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Moral expressivists think that moral thoughts and sentences don't represent or describe the world, at least not in any interesting sense. Global expressivists think that no thoughts or sentences represent the world; local expressivists think that some do and others don't. Huw Price has influentially argued that local expressivism collapses into global expressivism, due both to the effects of minimalist theories of representation and similar concepts, and to an unappreciated consequence of the success of specific expressivist theories like moral expressivism. In this paper I argue that Price's arguments don't succeed. While they can be fixed, doing so makes them miss their intended target. Local expressivists should therefore not be worried by Price's arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Fine's (Modality and tense: philosophical papers. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 261–320, 2005) famous take on the infamous McTaggartian paradox, realism about tensed facts is incompatible with the joint acceptence of three very general and seemingly plausible theses about reality. However, Correia and Rosenkranz (As time goes by: eternal facts in an ageing universe. Mentis, Paderborn, 2011) have recently objected that Fine's argument depends on a crucial assumption about the nature of tensed facts; once that assumption is given up, they claim, realists can endorse the theses in question without further ado. They also argue that their novel version of tense realism, called dynamic absolutism, is to be preferred over its rivals. I argue in this paper that dynamic absolutism does not constitute a genuine alternative for realists about tense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mechanistic framework traditionally comes bundled with a multi-level view. Some ascribe ontological weight to these levels, whereas others claim that characterising a higher-level entity and the corresponding lower-level mechanism are only different descriptions of the same thing. The goal of this paper is to develop a consistent metaphysical picture that can underly the latter position. According to this flat view, wholes and their parts are embedded in the same network of interacting units. The flat view preserves the original virtues of the mechanistic approach and is able to avoid the problems associated with the multi-level view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As neuroscience progresses, we will not only gain a better understanding of how our brains work, but also a better understanding of how to modify them, and as a result, our mental states. An important question we are faced with is whether the state could be justified in implementing such methods on criminal offenders, without their consent, for the purposes of rehabilitation and reduction of recidivism; a practice that is already legal in some jurisdictions. By focusing on a prominent type of view of free action, which I call bypassing views, this paper evaluates how such interventions may negatively impact the freedom of their subjects. The paper concludes that there will be a tension between the goals of rehabilitation and reduction of recidivism, on the one hand, and the negative impact such interventions may have on free action, on the other. Other things equal, the better that a particular intervention is at achieving the former, the more likely it is to result in the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is now standard in the literature on reasons and rationality to distinguish normative reasons from motivating reasons. Two issues have dominated philosophical theorising concerning the latter: (i) whether we should think of them as certain (nonfactive) psychological states of the agent—the dispute over Psychologism; and (ii) whether we should say that the agent can ϕ for the reason that p only if p—the dispute over Factivism. This paper first introduces a puzzle: these disputes look very much like merely verbal disputes about the meaning of phrases like 'S's reason' in motivating reasons ascriptions, and yet charity requires us to think that something substantive is afoot. But what? The second aim of the paper is to extract substantive theses from certain natural argument for Psychologism and Anti-Factivism—theses which are versions of a Cartesian view of the nature and normative structure of rationality. The paper ends by arguing against these substantive theses on phenomenological and ethical grounds. The upshot is that proponents of Psychologism and Anti-Factivism are either engaged in the project of defending merely verbal theses or they're engaged in the project of defending false substantive ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the complex relations between friendship and blame. In the first part, I show that to be friends is to have certain evaluative, emotional and behavioral dispositions toward each other, and distinguish between two kinds of norms of friendship, namely friendship-based obligations and friendship-constituting rules. Friendship-based obligations tag actions of friends as obligatory, permissible or wrong, whereas friendship-constituting rules specify conditions that, if met, make it so that two persons stand in a particular type of relationship defined by various friendship-based obligations. I argue that whereas friendship-based obligations apply to actions under direct voluntary control, friendship-constituting rules apply to emotional and evaluative attitudes. The second part develops an account of friendship blame by comparing Scanlon's account of blame with Wallace's Strawsonian account of blame. I demonstrate that Scanlon's account picks out responses that become appropriate when friends' attitudes are not in agreement with friendship-constituting rules, whereas Wallace's account picks out responses that become appropriate when friends violate friendship-based obligations. Arguing that the responses picked out by Scanlon's account do not amount to blame, I show that, when combined, the views give an illuminating picture of possible reactions to friends who fall short of the standards of friendship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are the categorical laws of ontology metaphysically contingent? I do not intend to give a full answer to this question in this paper. But I shall give a partial answer to it. In particular, Gideon Rosen, in his article "The Limits of Contingency" (2006), has distinguished a certain conception of metaphysical necessity, which he calls the Non-Standard conception, which, together with the assumption that all natures or essences are Kantian, is supposed to entail that many laws of ontology are metaphysically contingent (Rosen 2006: 20, 27). Now, the argument Rosen gives supports the conclusion that all categorical laws of ontology are contingent. I shall argue that the Non-Standard conception and the thesis that all natures are Kantian are incompatible with each other and that, if the Non-Standard conception is true, there must be at least one metaphysically necessary categorical law of ontology, and I shall identify such a law. Thus my contribution to the question of the title of the paper will be that not all categorical ontological laws can be contingent if the Non-Standard conception is true. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most poorly understood features of consciousness is the relation between an experience and the subject of the experience. In this paper, I develop an ontology of consciousness on which experiences are events constituted by substances having properties at times. I use this to explain the relation between a subject and her experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the author's views on theorizing about metaphysical issues. The first paper addresses the general issues characterizing the actualist conception. The second paper discusses an epistemological argument against modal realism. the third is a dialog about the coherence of the notion of an impossible world. A person's beliefs, conceptualizations and descriptions portray not only the world, but the citizen's place in the world.

Although there seems to be an agreement on what slurs are, many authors diverge when it comes to classify some words as such. Hence, many debates would benefit from a technical definition of this term that would allow scholars to clearly distinguish what counts as a slur and what not. Although the paper offers different definitions of the term in order to allow the reader to choose her favorite, I claim that 'slurs' is the name given to a grammatical category, and I consequently trace a difference in kind between slurs and other kinds of group pejoratives. I rely on a novel approach to slurs that characterizes them based on their membership to a particular kind of register category, an often neglected sociolinguistic notion determining the social contexts in which registered terms are expected, tolerated or unacceptable. The paper also points out to the close link between words registered as [+derogatory] (slurs) and their usage in the context of dominance relations of different kinds between users and recipients of slurs. By pointing out to this link I hope to underscore the political significance of slur usage, as well as to contribute further to the explanation why slurs are so damaging and unacceptable in most social contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the implication from value to fittingness. I shall argue that those committed to this implication face a serious explanatory challenge. This argument is not intended as a knock-down argument against FA but it will, I think, show that those who endorse the theory incur a particular explanatory burden: to explain how counterfactual (dis)favouring of actual (dis)value is possible. After making two important preliminary points (about one of the primary motivations behind the theory and what this implies, respectively) I briefly discuss an objection to FA made by Krister Bykvist a few years ago. The point of discussing this objection is to enable me to more easily present my own, and I believe stronger, version of that objection. The overall argument takes the form of, simply, a counterexample which can be constructed on the back of (an acceptance) of my two preliminary points. Throughout the paper I try to respond to various objections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes up a neglected problem for metaethical noncognitivism: the characterization of the acceptance states for agent-centered normative theories like Rational Egoism. If Egoism is a coherent view, the non-cognitivist needs a coherent acceptance state for it. This can be provided, as Dreier (Aust J Philos 74: 409–422, 1996) and Gibbard (Thinking how to live, Harvard University Press, 2003) have shown. But those accounts fail when generalized, assigning the same acceptance state to normative theories that are clearly distinct, or assigning no acceptance state to theories that look to be intelligible. The paper makes the case for this and then asks: What should we conclude if the problem cannot be solved? We might conclude that since Egoism is clearly a coherent (if mistaken) view, the argument amounts to a refutation of noncognitivism. But we suggest another possibility. There is, on reflection, something incoherent, or at least odd, in standard formulations of Egoism; noncognitivism predicts this and so provides an intriguing explanation for this fact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantifier variance holds that different languages can have unrestricted quantifier expressions that differ in meaning, where an expression is a "quantifier" just in case it plays the right inferential role. Several critics argued that J.H. Harris's "collapse" argument refutes variance by showing that identity of inferential role is incompatible with meaning variance. This standard, syntactic collapse argument has generated several responses. More recently, Cian Dorr proved semantic collapse theorems to generate a semantic collapse argument against variance. The argument is significantly different from standard collapse, so it requires a new response. Here I clarify and analyze the semantic collapse argument, and explain how variantists can and should respond to it. The paper also includes an appendix showing the difficulties of positing identity variance without quantifier variance. The argument in the appendix has yet to appear in print, but is familiar to specialists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I spell out a descriptive account of agnosticism that captures the intuitive view that a subject enters the mental state of agnosticism via an act or event called suspension. I will argue that agnosticism is a complex mental state, and that the formation of an attitude is the relevant act or event by which a subject commits to indecision regarding some matter. I will suggest a 'two-component analysis' that addresses two aspects that jointly account for the settled state of agnosticism: (1) the subject's de facto indecision and (2) the subject's commitment to her indecision. Unlike meta-cognitivist or sui generis accounts, I do not take the agnostic's commitment to indecision as constitutive for her indecision but rather as an evaluation or qualification of the indecision that she already exhibits. Agnosticism, thus, is a settled form of indecision that marks the end of inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper defends the claim that pragmatic encroachment—the idea that knowledge is sensitive to the practical stakes of believing—can explain a distinctive kind of epistemic injustice: the injustice that occurs when prejudice causes someone to know less than they otherwise would. This encroachment injustice, as we call it, occurs when the threat of being met with prejudice raises the stakes for someone to rely on her belief when acting, by raising the level of evidential support required for knowledge. We explain this notion of encroachment injustice, connect it to the empirical literature on implicit bias, and defend it against important objections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of authors have defended permissivism by appealing to rational supererogation, the thought that some doxastic states might be rationally permissible even though there are other, more rational beliefs available. If this is correct, then there are situations that allow for multiple rational doxastic responses, even if some of those responses are rationally suboptimal. In this paper, I will argue that this is the wrong approach to defending permissivism—there are no doxastic states that are rationally supererogatory. By the lights of contemporary linguistics, 'rational' is an absolute gradable adjective, and as such, can only be applied to things that satisfy the top of the scale of rationality. For this reason, it is not possible to believe what is rational while also failing to believe what is rationally optimal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consider the following argument written on the board in room 227: 1 = 1. So, the argument on the board in room 227 is not valid. This argument generates a paradox. The aim of this paper is to present a resolution of this paradox and related paradoxes of validity, including a version of the Curry paradox. The proposal stresses the close connections between these validity paradoxes and paradoxes of truth (such as the liar) and paradoxes of denotation (such as Richard's, Berry's and König's). So a more general aim is to provide a unified response to semantic paradox. The positive proposal is in part inspired by a brief, tantalizing suggestion of Gödel's, that the paradoxes might appear "as something analogous to dividing by zero"—so that the concept of validity, for example, is everywhere applicable except for certain singular points or singularities. A second central claim is that 'valid' is a context-sensitive predicate. The key notions of this contextual-singularity theory are presented and applied to a variety of cases. Any purported solution to paradox must deal with the phenomenon of revenge, and a response to revenge is outlined. The paper closes with remarks about the accommodation of Tarski's claim that natural languages are universal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intersectionality is the notion that concerns the complexity of the experiences of individuals in virtue of their belonging to multiple socially significant categories. One of its main insights is that the way society is structured around categories such as gender, race, sexuality, class, etc., produces distinctive and specific forms of discrimination and privilege for groups in the intersections. In this paper, we suggest conceiving intersectionality as a general metaphysical framework wherein specific claims to the effect that the experiences of discrimination of Black women, among others, can be fruitfully formulated and examined. The main claim is that intersectional experiences emerge from the conjunction of social categories when social structures make them relevant vis-à-vis discrimination and privilege. We then argue that our view has three main virtues: metaphysical neutrality, explanatory flexibility and methodological openness. Explaining these virtues will allow us to contrast our proposal with alternatives from the recent literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is it good for us if the different parts of our lives are connected to each other like the parts of a good story? Some philosophers have thought so, while others have firmly rejected it. In this paper, I focus on the state-of-the-art anti-narrativist arguments Amy Berg has recently presented in this journal. I argue that while she makes a good case that the best kind of lives for us do not revolve around a single project or theme, the best kind of narrativist views actually encourage us to pursue a variety of different projects, as long as they are mutually supportive. I claim that when interpreted in the most plausible way, prudentially good-making narrative coherence arises precisely out of this kind of unity in diversity. Well-roundedness and narrative coherence are thus not inherently in tension, but are both good-making holistic features of our lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In consideration of the spatial structures of sensory experiences, an 'Externality Thesis' is commonly proposed, according to which awareness of sensory boundaries is also an awareness of the presence of a space beyond these boundaries. The paper evaluates the Externality Thesis in the context of vision and touch. More specifically, relying on mereotopological theories, it is shown that the notion of spatial boundaries is ambiguous as it encompasses various distinct ways in which entities may be connected by a boundary. It is argued that only some of these ways are able to support the Externality Thesis. In particular, it is claimed that while bodily boundaries of which one is aware in tactile sensations are such that the awareness of them provides support for the Externality Thesis, the analogous claim is not true about the boundaries of the visual field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much philosophical work has examined both imperatival and non-imperatival forms of address that aim to motivate others to action. But one such kind of address has received relatively little attention: begging. This is partly surprising as begging, both as an individual act and as a widespread social practice, raises acute, yet difficult to articulate, moral and political concerns. In this paper, I identify a central form of the phenomenon which constitutively involves communicating one's relative powerlessness as a means of motivating one's target to act. I argue that this form of begging is present in a number of cases that animate many of our pre-theoretic normative worries about begging. I argue that when begging of this kind is bad for the beggar herself, this is so because either (i) the invoked powerlessness is bad for the beggar and thereby gives the action a negative evaluative meaning, or (ii) the invoked powerlessness is good/neutral, but the act of begging precludes or replaces valuable ways of interacting that the parties have reasons to care about in the context. In a slogan, the badness of begging revolves around power and helplessness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we introduce the view that realism about a social kind K entails that the grounding conditions of K are difficult (or impossible) to manipulate. In other words, we define social kind realism in terms of relative frame manipulability (RFM). In articulating our view, we utilize theoretical resources from Epstein's (Epstein, The ant trap: Rebuilding the foundations of the Social Sciences. Oxford University Press, 2015) grounding/anchoring model and causal interventionism. After comparing our view with causal and principle-based (Tahko, Synthese 200(2):1–23, 2022) proposals, we motivate RFM by showing that it accommodates important desiderata about the social landscape (such as recognizing the context-relativity of social properties and the emancipatory dimension of social practice). Finally, we consider three objections. First, we tackle frame-necessitarianism (FN), the view that social kind frames are metaphysically necessary (and thus unmanipulable). Secondly, we engage with what Epstein (Epstein, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 99(3):768–781 2019a) calls UNIVERSALITY (the view that social kinds can hold in the absence of anchors) and we argue that it should also be resisted. Finally, we tackle a recent objection from Mason's (Mason, Philosophical Studies, 178(12):3975–3994) essentialism about social kinds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

True benevolence is, most fundamentally, a desire that the world be better. It is natural and common, however, to frame thinking about benevolence indirectly, in terms of a desire to make a difference to how good the world is. This would be an innocuous shift if desires to make a difference were extensionally equivalent to desires that the world be better. This paper shows that at least on some common ways of making a "desire to make a difference" precise, this extensional equivalence fails. Where it fails, "difference-making preferences" run counter to the ideals of benevolence. In particular, in the context of decision making under uncertainty, coupling a "difference-making" framing in a natural way with risk aversion leads to preferences that violate stochastic dominance, and that lead to a strong form of collective defeat, from the point of view of betterness. Difference-making framings and true benevolence are not strictly mutually inconsistent, but agents seeking to implement true benevolence must take care to avoid the various pitfalls that we outline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A premise of the Leibnizian cosmological argument from contingency says that no contingent fact can explain why there are any contingent facts at all. David Hume and Paul Edwards famously denied this premise, arguing that if every fact has an explanation in terms of further facts ad infinitum, then they all do. This is known as the Hume–Edwards Principle (HEP). In this paper, I examine the cosmological argument from contingency within a framework of metaphysical explanation or ground and defend a ground-theoretic version of HEP which says, roughly, that the plurality of contingent facts is grounded in its members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How are justified belief and rational belief related? Some philosophers think that justified belief and rational belief come to the same thing. Others take it that justification is a matter of how well a particular belief is supported by the evidence, while rational belief is a matter of how well a belief coheres with a person's other beliefs. In this paper, I defend the view that justification is a dimension of rationality, a view that can make sense of both of these conflicting accounts. When it modifies belief, 'rational' is a multidimensional adjective, as there are multiple dimensions along which a belief can be rational. I will argue that one of these dimensions is justification, an account that can not only explain why philosophers give diverging theories of the relationship between justified belief and rational belief, but can also reveal why rational belief and justified belief are closely related despite being distinct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What makes your life go well for you? In this paper, we give an account of welfare. Our core idea is simple. There are impersonally good and bad things out there: things that are good or bad period, not (or not only) good or bad for someone. The life that is good for you is the life in contact with the good. We'll understand the relevant notion of 'contact' here in terms of manifestation: you're in contact with a value when it is manifest in parts of your life or parts of your life are manifest in it. So, the more the good is manifest in your life, or your life manifest in the good, the better for you. The more the bad is manifest in your life, or your life manifest in the bad, the worse for you. We'll argue that this account is extensionally adequate: it explains the welfare value of achievements, friendships, knowledge, pleasures and virtues. Moreover, it has a number of explanatory virtues: it's unified, elegant and explanatorily powerful. So, we'll suggest, it's an excellent account of welfare, and in many ways superior to its main competitors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To reconcile the standard possible worlds model of knowledge with the intuition that ordinary agents fall far short of logical omniscience, a Stalnakerian strategy appeals to two components. The first is the idea that mathematical and logical knowledge is at bottom metalinguistic knowledge. The second is the idea that non-ideal minds are often fragmented. In this paper, we investigate this Stalnakerian reconciliation strategy and argue, ultimately, that it fails. We are not the first to complain about the Stalnakerian strategy. But in contrast to existing complaints, we want to cause trouble for the strategy directly on its home turf. That is, we will advance our objection while granting both the plausibility of the fragmentation component—save for an extreme version of it—and that of the metalinguistic component. Once our central objection to the Stalnakerian strategy is in place, we will show how it negatively affects Adam Elga and Augustín Rayo's recent attempt to apply the Stalnakerian strategy in the context of Bayesian decision theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mereological atomism is the thesis that everything is ultimately composed of atomic parts, i.e., parts without proper parts. Typically, this thesis is characterized by an axiom stating that everything has atomic parts. The present paper argues that the success of this standard characterization depends on how the notions of sum and composition are defined. In particular, we put forward a novel definition of mereological sum that: (i) is not equivalent to existing definitions in the literature, if no strong decomposition principle is assumed; (ii) can be used to argue that the standard characterization of atomism fails, because having atomic parts is not sufficient to be a sum of atoms; and (iii) provides a purely mereological distinction between structured and unstructured wholes, contributing to the ongoing debate on this crucial topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to one prominent critique of mainstream epistemology, discoveries about what it takes to know or justifiedly believe that p can't provide the right kind of intellectual guidance. As Mark Webb puts it, "the kinds of principles that are developed in this tradition are of no use in helping people in their ordinary epistemic practices." In this paper I defend a certain form of traditional epistemology against this "regulative" critique. Traditional epistemology can provide—and, indeed, can be essential for—intellectual guidance. The reason is that, in many cases, how you should proceed intellectually depends on what you already know or justifiedly believe: how you should treat counterevidence to your beliefs, for example, can depend on whether those beliefs count as knowledge. Therefore, to get guidance on how to proceed intellectually, it will often be essential to be able to figure out what you know or justifiedly believe. And to do that it will often be helpful to try to figure out what it takes to count as knowledge or justified belief in the first place. To do this is precisely to engage in mainstream epistemology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely held that our beliefs can be epistemically faultless despite being morally flawed. Theories of moral encroachment challenge this, holding that moral considerations bear on the epistemic status of our attitudes. According to attitude-based theories of moral encroachment, morality encroaches upon the epistemic standing of our attitudes on the grounds that we can morally injure others with our epistemic practices. In this paper, I aim to show that current attitude-based theories have asymmetric mechanisms: moral features only make it harder for attitudes to secure epistemic merits. I argue that, if attitudes can incur moral injury, failure to form attitudes can too. To make sense of this, I contend, attitude-based accounts require symmetric mechanisms, allowing that moral considerations make it both harder and easier for attitudes to attain epistemic merits. I maintain that, once we recognize this, attitude-based encroachment views must soon concede that they sometimes demand we believe against the evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently some epistemologists have approached the question whether epistemic justification comes in degrees from a linguistic perspective. Drawing insights from linguistic analyses of gradable adjectives, they investigate whether epistemic occurrences of 'justified' are gradable and if yes what type of gradability they involve. These authors conclude that the adjective passes standard tests for gradability, but they classify it as belonging to different categories: as either an absolute or a relative gradable adjective. The aim of this paper is to further clarify the question of what kind of gradability is instantiated by epistemic uses of 'justified', and to investigate the consequences that this may have on epistemological theorizing. In particular, we challenge the alleged evidence provided by Siscoe (2021: 517–59) for the relative gradability of 'justified' and we provide positive arguments for the claim that 'justified' is a specific kind of absolute gradable adjective (a totally closed scale absolute with default minimal reading). We consider some important philosophical implications of these results. We also argue that the scale type of 'justified' is ordinal, and we consider which other properties typically associated to justification possess a similar type of scale. We argue that several popular contemporary models of graded justification, such as probabilistic and reliabilist accounts and various kinds of Lockean views, do not fit well with our results about the gradability of 'justified'. Linguistic data rather favour normalcy and plausibility accounts of graded justification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work by Matthew Bedke and Max Hayward develops a new attack on metaethical non-naturalists: that they are committed to an immoral state of mind, because they must be willing to change their mind about the moral importance of certain actions given possible evidence about the layout of the non-natural realm. For example, they must be willing to decrease their credence that torturing babies is bad, if they ever get evidence that torturing babies is not in the extension of a non-natural property. The present paper aims to both develop the strongest version of this argument and propose a response to it. The first section argues that the strongest version of this attack does not depend on whether accepting non-naturalism commits one to believing a certain kind of conditional proposition. Rather, it depends on whether accepting non-naturalism commits one to having a certain kind of conditional credences. Moreover, the moral criticism at hand does not hinge on the causal inertness of non-natural properties. And in so far as the argument does not depend on causal inertness, the people threatened by immorality are not just non-naturalists, but metaethicists in general (Sect. 2). This is because the worry hinges instead on particular relationships of epistemic dependence between our metaethical and some of our ethical views. But it is not clear that those relationships obtain; we could adopt metaethical methodologies that preclude morally problematic dependence of relevant first order views on evidence about our metaethical theories (Sect. 3). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although logical settings are typically concerned with tracking alethic considerations, frameworks exist in which topic-theoretic considerations—e.g., tracking subject-matter or topic—are given equal importance. Intuitions about extending topic through a propositional language are generally straightforward for extensional cases. For a number of reasons, arriving at a compelling account of the subject-matter of intensional operators—such as intensional conditionals—is a more difficult task. In particular, the framework of topic-sensitive intentional modals (TSIMs) championed by Francesco Berto and his collaborators leave the topics of intensional formulae undefined, which artificially constricts the expressivity of the theory. This paper proposes an approach to fill in this lacuna, emphasizing an analogous problem in Parry-style containment logics. In this setting, the approach receives a proof-of-concept through the introduction of a natural and general family of subsystems of Parry's PAI —with sound and complete axiomatizations—that allow a fine degree of control over the topics of intensional conditionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventionalism about promising is the view that the power to make binding promises depends essentially on the existence of a social practice or convention of promising. This paper explores an objection to conventionalism that says that—(allegedly) contra conventionalism—there is no morally acceptable world in which we lack the power of promise. Instead, normative powers theorists claim that our power of promise is morally basic or necessary. I argue that the conventionalist need not deny this claim. There are several ways to develop a noncontingent conventionalism: a version of the view that can accommodate the insight that the power of promise is indispensable to morally acceptable lives. Then, I argue that the conventionalist is indeed on the hook for accommodating this insight. I wrap up by considering the state of play in the debate over conventionalism about promising. Once we note the theoretical possibility of noncontingent conventionalism, it looks like the theatre of battle shifts to the difficult question of whether "natural" morality always provides "moral necessities." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Curry paradox about truth is generated by the following sentence, written on the board in room 101: If the sentence on the board in room 101 is true then 1 ≠ 1. A Curry paradox about validity is generated by the following argument, written on the board in room 102: The argument on the board in room 102 is valid. Therefore, 1 ≠ 1. Though the sentence and the argument generate Curry paradoxes, they also generate more basic paradoxes, in a sense to be made clear. I argue that if we solve these more basic paradoxes, we have solutions to both kinds of Curry paradox. The positive proposal is in part inspired by a brief remark of Gödel's, that the paradoxes might appear "as something analogous to dividing by zero"—so that the concepts of truth and validity, for example, are everywhere applicable except for certain singular points or singularities. A second central claim is that 'true' and 'valid' are context-sensitive predicates. This contextual-singularity approach to the Curry paradoxes applies also to other paradoxes of truth, validity, denotation, and predicate-extension. So a more general aim of the paper is to provide a unified response to semantic paradox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deflationists hold that it does not seem to us, in experience, as though time robustly passes. There is some recent empirical evidence that appears to support this contention. Equally, empirical evidence suggests that we naïvely represent time as dynamical. Thus deflationists are faced with an explanatory burden. If, as they maintain, the world seems to us in experience as though it is non-dynamical, then why do we represent time as dynamical? This paper takes up the challenge of investigating, on the part of the deflationist, one candidate explanation. We hypothesise that people's belief that the future is what we call deliberatively open partly explains why they represent time as dynamical. In a series of two experiments we test this hypothesis. We find no evidence that beliefs about deliberative openness explain why people represent time as dynamical. Hence there remains an explanatory burden for the deflationist to discharge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we clarify, unpack, and ultimately resist what is perhaps the most prominent argument for the compatibility of free will and determinism: the epistemic argument for compatibilism. We focus on one such argument as articulated by David Lewis: (i) we know we are free, (ii) for all we know everything is predetermined, (iii) if we know we are free but for all we know everything is predetermined, then for all we know we are free but everything is predetermined, (iv) if for all we know we are free but predetermined, then it is really possible that we are, so (v) compatibilism. We uncover how the crucial epistemic modality underlying (iv) must be understood, and contend that, understood this way, the libertarian can resist (iv). Importantly, however, resisting the argument does commit the libertarian to what has been called "flip-flopping"—but we argue that this is perfectly coherent. We conclude by articulating two crucially ways the libertarian can resist the argument, by saying that we can know that determinism is false "from the armchair". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that we should solve paradoxes for propositions (such as the Russell–Myhill paradox) in essentially the same way that we solve Russellian paradoxes for sets. That is, the standard, iterative approach to sets is extended to include properties, and then the resulting hierarchy of sets and properties is used to construct propositions. Propositions on this account are structured in the sense of mirroring the sentences that express them, and they would seem to serve the needs of philosophers of language and metaphysicians who rely on such propositions. The resulting account has limitations, comparable to those faced by the iterative approach to sets, but it is argued to be in important ways preferable to others that have been proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A popular accusation against moral relativism is that it goes too far in its vindication of tolerance. The idea behind accusations like this can be summarized in the slogan, frequently attributed to relativism, that "anything goes". The aim of this paper is to defend moral relativism from the accusation that it is an "anything goes" view; from the accusation that it forces us to suspend our judgment in cases in which we do not think we should even be allowed to. In the end, relativism is not an "anything goes" view because it is not a view about what goes, but about the way things go—about what goes on when we say that something is morally right or wrong. There is indeed a view, sometimes called "relativism", that forces us to suspend our judgment about practices that do not allow for such comfort, but it is not so much moral relativism as moral contextualism. Apparently, though, the most salient alternative to "anything goes" views such as contextualism is not moral relativism. It is moral objectivism, according to which there is a fact of the matter about moral issues. However, I show that moral objectivism too ends up being an "anything goes" view unless the objectivist takes herself to be endowed with "God's point of view", which I prove troublesome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rinard (Philos Stud 176(7):1923–1950, 2019) brings to our attention the fact that, typically, the questions What should I believe? and What should I do? are treated differently. A typical answer to the first question is Believe according to the evidence, and a typical answer to the second question is Do what is right. But Rinard rejects this dichotomy. In its place, she argues for a view which she calls "Equal Treatment" in which one should believe according to the same considerations that govern what one should do. Christensen (Philos Phenomenol Res. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12712, 2020) aptly situates Equal Treatment as a limit case of a recent movement towards taking pragmatic factors as partly determining what one should believe, in that Equal Treatment is a purely pragmatic view. Does Rinard's case for a purely pragmatic view succeed? This paper argues that the answer is no. Three objections that target key parts of Rinard's case for Equal Treatment are presented. The upshot is that the dichotomy between the answers to What should I believe? and What should I do? seems robust against strong attempts to dismantle it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern particle physics suggests an intriguing vision of physical reality: we are to imagine the symmetries of the world as fundamental, whereas the material constituents of the world (such as particles and fields) are ontologically derivative of them. This paper develops a novel ontology for non-relativistic quantum mechanics which gives precise metaphysical content to this vision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many philosophers are baffled by necessity. Humeans, in particular, are deeply disturbed by the idea of necessary laws of nature. In this paper I offer a systematic yet down to earth explanation of necessity and laws in terms of invariance. The type of invariance I employ for this purpose generalizes an invariance used in meta-logic. The main idea is that properties and relations in general have certain degrees of invariance, and some properties/relations have a stronger degree of invariance than others. The degrees of invariance of highly-invariant properties are associated with high degrees of necessity of laws governing/describing these properties, and this explains the necessity of such laws both in logic and in science. This non-mysterious explanation has rich ramifications for both fields, including the formality of logic and mathematics, the apparent conflict between the contingency of science and the necessity of its laws, the difference between logical-mathematical, physical, and biological laws/principles, the abstract character of laws, the applicability of logic and mathematics to science, scientific realism, and logical-mathematical realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Something is good insofar as it achieves its end, so says a neo-Aristotelian view of goodness. Powers/dispositions are paradigm cases of entities that have an end, so say many metaphysicians. A question therefore arises, namely, can one account for neo-Aristotelian goodness in terms of an ontology of powers? This is what I shall begin to explore in this paper. I will first provide a brief explication of both neo-Aristotelian goodness and the metaphysics of powers, before turning to investigate whether one can give an account of neo-Aristotelian goodness in terms of powers. I will suggest that the answer to this question is yes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the role of culpability in determining the degree of liability to defensive harm, and asks whether there are any restrictions on when culpability is relevant to liability. A natural first suggestion is that it is only relevant (or at least is significantly enhanced) when combined with an actual threat of harm in the situation in which defensive harm becomes salient as a means of protection. The paper begins by considering the question of whether two people are equally liable to defensive harm in a situation if both culpably intend to harm another, but due to circumstances outside the control of the two people only one has a chance of succeeding in causing harm. I argue that there is no difference in liability between the two. I then turn to a kind of slippery slope challenge that accepting this conclusion would lead to a vast over-inclusiveness in those liable to defensive harm, and consider a recent attempt at meeting it that requires that a person's culpability can only affect liability if it concerns the very situation in which defensive harm is relevant. Finally, I put forward and assess a new way of meeting the challenge that appeals to a particular conception of culpability together with auxiliary theses concerning how culpability can decrease over time, among others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Naïve Realism claims that veridical perceptual experiences essentially consist in genuine relations between perceivers and mind-independent objects and their features. The contemporary debate in the philosophy of perception has devoted little attention to assessing one of the main motivations to endorse Naïve Realism–namely, that it is the only view which articulates our 'intuitive' conception of perception. In this paper, I first clarify in which sense Naïve Realism is supposed to be 'naïve'. In this respect, I argue that it is put forward as the only view which can take our introspective knowledge of perception at face value, and I identify the two (alleged) key features of such introspective knowledge. Second, I challenge the claim that one of these features-namely, that it seems as one could not be in the same perceptual state unless the putative objects of perception existed and were perceived–is introspectively evident. Consequently, I argue that a view of perceptual experience–such as Intentionalism–which denies that this feature is true of perception can still take introspection at face value. This undermines the claim that Naïve Realism is the only account which accommodates our intuitions on the nature of perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does attention contribute to perceptual experience? Within cognitive science, attention is known to contribute to the organization of sensory features into perceptual objects, or 'object-based organization.' The current paper tackles a different type of organization and thus suggests a different role for attention in conscious perception. Within every perceptual experience we find that more subjectively interesting percepts stand out in the foreground, whereas less subjectively interesting percepts are relegated to the background. The sight of a sycamore often gains the visual foreground for a nature lover, whereas the sound of a violin often gains the auditory foreground for a music lover, but not necessarily vice versa. How does the perceptual system organize early sensory processing according to the subject's interests? The current paper reveals how this subject-based organization is brought about and maintained through top-down attention. In fact, the current paper argues that top-down attention is necessary for conscious perception in so far as it is necessary for bringing about and maintaining the subject-based organization of perceptual experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper addresses Molnar's problem (Australas J Philos 78(1):72-86, 2000): that of finding positive truthmakers for negative truths. The proposed solution, called (Simple), is to hold truth and falsity to be primitive and positive features of propositions and to take every literal negative truth to be made true by the falsity of the atomic proposition that it embeds. The solution is shown to be compatible with Maximalism, Necessitarianism and with the Entailment Thesis, as well as with most if not all possible variants of truthmaking theory. Other advantages of (Simple) are noted: it doesn't require the inclusion of exotic objects in one's ontology; it doesn't require any revision of one's logic or of one's theory of modality. The solution also allows one to eschew negative facts, tropes and properties while providing a definition of negativity (DefNegativity) for certain literal propositions. The paper ends by rebutting several objections that may be levelled against (Simple). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dispositional Essentialism is a unified anti-Humean account of the metaphysics of low-level physical properties and laws of nature. In this paper, I articulate the view that I label Canonical Dispositional Essentialism (CDE), which comprises a structuralist metaphysics of properties and an account of laws as relations in the property structure. I then present an alternative anti-Humean account of properties and laws (still somewhat in the dispositional essentialist spirit). This account rejects CDE's structuralist metaphysics of properties in favour of a view of properties as qualitative grounds of dispositions and it rejects CDE's view of laws as relations in favour of a view of laws as features of an efficient description of possible property distributions. I then defend this view over CDE on the grounds that it can overcome an explanatory shortcoming of CDE and that it achieves a level of continuity with science that CDE fails to achieve. The upshot of this paper is a significant narrowing of the range of possibilities in which the absolutely best unified account of laws and properties resides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imagination plays a rich epistemic role in our cognitive lives. For example, if I want to learn whether my luggage will fit into the overhead compartment on a plane, I might imagine trying to fit it into the overhead compartment and form a belief which is justified on the basis of this imagining. But what explains the fact that imagination has the power to justify beliefs, and what is the structure of imaginative justification? In this paper, I answer these questions by arguing that imaginings manifest an epistemic status: they are epistemically evaluable as justified or unjustified. This epistemic status grounds their ability to justify beliefs, and they accrue this status in virtue of being based on evidence. Thus, imaginings are best understood as justified justifiers. I argue for this view by way of showing how it offers a satisfying explanation of certain key features of imaginative justification that would otherwise be puzzling. I also argue that imaginings exhibit a number of markers of the basing relation, which further motivates the view that imaginings can be based on evidence. The arguments in this paper have theoretically fruitful implications not only for the epistemology of imagination, but for accounts of reasoning and epistemic normativity more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wright claims that "the epistemology of good abstraction principles should be assimilated to that of basic principles of logical inference". In this paper I follow Wright's recommendation, but I consider a different epistemology of logic, namely anti-exceptionalism. Anti-exceptionalism's main contention is that logic is not a priori, and that the choice between rival logics should be based on abductive criteria such as simplicity, adequacy to the data, strength, fruitfulness, and consistency. This paper's goal is to lay down the foundations for an application of the anti-exceptionalist methodology to abstraction principles. In Sect. 1 I outline my strategy. I show that anti-exceptionalism has a bearing on the so-called Bad Company problem (Sect. 2), and explore some versions of anti-exceptionalism about abstraction (Sect. 3). I then consider new criteria for choosing between rival abstraction principles, and, in particular, between consistent revisions of Frege's Basic Law V (Sect. 4). I finally consider how the abstractionist can compare between competing criteria (Sect. 5), and argue that anti-exceptionalists should be pluralists about abstraction (Sect. 6). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]