The replication crisis is perceived by many as one of the most significant threats to the reliability of research. Though reporting of the crisis has emphasized social science, all signs indicate that it extends to many other fields. This paper investigates the possibility that the crisis and related challenges to conducting research also extend to philosophy. According to one possibility, philosophy inherits a crisis similar to the one in science because philosophers rely on unreplicated or unreplicable findings from science when conducting philosophical research. According to another possibility, the crisis likely extends to philosophy because philosophers engage in similar research practices and face similar structural issues when conducting research that have been implicated by the crisis in science. Proposals for improving philosophical research are offered in light of these possibilities.

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Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions

The replication crisis and philosophy

Non-bivalent semantics of the future tense assert that propositions regarding future contingents are neither true nor false. One of the most relevant non-bivalent semantics is supervaluationism (Thomason in Theoria 36(3):264–281, 1970; Thomason, in: Gabbay, Guenthner (eds) Handbook of philosophical logic, Springer, Berlin, 1984), which preserves important logical principles. Recently, non-bivalent semantics are under attack from some pragmatics arguments: these semantics would be incompatible with our practices of asserting future contingents and with the probability we ascribe to such assertions (Besson and Hattiangadi in Philosophical Studies 167(2):251–271, 2014; Cariani and Santorio in Mind 127(505):129–165, 2018). The aim of this paper is to defend supervaluationism against this kind of criticism. We argue that, if probability is interpreted as the subjective belief in a proposition and if a semantic contextualism is adopted, supervaluationism makes correct predictions concerning the norms that govern our practices of asserting future contingents. Obviously, other arguments can be proposed against supervaluationism, but they must be of a different kind, such as metaphysical arguments.

Assertions and future tense semantics

Several authors have claimed that indicative conditionals are sensitive to the epistemic perspective of agents. According to this sort of view, the truth of an indicative conditional depends on the...

Indicatives at stake

We present an epistemic logic ELF (Epistemic Logic with Filters) where knowledge does not require complete certainty. In this logic, instead of saying that an agent knows a particular fact if it is true in every accessible world, we say that it knows the fact if it is true in a sufficiently large set accessible worlds. On a technical level, we do this by enriching the standard Kripke models of epistemic logic with a set of filters: a sufficiently large set of worlds is one that is in the filter. We introduce semantics for ELF, and give a sound and complete proof system.

Knowledge Without Complete Certainty

In this paper I focus on a recently discussed phenomenon illustrated by sentences containing predicates of taste: the phenomenon of “perspectival plurality”, whereby sentences containing two or more predicates of taste have readings according to which each predicate pertains to a different perspective. This phenomenon has been shown to be problematic for (at least certain versions of) relativism. My main aim is to further the discussion by showing that the phenomenon extends to other perspectival expressions than predicates of taste and by proposing a general solution to the problem raised by it on behalf of the relativist. The core claim of the solution (“multiple indexing”) is that utterances of sentences containing perspectival expressions should be evaluated with respect to (possibly infinite) sequences of perspective parameters. While such a move sounds radical, I argue that the departure from the traditional Kaplanian framework is not as dramatic as it sounds.

Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions

Citations

The replication crisis and philosophy

Assertions and future tense semantics

Indicatives at stake

Knowledge Without Complete Certainty

Perspectival Plurality, Relativism, and Multiple Indexing

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