Showing papers in "Mind in 2016"

Backtracking Counterfactuals Revisited

Abstract: I discuss three observations about backtracking counterfactuals not predicted by existing theories, and then motivate a theory of counterfactuals that does predict them. On my theory, counterfactuals quantify over a suitably restricted set of historical possibilities from some contextually relevant past time. I motivate each feature of the theory relevant to predicting our three observations about backtracking counterfactuals. The paper concludes with replies to three potential objections. Consider the following situation (cf. Jackson 1977): you see your friend Smith on the roof of a twenty story building, poised to jump. There is nothing underneath him besides the solid concrete of the sidewalk. You feel anxiety and fear—you do not want your friend to die! Trying to regain composure, you remind yourself that you know Smith and know that he is rational, has no wish to die, and knows that (since there is nothing underneath him) jumping in such circumstances will kill him. Reflecting on this, you think: he is not going to jump. Thankfully, just as you predict, Smith steps down off the ledge and descends the stairs, exiting the building safely. Relieved, you say, ‘Thank goodness, (1) If Smith had jumped, he would have died.’ It seems clear that the counterfactual you utter is true. Furthermore, that (1) is true seems to be why it is appropriate to feel relief when Smith does not jump; it also seems to be why your anxiety that he might jump is reasonable in light of the circumstances.1 Now, Beth is also on the scene, and hears you utter (1). Beth objects on the following grounds. ‘Smith was rational, had no wish to die, could see below him, and knew that I have in mind something like the following: feeling relief that ¬p is appropriate iff things would have been worse off had p occurred (or perhaps iff you believe things would have been worse off had p occurred). Some sort of counterfactual comparison seems to be a property of emotive factive verbs generally (compare regret, resent) and may be related to the fact that emotive factious seem to presuppose knowledge (not just truth) of their complements—see for instance Zuber 1977.

What Is the Well-Foundedness of Grounding?

Abstract: A number of philosophers think that grounding is, in some sense, well-founded. This thesis, however, is not always articulated precisely, nor is there a consensus in the literature as to how it should be characterized. In what follows, I consider several principles that one might have in mind when asserting that grounding is well-founded, and I argue that one of these principles, which I call ‘full foundations’, best captures the relevant claim. My argument is by the process of elimination. For each of the inadequate principles, I illustrate its inadequacy by showing either that it excludes cases that should not be ruled out by a well-foundedness axiom for grounding, or that it admits cases that should be ruled out.

Normative Uncertainty as a Voting Problem

Abstract: Some philosophers have recently argued that decision-makers ought to take normative uncertainty into account in their decisionmaking. These philosophers argue that, just as it is plausible that we should maximize expected value under empirical uncertainty, it is plausible that we should maximize expected choice-worthiness under normative uncertainty. However, such an approach faces two serious problems: how to deal with merely ordinal theories, which do not give sense to the idea of magnitudes of choice-worthiness; and how, even when theories do give sense to magnitudes of choice-worthiness, to compare magnitudes of choice-worthiness across different theories. Some critics have suggested that these problems are fatal to the project of developing a normative account of decision-making under normative uncertainty. The primary purpose of this article is to show that this is not the case. To this end, I develop an analogy between decisionmaking under normative uncertainty and the problem of social choice, and then argue that the Borda Rule provides the best way of making decisions in the face of merely ordinal theories and intertheoretic incomparability.

Overpowering: How the Powers Ontology Has Overreached Itself

Abstract: Many authors have argued in favour of an ontology of properties as powers, and it has been widely argued that this ontology allows us to address certain philosophical problems in novel and illuminating ways, for example, causation, representation, intentionality, free will and liberty. I argue that the ontology of powers, even if successful as an account of fundamental natural properties, does not provide the insight claimed as regards the aforementioned non-fundamental phenomena. I illustrate this argument by criticizing the powers theory of causation presented by Mumford and Anjum (2011) and showing that related criticisms can be directed at other abuses of (the ontology of) powers.

Kant on Perceptual Content

Abstract: Call the idea that states of perceptual awareness have intentional content, and in virtue of that aim at or represent ways the world might be, the ‘Content View.’ I argue that though Kant is widely interpreted as endorsing the Content View there are significant problems for any such interpretation. I further argue that given the problems associated with attributing the Content View to Kant, interpreters should instead consider him as endorsing a form of acquaintance theory. Though perceptual acquaintance is controversial in itself and in attribution to Kant, it promises to make sense of central claims within his critical philosophy.

On the 'Indispensable Explanatory Role' of Mathematics

Abstract: The literature on the indispensability argument for mathematical realism often refers to the ‘indispensable explanatory role’ of mathematics. I argue that we should examine the notion of explanatory indispensability from the point of view of specific conceptions of scientific explanation. The reason is that explanatory indispensability in and of itself turns out to be insufficient for justifying the ontological conclusions at stake. To show this I introduce a distinction between different kinds of explanatory roles—some ‘thick’ and ontologically committing, others ‘thin’ and ontologically peripheral—and examine this distinction in relation to some notable ‘ontic’ accounts of explanation. I also discuss the issue in the broader context of other ‘explanationist’ realist arguments.

Future Contingents are all False! On Behalf of a Russellian Open Future

Abstract: There is a familiar debate between Russell and Strawson concerning bivalence and ‘the present King of France’. According to the Strawsonian view, ‘The present King of France is bald’ is neither true nor false, whereas, on the Russellian view, that proposition is simply false. In this paper, I develop what I take to be a crucial (and unnoticed) connection between this debate and a different domain where bivalence has been at stake: future contingents. On the familiar ‘Aristotelian’ view, future contingent propositions are neither true nor false. However, I argue that, just as there is a Russellian alternative to the Strawsonian view concerning ‘the present King of France’, according to which the relevant class of propositions all turn out false, so there is a Russellian alternative to the Aristotelian view, according to which future contingents all turn out false, not neither true nor false. The result: contrary to millennia of philosophical tradition, we can be open futurists without denying bivalence.

Naive Realism In Kantian Phrase

Abstract: Early twentieth-century philosophers of perception presented their naive realist views of perceptual experience in anti-Kantian terms. For they took naive realism about perceptual experience to be incompatible with Kant’s claims about the way the understanding is necessarily involved in perceptual consciousness. This essay seeks to situate a naive realist account of visual experience within a recognisably Kantian framework by arguing that a naive realist account of visual experience is compatible with the claim that the understanding is necessarily involved in the perceptual experience of those rational beings with discursive intellects. The effect is a middle-way between recent conceptualist and non-conceptualist interpretations of Kant: one which holds that the understanding is necessarily involved in the kind of perceptual consciousness that we, as rational beings, enjoy whilst allowing that the relations of apprehension which constitute perceptual consciousness are independent of acts of the understanding.

Cognitive Mobile Homes

Abstract: While recent discussions of contextualism have mostly focused on other issues, some influential early statements of contextualism emphasized the possibility for contextualism to provide an alternative both to coherentism and to traditional versions of foundationalism. In this essay, I will pick up on this strand of contextualist thought and argue that contextualist versions of foundationalism promise to solve some problems that their non-contextualist cousins cannot. In particular, I will argue that adopting contextualist versions of foundationalism can let us reconcile Bayesian accounts of belief updating with a version of the holist claim that all beliefs are defeasible.

The Category of Occurrent Continuants

Abstract: Arguing first that the best way to understand what a continuant is is as something that primarily has its properties at a time rather than atemporally, the paper then defends the idea that there are occurrent continuants These are things that were, are, or will be happening—like the ongoing process of someone reading or my writing this paper, for instance A recently popular philosophical view of process is as something that is referred to with mass nouns and not count nouns This has mistakenly encouraged the view that the only way to think of process is as the stuff of events, and has obscured the possibility of thinking of processes as individual continuants

Reliability Theories of Justified Credence

Abstract: Reliabilists hold that a belief is doxastically justified if and only if it is caused by a reliable process. But since such a process is one that tends to produce a high ratio of true to false beliefs, reliabilism is on the face of it applicable to binary beliefs, but not to degrees of confidence or credences. For while (binary) beliefs admit of truth or falsity, the same cannot be said of credences in general. A natural question now arises: Can reliability theories of justified belief be extended or modified to account for justified credence? In this paper, I address this question. I begin by showing that, as it stands, reliabilism cannot account for justified credence. I then consider three ways in which the reliabilist may try to do so by extending or modifying her theory, but I argue that such attempts face certain problems. After that, I turn to a version of reliabilism that incorporates evidentialist elements and argue that it allows us to avoid the problems that the other theories face. If I am right, this gives reliabilists a reason, aside from those given recently by Comesana and Goldman, to move towards such a kind of hybrid theory.

The Role of Speaker and Hearer in the Character of Demonstratives

Abstract: Demonstratives have different semantic values relative to different contexts of utterance. But it is surprisingly difficult to describe the function from contexts to contents (i.e. the character) which determines the semantic value of a given use of a demonstrative. It is very natural to think that the intentions of the speaker should play a significant role here. The aim of this paper is to discuss a pair of problems that arise for views which give intentions this central role in explaining the characters of demonstratives. As will emerge, these problems lead quickly to a foundational question about the semantics of demonstratives and many other context-sensitive expressions: the question of whether, in explaining their characters, we need to understand them as sensitive, not just to facts about the psychology of the speaker of the context, but also to facts about the audience of the context. I critically examine Jeffrey King’s theory of demonstratives, which answers this question in the affirmative, and argue that it ultimately collapses into a purely speaker-based view of the character of demonstratives. I then show how to develop a much simpler speaker-based theory which both handles all of the cases handled by King’s theory and avoids some of the more serious problems which King’s theory faces. Towards the end I consider how we might solve the very difficult problems which result from cases in which speakers use demonstratives with conflicting referential intentions

Type-Ambiguous Names

Abstract: The orthodox view of proper names, Millianism, provides a very simple and elegant explanation of the semantic contribution (and semantic properties) of referential uses of names, namely names that occur as bare singulars and as the argument of a predicate. However, one problem for Millianism is that it cannot explain the semantic contribution of predicative uses of names (as in e.g. ’there are two Alberts in my class’). In recent years, an alternative view, socalled The–Predicativism, has become increasingly popular. According to The–Predicativists, names are uniformly count nouns. This straightforwardly explains why names can be used predicatively, but is prima facie less congenial to an analysis of referential uses. To address this issue, The–Predicativists argue that referential names are in fact complex determiner phrases consisting of a covert definite determiner and a count noun—and so, a referential name is a (covert) definite description. In this paper, I will argue that despite the appearance of increased theoretical complexity, the view that names are ambiguous between predicative and referential types is in fact superior to the unitary The–Predicativist view. However, I will also argue that to see why this (type) ambiguity view is better, we need to give up the standard Millian analysis. Consequently, I will first propose an alternative analysis of referential names that (a) retains the virtues of Millianism, but (b) provides an important explanatory connection to the predicative uses. Once this analysis of names is adopted, the explanation for why names are systematically ambiguous between referential and predicative types is both simple and elegant. Second, I will argue that The–Predicativism has the appearance of being simpler than an ambiguity view, but is in fact unable to account for certain key properties of referential names without making ad hoc stipulations.

Explosion and the normativity of logic

Abstract: Logic has traditionally been construed as a normative discipline; it sets forth standards of correct reasoning. Explosion is a valid principle of classical logic. It states that an inconsistent set of propositions entails any proposition whatsoever. However, ordinary agents presumably do -- occasionally, at least -- have inconsistent belief sets. Yet it is false that such agents may, let alone ought to, believe any proposition they please. Therefore, our logic should not recognize explosion as a logical law. Call this the 'normative argument against explosion'. Arguments of this type play -- implicitly or explicitly -- a central role in motivating paraconsistent logics. Branden Fitelson (2008), in a throwaway remark, has conjectured that there is no plausible 'bridge principle' articulating the normative link between logic and reasoning capable of supporting such arguments. This paper offers a critical evaluation of Fitelson's conjecture, and hence of normative arguments for paraconsistency and the conceptions of logic's normative status on which they repose. It is argued that Fitelson’s conjecture turns out to be correct: normative arguments for paraconsistency probably fail.

Reformulating Mill’s Harm Principle

Abstract: Mill’s harm principle is commonly supposed to rest on a distinction between self-regarding conduct, which is not liable to interference, and other-regarding conduct, which is. As critics have noted, this distinction is difficult to draw. Furthermore, some of Mill’s own applications of the principle, such as his forbidding of slavery contracts, do not appear to fit with it. This article proposes that the selfregarding/other-regarding distinction is not in fact fundamental to Mill’s harm principle; what he should have said is that intervention is permissible only to prevent non-consensual harm, regardless of where it falls. This explains both why some otherregarding conduct is immune to interventions and why some self-regarding conduct can be interfered with.

Self-made People

Abstract: The Problem of Overlappers is a puzzle about what makes it the case, and how we can know, that we have the parts we intuitively think we have. In this paper, I develop and motivate an overlooked solution to this puzzle. According to what I call the self-making view it is within our power to decide what we refer to with the personal pronoun ‘I’, so the truth of most of our beliefs about our parts is ensured by the very mechanism of self-reference. Other than providing an elegant solution to the Problem of Overlappers, the view can be motivated on independent grounds. It also has wide-ranging consequences for how we should be thinking about persons. Among other things, it can help undermine an influential line of argument against the permissibility of elective amputation. After a detailed discussion and defence of the self-making view, I consider some objections to it. I conclude that none of these objections is persuasive and we should at the very least take seriously the idea that we are to some extent self-made.

Making Ado Without Expectations

Abstract: This paper is a response to Paul Bartha’s ‘Making Do Without Expectations’. We provide an assessment of the strengths and limitations of two notable extensions of standard decision theory: relative expectation theory (RET) and Paul Bartha’s relative utility theory (RUT). These extensions are designed to provide intuitive answers to some well-known problems in decision theory involving gaps in expectations. We argue that both RET and RUT go some way towards providing solutions to the problems in question but neither extension solves all the relevant problems.

Truth is Simple

Abstract: John Burgess published a paper with the title ‘The Truth is Never Simple’ (Burgess 1986). What he meant was that the extension of the truth predicate in a typed, and even more so in a type-free approach, is complicated. This cannot be disputed. But we argue that the intension of the truth predicate is simple, in the sense that the content of the concept of truth is given by a simple and natural collection of truth-biconditionals. In other words, we claim that some form of disquotationalism must be in some sense correct. From a logical point of view, this takes us to the area of proof-theoretic approaches to truth, and away from the area of modeltheoretic approaches to truth, which was the focus of Burgess (1986). Arguments by Shapiro (1998) and Ketland (1999), based on observations by Tarski, have shown that certain standard formulations of disquotationalism are untenable. The fact that truth is compositional cannot be fully accounted for by disquotational axioms alone. Moreover, disquotational principles alone do not seem to do justice to the role that truth plays in metamathematical reasoning. In particular, compositional truth principles can be used to show that

Metanormative Contextualism and Normative Uncertainty

Abstract: We offer a new argument in favor of metanormative contextualism, the thesis that the semantic value of a normative ‘ought’ claim of the form ‘S ought to Φ’ depends on the value of one or more parameters whose values vary in a way that is determined by the context of utterance. The debate over this contextualist thesis has centered on cases that involve ‘ought’ claims made in the face of uncertainty regarding certain descriptive facts. Contextualists, relativists, and invariantists all have plausible ways of explaining these cases, and one could reasonably judge the debate between these views to be a stalemate. We argue that this stalemate can be broken by shifting focus to a case that involves normative uncertainty rather than descriptive uncertainty. While relativist and invariantist rivals of contextualism can give plausible accounts of the descriptive uncertainty cases, only contextualism can provide a plausible account of the normative uncertainty case.

Advanced Modalizing Problems

Abstract: I present an internal problem for David Lewis’s genuine modal realism. My aim is to show that his analysis of modality is inconsistent with his metaphysics. I consider several ways of modifying the Lewisian analysis of modality, but argue that none are successful. I argue that the problem also affects theories related to genuine modal realism, including the stage theory of persistence and modal fictionalism.

A Reply to the Synchronist

Abstract: On the face of it, in ordinary practices of rational assessment, we criticize agents both for the combinations of attitudes, like belief, desire, and intention, that they possess at particular times, and for the ways that they behave cognitively over time, by forming, reconsidering, and updating those attitudes. Accordingly, philosophers have proposed norms of rationality that are synchronic—concerned fundamentally with our individual time-slices, and diachronic—concerned with our temporally extended behaviour. However, a recent movement in epistemology has cast doubt on the very existence of requirements of the latter type. My aim in this paper is to address what I take to be the most direct and general recent attack on diachronic epistemic rationality, the arguments for so-called ‘time-slice epistemology’ by Brian Hedden (2015). I argue that Hedden's attempt to motivate the rejection of diachronic rational norms ultimately fails, and in particular that an independently attractive view about the nature of such norms, namely one on which such norms govern processes, escapes his assault unscathed.

A Proof-Theoretic Defence of Meaning-Invariant Logical Pluralism

Abstract: In this paper I offer a proof-theoretic defence of meaning-invariant logical pluralism. I argue that there is a relation of co-determination between the operational and structural aspects of a logic. As a result, some features of the consequence relation are induced by the connectives. I propose that a connective is defined by those rules which are conservative and unique, while at the same time expressing only connective-induced structural information. This is the key to stabilizing the meaning of the connectives across multiple determinations of the consequence relation.

What’s the Point of Complete Rigour?

Abstract: Complete inferential rigour is achieved by breaking down arguments into steps that are as small as possible: inferential ‘atoms’. For example, a mathematical or philosophical argument may be made completely inferentially rigorous (‘atomized’) by decomposing its inferential steps into the type of step found in a natural deduction system. It is commonly thought that atomization, paradigmatically in mathematics but also more generally, is pro tanto epistemically valuable. The paper considers some plausible candidates for the epistemic value arising from atomization and finds that none of them fits the bill. In particular, atomized arguments do not ground the correctness of their unatomized counterparts; they are typically not credence-preserving; and they need not reveal the source of inferential disagreement. The moral this suggests is that complete rigour is not even a defeasible epistemic ideal.

Making Do Without Expectations

Abstract: The Pasadena game invented by Nover and Hajek (2004) raises a number of challenges for decision theory. The basic problem is how the game should be evaluated: it has no expectation and hence no well-defined value. Easwaran (2008) has shown that the Pasadena game does have a weak expectation, raising the possibility that we can eliminate the value gap by requiring agents to value gambles at their weak expectations (where they exist). In this paper, I first prove a negative result: there are gambles like the Pasadena game that do not even have a weak expectation. Hence, problematic value gaps remain even if decision theory is extended to take in weak expectations. There is a further challenge: the existence of a ‘value gap’ in the Pasadena game seems to make decision theory inapplicable in a number of cases where the right choice is obvious. The positive contribution of the paper is a theory of ‘relative utilities’, an extension of decision theory that lets us make comparative judgements even among gambles that have no well-defined value.

Reasoning without Blinders: A Reply to Valaris

Abstract: I object to Markos Valaris’s thesis that reasoning requires a belief that your conclusion follows from your premisses. My counter-examples highlight the important but neglected role of suppositional reasoning in the basis of so much of what we know.