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Displaying: 1-20 of 418 documents

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1. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Rohan French An Argument Against General Validity?
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This paper argues that a prominent—and oft-thought to be persuasive—argument against general validity as the best account of validity for languages containing the actuality operator is flawed, the flaw arising out of inadequate attention to the formalisation of mood distinctions.
2. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
John Divers, Crispin Wright Editorial
3. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Rogério Passos Severo A Note on Essential Indexicals of Direction
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Some authors claim that ‘I’ and ‘now’ are essential indexicals, in the sense that they cannot be eliminated in favor of other indexicals or nonindexical expressions. This article argues that three indexicals of direction—one for each spatial dimension (e.g., ‘up’, ‘front’, and ‘left’)—must also be regarded essential, insofar as they are used as pure indexicals and not as demonstratives.
4. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Roberto Loss Branching Time, Actuality and the Puzzle of Retrospective Determinacy
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The supervaluationist approach to branching time (‘SBT-theory’) appears to be threatened by the puzzle of retrospective determinacy: if yesterday I uttered the sentence ‘It will be sunny tomorrow’ and only in some worlds overlapping at the context of utterance it is sunny the next day, my utterance is to be assessed as neither true nor false even if today is indeed a sunny day. John MacFarlane (‘‘Truth in the Garden of Forking Paths’’ 81) has recently criticized a promising solution to this puzzle for falling short of an adequate account of ‘actually’. In this paper, I aim to rebut MacFarlane’s criticism. To this effect, I argue that: (i) ‘actually’ can be construed either as an indexical or as a nonindexical operator; (ii) if ‘actually’ is nonindexical, MacFarlane’s criticism is invalid; (iii) there appear to be independent reasons for SBT-theorists to claim that ‘actually’ is a nonindexical expression.
5. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Richard G. Heck Jr. A Liar Paradox
6. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Aaron Barth A Refutation of Frege’s Context Principle?
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This paper explores the limitations of current empirical approaches to the philosophy of language in light of a recent criticism of Frege’s context principle. According to this criticism, the context principle is in conflict with certain features of natural language use and this is held to undermine its application in Foundations of Arithmetic. I argue that this view is mistaken because the features with which the context principle is alleged to be in conflict are irrelevant to the principle’s methodological significance for our understanding of the role of analysis in analytic philosophy.
7. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Robert May What Frege’s Theory of Identity is Not
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The analysis of identity as coreference is strongly associated with Frege; it is the view in Begriffsschrift, and, some have argued, henceforth throughout his work. This thesis is incorrect: Frege never held that identity is coreference. The case is made not by interpretation of ‘‘proof-quotes’’, but rather by exploring how Frege actually deploys the concept. Two cases are considered. The first, from Grundgesetze, are the definitions of the core concepts, zero and truth; the second, from Begriffsschrift, is the validity of Leibniz’s Law. In both cases, if identity is coreference, results ensue that would be unacceptable to Frege.
8. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa Knowledge Norms and Acting Well
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I argue that evaluating the knowledge norm of practical reasoning is less straightforward than is often assumed in the literature. In particular, cases in which knowledge is intuitively present, but action is intuitively epistemically unwarranted, provide no traction against the knowledge norm. The knowledge norm indicates what it is appropriately to hold a particular content as a reason for action; it does not provide a theory of what reasons are sufficient for what actions. Absent a general theory about what sorts of reasons, if genuinely held, would be sufficient to justify actions—a question about which the knowledge norm is silent—many of the kinds of cases prevalent in the literature do not bear on the knowledge norm.
9. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Jason Gray Dueling Interveners: A Challenge to Frankfurt’s Conception of Free Will and Acting Freely
10. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Tom McClelland In Defence of Kantian Humility
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Kantian Humility (KH) holds that the intrinsic properties of objects are unknowable for agents such as ourselves. Categorial properties, such as being an object, present a potential threat to KH. Cowling (2010) argues that knowing KH to be true requires knowledge of categorial properties. However, if such properties are shown to be intrinsic properties, then KH is committed to their being unknowable. I defend KH by presenting three alternative responses to this challenge. First, that categorial properties are not properties in the sense relevant to KH. Second, that if they are properties, they are not intrinsic properties. Third, that if they are intrinsic properties, KH is not committed to their being unknowable. I also show how these responses can be applied to a related objection to KH offered by Moore (2001).
11. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 1
Sebastian Köhler Expressivism, Subjectivism and Moral Disagreement
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One worry about metaethical expressivism is that it reduces to some form of subjectivism. This worry is enforced by subjectivists who argue that subjectivism can explain certain phenomena thought to support expressivism equally well. Recently, authors have started to suggest that subjectivism can take away what has often been seen as expressivism’s biggest explanatory advantage, namely expressivism’s ability to explain the possibility of moral disagreement. In this paper, I will give a response to an argument recently given by Frank Jackson to this conclusion that will show that it is false that subjectivism could explain disagreement as well as expressivism.
12. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 2
John Divers, Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins, Crispin Wright Editorial
13. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 2
Alexis Burgess A Puzzle about Identity
14. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 2
Alexander R. Pruss Infinite Lotteries, Perfectly Thin Darts and Infinitesimals
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One of the problems that Bayesian regularity, the thesis that all contingent propositions should be given probabilities strictly between zero and one, faces is the possibility of random processes that randomly and uniformly choose a number between zero and one. According to classical probability theory, the probability that such a process picks a particular number in the range is zero, but of course any number in the range can indeed be picked. There is a solution to this particular problem on the books: a measure that assigns the same infinitesimal probability to each number between zero and one. I will show that such a measure, while mathematically interesting, is pathological for use in confirmation theory, for the same reason that a measure that assigns an infinitesimal probability to each possible outcome in a countably infinite lottery is pathological. The pathology is that one can force someone to assign a probability within an infinitesimal of one to an unlikely event.
15. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 2
Palle Yourgrau Kripke’s Frege
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In a recent essay, "Frege’s Theory of Sense of Reference: Some Exegetical Notes", Saul Kripke shows that in addition to being an astute critic of Frege, he is also an insightful interpreter. Kripke’s Frege emerges as a closet Russellian, who, like Russell, relies heavily on a doctrine of acquaintance. Is Kripke right? Where exactly does his approach resemble, and where depart from earlier interpretations, and what should one take away about whether or not Frege really was a Russellian and the effect this has on his theory?
16. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 2
Giuseppe Spolaore Not Just a Coincidence. Conditional Counter-examples to Locke’s Thesis
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So-called Locke’s thesis is the view that no two things of the same kind may coincide, that is, may be completely in the same place at the same time. A number of counter-examples to this view have been proposed. In this paper, some new and arguably more convincing counter-examples to Locke’s thesis are presented. In these counter-examples, a particular entity (a string, a rope, a net, or similar) is interwoven to obtain what appears to be a distinct, thicker entity of the same kind. It is argued that anyone who subscribes to certain standard metaphysical arguments, which are generally taken for granted in the debate about Locke’s thesis, is virtually compelled to accept the counter-examples.
17. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 2
Agustín Vicente Burge on Representation and Biological Function
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In Origins of Objectivity, Burge presents three arguments against what he calls ‘deflationism’: the project of explaining the representational function in terms of the notion of biological function. I evaluate these arguments and argue that they are not convincing.
18. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 2
Brian Rabern Propositions and Multiple Indexing
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It is argued that propositions cannot be the compositional semantic values of sentences (in context) simply due to issues stemming from the compositional semantics of modal operators (or modal quantifiers). In particular, the fact that the arguments for double indexing generalize to multiple indexing exposes a fundamental tension in the default philosophical conception of semantic theory. This provides further motivation formaking a distinction between two sentential semantic contents—what (Dummett 1973) called ‘‘ingredient sense’’ and ‘‘assertoric content’’.
19. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 2
Andreas Kapsner Strong Connexivity
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Connexive logics aim to capture important logical intuitions, intuitions that can be traced back to antiquity. However, the requirements that are imposed on connexive logic are actually not enough to do justice to these intuitions, as I will argue. I will suggest how these demands should be strengthened.
20. Thought: A Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 1 > Issue: 2
Harold Noonan, Mark Jago The Accidental Properties of Numbers and Properties
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According to genuine modal realism, some things (including numbers and properties) lack distinct counterparts in different worlds. So how can they possess any of their properties contingently? Egan (2004) argues that to explain such accidental property possession, the genuine modal realist must depart from Lewis and identify properties with functions, rather than with sets of possibilia. We disagree. The genuine modal realist already has the resources to handle Egan’s proposed counterexamples. As we show, she does not need to amend her analysis of possibility statements, or her theory of what properties are.