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This paper extends several themes from recent work on norms of assertion. It does as much by applying those themes to the speech act of asking. In particular, it argues for the view that there is a species of asking which is governed by a certain norm, a norm to the effect that one should ask a question only if one doesn't know its answer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 'Collapsing Emergence', Elanor Taylor argues that all accounts of emergence face a common problem: excluding 'collapse-inducing' features--features encoding information about macro-level phenomena-- from the micro-level bases of putatively emergent phenomena in a metaphysically principled way. I argue that Taylor's solution to 'the collapse problem', which utilizes an explanation-based account of emergence she develops in recent work, does not succeed, as it relies on a false principle about the requirements for explanation. I then propose a better solution, one that presupposes no specific account of emergence, instead relying on the metaphysically principled distinction between what is essential to the having of a feature versus what is not. In addition to solving the collapse problem, I show how the distinction is also a useful tool for articulating more and less robust ways in which emergent phenomena can be genuinely novel and autonomous from the micro-level features they emerge from. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Penelope Maddy's 2011 book, Defending the Axioms, argues that there may be an objectively correct answer to the question whether there are sets whose cardinality is strictly less than the real numbers, but strictly greater than the natural numbers, but that there is no objectively correct answer to the question of whether there are sets. This review examines Maddy's reasons for these claims, and agrees with her that, once the position she calls 'Robust Realism' (which she herself defended in earlier work) is ruled out, the issue between realism and anti-realism in the philosophy of mathematics is a mere terminological dispute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue that there could be observational evidence for absolute motion. My argument employs a spatial analogue of Shoemaker's classic 'global freeze' thought experiment, wherein he imagines a world whose inhabitants would seem to have strong evidence that a period of time without change had occurred. The inhabitants of my own imagined world, I claim, would have strong evidence that everything in the universe had moved the same distance in the same direction and, thus, strong evidence for absolute motion. This conclusion seems to pose a problem for spatial relationists insofar as they cannot account for absolute motion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidentialism is the thesis that all reasons to believe p are evidence for p. Pragmatists hold that pragmatic considerations--incentives for believing--can also be reasons to believe. Nishi Shah, Thomas Kelly and others have argued for evidentialism on the grounds that incentives for belief fail a 'reasoning constraint' on reasons: roughly, reasons must be considerations we can reason from, but we cannot reason from incentives to belief. In the first half of the paper, I show that this argument fails: the claim that we cannot reason from incentives is either false or does not combine with the reasoning constraint to support evidentialism. However, the failure of this argument suggests an alternative route to evidentialism. Roughly, reasons must be premises of good reasoning, but it is not good reasoning to reason from incentives to belief. The second half of the paper develops and defends this argument for evidentialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I present an argument for the claim that you ought to do something only if you may believe that you ought to do it. More exactly, I defend the following principle about normative reasons: An agent A has decisive reason to f only if she also has sufficient reason to believe that she has decisive reason to f. I argue that this principle follows from the plausible assumption that it must be possible for an agent to respond correctly to her reasons. In conclusion, I discuss some implications of this argument (given that some other standard assumptions about reasons hold). One such implication is that we are always in a position to be justified in believing all truths about what we have decisive reason (or ought) to do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue that moral judgement is a natural kind on the grounds that it plays a causal/explanatory role in psychological generalizations. I then develop an empirically grounded theory of its identity as a natural kind. I argue that moral judgement is a hybrid state of moral belief and moral emotion. This hybrid theory supports the role of moral judgement in explanations of reasoning and action and also supports its role in a dual process model of moral cognition. Although it is composed of moral belief and moral emotion, moral judgement is unified, like other natural kinds, in virtue of underlying mechanisms that generate homeostasis among its components. Finally, this theory about the unity of moral judgement resolves a longstanding puzzle about moral motivation. The view explains how it is that moral judgements motivate all on their own but not all the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A standard objection to socioeconomic human rights is that they are not claimable as human rights: their correlative duties are not owed to each human, independently of specific institutional arrangements, in an enforceable manner. I consider recent responses to this 'claimability objection', and argue that none succeeds. There are no human rights to socioeconomic goods. But all is not lost: there are, I suggest, human rights to 'socioeconomic consideration'. I propose a detailed structure for these rights and their correlative duties, while remaining neutral on substantive moral debates. I argue that socioeconomicconsideration human rights are satisfactorily claimable and sufficiently practical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wolterstorff 's objection (WO) to Class Nominalism says that properties cannot be identical to classes because classes have their members essentially while properties typically do not have their instances essentially. I develop a two-step solution toWO on behalf of actualist nominalism: part one shows that the actualist nominalist can mimic Lewis's reply toWO by identifying abundant properties with classes of ersatz individuals in combinatorial ersatz worlds. Part two shows that the possibilia-generating recombination can be based on perfectly natural classes of actual particulars instead of sparse universals: to consider a particular as instantiating a natural class is not to consider it as possibly being one of the things in that class but as being like those things; instantiation is not membership but a 'qualitative' relationship defined by a resemblance-like primitive that compares particulars, as they might be, to pluralities of actual particulars, as they actually are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely accepted that pictures can only depict visible things. The paper criticizes this 'visibility constraint' on the objects of depiction. The constraint is shown to imply that the range of visibilia is settled prior to an investigation of what can be seen in pictures. By contrast to this, I suggest that settling what can be seen in pictures is relevant to settling the range of visibilia. It is what we experience in pictures, and not the objects of depiction, that is subject to a visibility constraint, I propose. After criticising the widely accepted visibility constraint in the first half of the paper, I outline an account of what we experience in pictures in the second half of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that a definition of paternalism must meet certain methodological constraints. Given the failings of descriptivist and normatively charged definitions of paternalism, I argue that we have good reason to pursue a normatively neutral definition. Archard's 1990 definition is one such account. It is for this reason that I return to Archard's account with a critical eye. I argue that Archard's account is extensionally inadequate, failing to capture some cases which are clear instances of paternalism. I refine each of his three conditions, ultimately providing an improved definition of paternalistic interference. This revised definition meets specific methodological constraints, offering a definition that is both neutral between anti- and pro-paternalistic intuitions, but that also explains why paternalism is normatively significant. Specifically, this definition captures the conflict between interfering with an individual's choices and treating the individual benevolently, without making paternalism permissible or impermissible by definition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

According to current orthodoxy in the philosophy of action, intentional actions consist in intrinsically mindless bodily movements that stand in causal relations to appropriate mental states. This paper challenges this approach to intentional action, by arguing that there are not enough appropriate mental states around to ‘animate’ all of the bodily movements we intuitively count as intentional actions. In the alternative picture I suggest, the bodily movements that constitute our intentional actions are themselves to be thought of as cognitive events, embodying our grasp of ways of acting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]