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Displaying: 181-200 of 418 documents

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181. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 2
Patrick Girard, Zach Weber Bad Worlds
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The idea of relevant logic—that irrelevant inferences are invalid—is appealing. But the standard semantics for relevant logics involve baroque metaphysics: a three-place accessibility relation, a star operator, and ‘bad’ (impossible/non-normal) worlds. In this article we propose that these oddities express a mismatch between non-classical object theory and classical metatheory. A uniformly relevant semantics for relevant logic is a better fit.
182. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 2
Michael Blome-Tillmann Sensitivity, Causality, and Statistical Evidence in Courts of Law
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Recent attempts to resolve the Paradox of the Gatecrasher rest on a now familiar distinction between individual and bare statistical evidence. This paper investigates two such approaches, the causal approach to individual evidence and a recently influential (and award-winning) modal account that explicates individual evidence in terms of Nozick’s notion of sensitivity. This paper offers counterexamples to both approaches, explicates a problem concerning necessary truths for the sensitivity account, and argues that either view is implausibly committed to the impossibility of no-fault wrongful convictions. The paper finally concludes that the distinction between individual and bare statistical evidence cannot be maintained in terms of causation or sensitivity. We have to look elsewhere for a solution of the Paradox of the Gatecrasher.
183. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 2
Aidan Gray Lexical Individuation and Predicativism about Names
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Predicativism about names—the view that names are metalinguistic predicates—has yet to confront a foundational issue: how are names represented in the lexicon? I provide a positive characterization of the structure of the lexicon from the point of view Predicativism. I proceed to raise a problem for Predicativism on the basis of that characterization, focusing on cases in which individuals have names which are spelled the same way but pronounced differently. Finally, I introduce two potential strategies for solving the problem, and offer reasons not to be optimistic about either.
184. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 2
Marco Dees Maudlin on the Triangle Inequality
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Tim Maudlin argues that we should take facts about distance to be analyzed in terms of facts about path lengths. His reason is that if we take distances to be fundamental, we must stipulate that constraints like the triangle inequality hold, but we get these constraints for free if we take path lengths to be prior. I argue that Maudlin ismistaken. Even if we take path lengths as primitive, the triangle inequality follows only if we stipulate that the fundamental properties and relations obey constraints that are just as puzzling as the triangle inequality.
185. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 2
David Ripley Contraction and closure
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In this paper, I consider the connection between consequence relations and closure operations. I argue that one familiar connection makes good sense of some usual applications of consequence relations, and that a largeish family of familiar noncontractive consequence relations cannot respect this familiar connection.
186. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 2
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187. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 3
Brian Garrett On the Epistemic Bilking Argument
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The standard bilking argument is well-known and attempts to prove the impossibility of backwards causation. In this discussion note, I identify an epistemic bilking argument, which has not received sufficient attention in the literature, and indicate how best to respond to it. This response involves a parity argument based on a forwards causation case.
188. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 3
Ryan Wasserman Lewis on Backward Causation
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David Lewis famously defends a counterfactual theory of causation and a non-causal, similarity-based theory of counterfactuals. Lewis also famously defends the possibility of backward causation. I argue that this combination of views is untenable—given the possibility of backward causation, one ought to reject Lewis’s theories of causation and counterfactuals.
189. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 3
Mark Pinder A Revenge Problem Without the Concept of Truth
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The vast majority of putative solutions to the liar paradox face the infamous revenge problem. In recent work, however, Kevin Scharp has extensively developed an exciting and highly novel “inconsistency approach” to the paradox that, he claims, does not face revenge. If Scharp is right, then this represents a significant step forward in our attempts to solve the liar paradox. However, in this paper, I raise a revenge problem that faces Scharp’s inconsistency approach.
190. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 3
Neil McDonnell The Deviance in Deviant Causal Chains
191. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 3
Avery Archer Reconceiving Direction of Fit
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I argue that the concept of direction of fit (DOF) is best seen as picking out a certain inferential property of a psychological attitude. The property in question is one that believing shares with assuming and fantasizing and fails to share with desire.Unfortunately, the standard analysis of DOF obscures this fact because it conflates two very different properties of an attitude: that in virtue of which it displays a certain DOF, and that in virtue of which it displays certain revision conditions. I claim that the latter corresponds with the aim of an attitude, not its DOF. In order to remedy this failure of the standard analysis, I offer an alternative account of DOF, which I refer to as the two-content analysis.
192. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 3
Toby Meadows Unpicking Priest’s Bootstraps
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Graham Priest has argued that the fruits of classical set theory can be obtained by naive means through a puzzling piece of reasoning often known as the bootstrapping argument (Priest 2006). I will demonstrate that the bootstrapping involved is best understood as viciously circular and thus, that these fruits remain forbidden. The argument has only one rehearsal in print and it is quite subtle. This paper provides reconstruction of the argument based on Priest (2006) and attempts some fixes and alternative construals to get around some elementary problems. Despite these efforts, the argument remains unconvincing.
193. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 3
Gideon Rosen A Puzzle Postponed
194. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 3
Michael J. Clark A Puzzle About Partial Grounding
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I argue that plausible claims in the logic of partial grounding, when combined with a plausible analysis of that concept, entail the falsity of plausible grounding claims. As our account of the concept of partial grounding and its logic should be consistent with plausible grounding claims, this is problematic. The argument hinges on the idea that some facts about what grounds what are grounded in others, which is an idea the paper aims to motivate.
195. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 3
Timothy McCarthy A Note on Unrestricted Composition
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I discuss a general limitative consequence of the unrestricted mereological composition thesis. The unrestricted composition thesis, which is roughly the assertion that every plurality of objects possesses a fusion or sum, is shown to be in conflict with general existence-conditions for certain categories of mereologically non-composite objects. The conclusion is that the unrestricted composition thesis,which is a maximizing principle about what aggregates exist, places sharp limits on what unaggregated items can exist.
196. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 3
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197. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 4
Casper Storm Hansen Double Up on Heaven
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This paper describes a scenario in which a person in his afterlife will with probability 1 spend twice as many days in Heaven as in Hell, but, even though Heaven is as good as Hell is bad, his expected utility for any given day in that afterlife is negative.
198. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 4
Adam Rieger Moore’s Paradox, Introspection and Doxastic Logic
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An analysis of Moore’s paradox is given in doxastic logic. Logics arising from formalizations of various introspective principles are compared; one logic, K5c, emerges as privileged in the sense that it is the weakest to avoid Moorean belief. Moreover it has other attractive properties, one of which is that it can be justified solely in terms of avoiding false belief. Introspection is therefore revealed as less relevant to the Moorean problem than first appears.
199. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 4
Beau Madison Mount Higher-Order Abstraction Principles
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I extend theorems due to Roy Cook (2009) on third- and higher-order versions of abstraction principles and discuss the philosophical importance of results of this type. Cook demonstrated that the satisfiability of certain higher-order analogues of Hume’s Principle is independent of ZFC. I show that similar analogues of Boolos’s NEWV and Cook’s own ordinal abstraction principle SOAP are not satisfiable at all. I argue, however, that these results do not tell significantly against the second-order versions of these principles.
200. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 4 > Issue: 4
Marcoen J.T.F. Cabbolet The Importance of Developing a Foundation for Naive Category Theory
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Recently Feferman (Rev. Symb. Logic 6: 6–15, 2013) has outlined a program for the development of a foundation for naive category theory. While Ernst (ibid. 8: 306–327, 2015) has shown that the resulting axiomatic system is still inconsistent, the purpose of this note is to show that nevertheless some foundation has to be developed before naive category theory can replace axiomatic set theory as a foundational theory for mathematics. It is argued that in naive category theory currently a ‘cookbook recipe’ is used for constructing categories, and it is explicitly shown with a formalized argument that this “foundationless” naive category theory therefore contains a paradox similar to the Russell paradox of naive set theory.