) proposed that that the content of propositional faith need not be believed if it is accepted. Subsequently non-doxastic theories that reject the belief requirement have proliferated and have come to dominate literature in the field. This paper aims to redress the balance by identifying a dilemma for non-doxasticism that comes into view when we draw out the implications of non-doxasticism for the interpretation of affirmations of religious propositional faith. One horn of this dilemma commits non-doxasticists to hermeneutic fictionalism: a substantive, contentious and little explored theory about religious discourse. The other appears to render the affirmation of faith prima facie bullshitting, leading to problems about the integrity of religious discourse and its speakers.

Recent debates about mathematical ontology are guided by the view that Platonism's prospects depend on mathematics' explanatory role in science. If mathematics plays an explanatory role, and in the right kind of way, this carries ontological commitment to mathematical objects. Conversely, the assumption goes, if mathematics merely plays a representational role then our world-oriented uses of mathematics fail to commit us to mathematical objects. I argue that it is a mistake to think that mathematical representation is necessarily ontologically innocent and that there is an argument from mathematics' representational capacity to Platonism. Given that it is common ground between the Platonist and nominalist that mathematics plays a representational role in science, this representationalist argument is to be preferred over the explanatory, or enhanced, indispensability argument.

According to Whitehead's rectified principle, two individuals are connected just in case there is something self-connected which overlaps both of them, and every part of which overlaps one of them. Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi have offered a counterexample to the principle, consisting of an individual which has no self-connected parts. But since atoms are self-connected, Casati and Varzi's counterexample presupposes the possibility of gunk or, in other words, things which have no atoms as parts. So one may still wonder whether Whitehead's rectified principle follows from the assumption of atomism. This paper presents an atomic countermodel to show the answer is no.

This paper criticizes the circularity reading of Frege's argument for the indefinability of truth. According to this reading, Frege is appealing to a sort of circularity in the argument. I argue that the circularity reading is interpretatively incorrect, or makes Frege's argument a non-starter.

I argue that those who accept modal rationalism, the idea that all of modal space is accessible to a priori reflection, must also accept a seemingly much more ambitious thesis: fundamental scrutability, which says that from a description of the world's fundamental layer, one can reason a priori to all truths.