I shall offer some very plausible assumptions for the measure of confirmation and show that they imply that E confirms H relative to background K to degree f (PK(E|H)/PK(E|~H)), where f is a strictly increasing function. An additional assumption about how measures of confirmation combine then makes f be proportional to a logarithm.

Ned Block says ‘yes’ (2012, 2013). His position is based on the phenomenon of identity-crowding. According to Block, in cases of identity-crowding, something is consciously seen even though one cannot attend to it.1 In taking this view, Block is opposing a position I have taken in recent work (Tye 2009a, 2009b, 2010). He is also contributing to a vigorous recent debate in the philosophy of mind over the relation, if any, between consciousness and attention.Who is right? Not surprisingly, I think I am.

William Roche and Elliott Sober argue that explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant. This conclusion is surprising since it conflicts with a plausible assumption—the fact that a hypothesis best explains a given set of data is evidence that the hypothesis is true. We argue that Roche and Sober’s screening-off argument fails to account for a key aspect of evidential strength: the weight of a body of evidence. The weight of a body of evidence affects the resiliency of probabilities in the light of new evidence. Thus, Roche and Sober are mistaken. Explanatoriness is evidentially relevant.

Michael Tye’s response to my “Grain” (Block 2012) and “Windows” (Block 2013) raises general metaphilosophical issues about the value of intuitions and judgments about one’s perceptions and the relations of those intuitions and judgments to empirical research, as well as specific philosophical issues about the relation between seeing, attention and de re thought. I will argue that Tye’s appeal to what is (§. 2) “intuitively obvious, once we reflect upon these cases” (“intuition”) is problematic. I will also argue that first person judgments can be problematic when used on their own as Tye does but can be valuable when integrated with empirical results.

Cardinality arguments against regular probability measures aim to show that no matter which ordered field H we select as the measures for probability, we can find some event space F of sufficiently large cardinality such that there can be no regular probability measure from F into H. In particular, taking H to be hyperreal numbers won’t help to guarantee that probability measures can always be regular. I argue that such cardinality arguments fail, since they rely on the wrong conception of the role of numbers as measures of probability. With the proper conception of their role we can see that for any event space F, of any cardinality, there are regular hyperreal-valued probability measures.

Lewis (1976) argued that ‘there is no way to interpret a conditional connective so that,with sufficient generality, the probabilities of conditionals will equal the appropriate conditional probabilities’. However, as Lewis and others have subsequently recognized, Lewis’ triviality results go through only on the assumption that ‘if’ is not context-sensitive. This leaves a question that has not been adequately addressed: what are the prospects of a context-sensitive theory of ‘if’ that complies with Stalnaker’s thesis? I offer one interesting constraint on any such theory. I argue that no context-sensitive theory satisfies Stalnaker’s thesis if it satisfies three plausible assumptions: first, that the truth of an indicative is determined by theworld of evaluation and by the set ofworlds in the relevant epistemic context in which the antecedent is true; second, that one can learn an indicative conditional without learning that the antecedent and consequent are both true; third, that belief revision is conservative in the sense that it does not reduce the probabilities to zero unnecessarily. The result gives us a clearer picture of the real costs of a truth-conditional context-sensitive Stalnaker’s thesis-compliant semantics.

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.