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30781.548276
Our aim in this paper is to extend the semantics for the kind of logic of ground developed in [deRosset and Fine, 2023]. In that paper, the authors very briefly suggested a way of treating universal and existential quantification over a fixed domain of objects. Here we explore some options for extending the treatment to allow for a variable domain of objects.
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243615.548558
Consumption decisions are partly influenced by values and ideologies. Consumers care about global warming, child labor, fair trade, etc. We develop an axiomatic model of intrinsic values – those that are carriers of meaning in and of themselves – and argue that they often introduce discontinuities near zero. For example, a vegetarian’s preferences would be discontinuous near zero amount of animal meat. We distinguish intrinsic values from instrumental ones, which are means rather than ends and serve as proxies for intrinsic values. We illustrate the relevance of our value-based model in different contexts, including equity concerns and prosocial behavior.
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475223.548587
This picture by Roice Nelson shows a remarkable structure: the hexagonal tiling honeycomb. What is it? Roughly speaking, a honeycomb is a way of filling 3d space with polyhedra. The most symmetrical honeycombs are the ‘regular’ ones. …
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492470.5486
This axiomatization parallels the structure of first order logic exactly. It can be read as a reduction of the axiom scheme of comprehension of TST(U) to finitely many axiom templates (up to type assignment) or as a reduction of the axiom scheme of stratified comprehension to finitely many axioms. Probably one should assume weak extensionality: nonempty sets with the same elements are equal.
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492623.548611
When a person decides to do something in the future, she forms an intention and her intention persists. Philosophers have thought about the rational requirement that an agent’s intention persists until its execution. But philosophers have neglected to think about the causal memory mechanisms that could enable this kind of persistence and its role in rational long-term agency. Our aim of this paper is to fill this gap by arguing that memory for intention is a specific kind of memory. We do this by evaluating and rejecting standard declarative accounts of memory for intention and arguing for the plausibility of an alternative model of memory for intention. We argue for the alternative by spelling out a number of computational principles that could enable retaining and retrieving intentions from long-term memory. These principles could explain a number of core features of intentions.
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492716.548624
According to urban legend, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Death is number two.1
I don’t know if it’s true, but if it is, I’d bet that the most dreaded form of public speaking is to stand onstage, alone, attempting to make an audience of strangers laugh. …
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502657.548635
The main goal of this essay is to propose and make plausible a framework for developing a philosophical account of musical notation. The proposed framework countenances four elements of notation: symbols (abstract objects that collectively constitute the backbone of a ‘system’ of notation), their characteristic ‘forms’ (for example, shapes, understood abstractly), the concrete instances, or ‘engravings’, of those forms, and the meanings of the symbols. It is argued that these elements are distinct. Along the way, several preliminary arguments are given for how one ought to understand them—for example, it is suggested that engravings represent symbols rather than instantiate forms, although they are characteristically seen to represent a symbol by being seen to instantiate an associated form. Having proposed this framework, the essay explores the nature of musical instructions, as the meanings of symbols, and offers an argument in favor of the commonly held (but recently challenged) view that those meanings are imperative. Specifically, composites of musical notation (paradigmatically, musical scores) primarily express instructional meaning, and denote something like ‘sonic structures’ only secondarily, in virtue of their primary, imperative, meaning.
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551529.548646
I want to comment on an old objection to the “similarity analysis” of counterfactuals, and on a more recent, but related, argument for counterfactual skepticism. According to the similarity analysis, a counterfactual ? > ? is true iff ? is true at all ? worlds that are most similar, in certain respects, to the actual world. The old objection that I have in mind is that the similarity analysis fails to validate Simplification of Disjunctive Antecedents (SDA), the inference from (? ∨ ?) > ? to ? > ? and ? > ?. Imagine someone utters (1a) on a hot summer day.
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558727.548657
Jc Beall’s Divine Contradiction is a fascinating defence of the idea that contradictions are true of the tri-personal God. This project requires a logic that avoids the consequence that every proposition follows from a contradiction. Beall presents such a logic. This ‘gap/glut’ logic is the topic of this article. A gap/glut logic presupposes that falsity is not simply the absence of truth – for a proposition that is true may also be false. This article is essentially an examination of the idea that falsity is not simply untruth. The author rejects this position but does not claim to have an argument against it. In lieu of an argument, he presents three ‘considerations’. First, it is possible to give an intuitive semantics for the language of sentential logic that yields ‘classical’ sentential logic (including ‘p, ¬ p ⊢ q’) and which makes no mention of truth-values. Second, it is possible to imagine a race who manage their affairs very well without having the concept ‘falsity’. Third, it is possible to construct a semantics that yields a logic identical with the dialetheist logic and which makes no mention of truth-values – and which, far from being plausible, seems pointless.
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776348.548668
Alonzo Church proposed a theory of sequences of functions and their arguments as surrogates for Russellian singular propositions and singular concepts. Church’s proposed theory accords with his Alternative (0), the strictest of his three competing criteria for strict synonymy. The currently popular objection to strict criteria like (0) on the basis of the Russell-Myhill antinomy is rebutted. Russell-Myhill is not a problem specifically for 1 ACKOWLEDGMENTS: This essay is dedicated to the memory of the great philosopher and logician, Alonzo Church. I had the good fortune to study under Prof. Church (among others) through the 1970s. Years later he read my Frege’s Puzzle (1986), in which I defend what is now called a Millian theory of semantic content. In May 1989, Prof. Church sent me a pair of manuscripts, then not yet published, in which he independently proposed similar ways of developing a theory of n–tuple surrogates for singular propositions. Church’s cover letter began “Just to prove that great minds run in the same channel.” Although his throwaway remark did not reflect a genuine assessment—of me or of himself—it was exceedingly generous, and the memory of it can still cause me to blush. The present essay is in part a much delayed result of careful study of Church’s excellent papers. I am profoundly in his debt.
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776373.548678
I propose an approach to liar and Curry paradoxes inspired by the work of Roger Swyneshed in his treatise on insolubles (1330-1335). The keystone of the account is the idea that liar sentences and their ilk are false (and only false) and that the so-called “capture” direction of the T-schema should be restricted. The proposed account retains what I take to be the attractive features of Swyneshed’s approach without leading to some worrying consequences Swyneshed accepts. The approach and the resulting logic (called “Swynish Logic”) are non-classical, but are consistent and compatible with many elements of the classical picture including modus ponens, modus tollens, and double-negation elimination and introduction. It is also compatible with bivalence and contravalence. My approach to these paradoxes is also immune to an important kind of revenge challenge that plagues some of its rivals.
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886202.548689
‘Gender identity’ was clearly defined sixty years ago, but the dominant conceptions of gender identity today are deeply obscure. Florence Ashley’s 2023 theory of gender identity is one of the latest attempts at demystification. Although Ashley’s paper is not fully coherent, a coherent theory of gender identity can be extracted from it. That theory, we argue, is clearly false. It is psychologically very implausible, and does not support ‘firstperson authority over gender’, as Ashley claims. We also discuss other errors and confusions in Ashley’s paper.
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891912.5487
An act type is something that an agent can do: walk to the store, climb Mount Everest, trip over a wire. Act types are ‘repeatables’: many have climbed Mount Everest. Act types are not events. If you climb Everest, an event occurs—your cold, brutal climb—but this event is not what you do. What you do is climb Everest.
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892015.54871
Special quantifiers are quantifiers like something, everything, and several things. They are special both semantically and syntactically and play quite an important role in philosophy, in discussions of ontological commitment to abstract objects, of higher-order metaphysics, and of the apparent need for propositions. This paper will review and discuss in detail the syntactic and semantic peculiarities of special quantifiers and show that they are incompatible with substitutional and higher-order analyses that have recently been proposed. It instead defends and develops in formal detail a semantic analysis of special quantifiers as nominalizing quantifiers. On this analysis, special quantifiers involve both singular objectual quantification and implicit on non-singular (higher-order, plural, or mass) quantification. The analysis rests on a range of recent insights and proposals in generative syntactic theory, in particular the recognition of –thing as a light noun and a potential classifier as well as recent views of the decomposition of attitudinal and locutionary verbs in syntax.
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892098.54872
What does ‘Smith knows that it might be raining’ mean? Expressivism here faces a challenge, as its basic forms entail a pernicious type of transparency, according to which ‘Smith knows that it might be raining’ is equivalent to ‘it is consistent with everything that Smith knows that it is raining’ or ‘Smith doesn’t know that it isn’t raining’. Pernicious transparency has direct counterexamples and undermines vanilla principles of epistemic logic, such as that knowledge entails true belief and that something can be true without one knowing it might be. I re-frame the challenge in precise terms and propose a novel expressivist formal semantics that meets it by exploiting (i) the topic-sensitivity and fragmentation of knowledge and belief states and (ii) the apparent context-sensitivity of epistemic modality. The resulting form of assertibility semantics advances the state of the art for state-based bilateral semantics by combining attitude reports with context-sensitive modal claims, while evading various objectionable features. In appendices, I compare the proposed system to Beddor and Goldstein’s ‘safety semantics’ and discuss its analysis of a modal Gettier case due to Moss.
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964270.548731
The question when something is has unity and counts as one or a single thing is as much a metaphysical question as a linguistic one: whether something has unity or is a single thing should be the basis for the applicability of predicates of number and of counting. The aim of the paper is to take a closer look at how natural language contributes to the question of unity or countability. A well known fact is that many languages display a mass-count distinction among nouns, and that that distinction goes along with the (in)applicability of number predicates and count quantifiers. Other languages may fail to display a mass-count distinction and often mark countability through the use of classifiers (Chinese).
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1080945.548742
We present the reply Leibniz gave to Stahl’s Theoria medica vera (1707), and the controversy between the authors that those remarks stimulated. After having described the main points of Stahl’s dualism between life and death, correlated to his dualism mechanism/organism, we unravel the main epistemological and scientific points of debate. We propose several distinctions in order to make sense of the various uses of mechanism in this period, and suggest that what essentially motivated Leibniz was both Stahl’s implicit denial of uniform laws of nature, and Stahl’s misunderstanding of the metaphysics of substance and causality that Leibniz was in general elaborating in his own conceptions. We finally suggest how both authors were misunderstanding each other because of different scientific agendas and metaphysical commitments.
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1172123.548756
Davide Grossi Artificial Intelligence, Bernoulli Institute, University of Groningen ILLC/ACLE, University of Amsterdam The Netherlands d.grossi@rug.nl its application varies in complexity and depends, in particular, on whether relevant past decisions agree, or exist at all. The contribution of this paper is a formal treatment of types of the hardness of case-based decisions. The typology of hardness is defined in terms of the arguments for and against the issue to be decided, and their kind of validity (conclusive, presumptive, coherent, incoherent). We apply the typology of hardness to Berman and Hafner’s research on the dynamics of case-based reasoning and show formally how the hardness of decisions varies with time.
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1185761.548771
One feature of language is that we are able to make mistakes in our use of language. Amongst other sorts of mistakes, we can misspeak, misspell, missign, or misunderstand. Given this, it seems that our metaphysics of words should be flexible enough to accommodate such mistakes. It has been argued that a nominalist account of words cannot accommodate the phenomenon of misspelling. I sketch a nominalist trope-bundle view of words that can.
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1238494.548781
Transitivity, Simplification, and Contraposition are intuitively compelling. Although Antecedent Strengthening may seem less attractive at first, close attention to the full range of data reveals that it too has considerable appeal. An adequate theory of conditionals should account for these facts. The strict theory of conditionals does so by validating the four inferences. It says that natural language conditionals are necessitated material conditionals: A B is true if and only if A B is true throughout a set of accessible worlds. As a result, it validates many classical inferences, including Transitivity, Simplification, Contraposition, and Antecedent Strengthening. In what follows I will refer to these as the strict inferences.
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1238592.548791
Let serious propositional contingentism (SPC) be the package of views which consists in (i) the thesis that propositions expressed by sentences featuring terms depend, for their existence, on the existence of the referents of those terms, (ii) serious actualism— the view that it is impossible for an object to exemplify a property and not exist—and (iii) contingentism—the view that it is at least possible that some thing might not have been something. SPC is popular and compelling. But what should we say about possible worlds, if we accept SPC? Here, I first show that a natural view of possible worlds, well-represented in the literature, in conjunction with SPC is inadequate. Though I note various alternative ways of thinking about possible worlds in response to the first problem, I then outline a second more general problem—a master argument— which generally shows that any account of possible worlds meeting very minimal requirements will be inconsistent with compelling claims about mere possibilia which the serious propositional contingentist should accept.
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1516156.548802
It is widely held that if you do wrong in culpable ignorance (ignorance that you are blameworthy for), you are culpable for the wrong you do. I have long though think this is mistaken—instead we should frontload the guilt onto the acts and omissions that made one culpable for the ignorance. …
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1634510.548813
Metric poetry is rhythmic language laid above, and to some degree matching, an underlying pulse. If you do not know where in that pulse you are, you may mangle the verse. In iambic pentameter the pulse is easy: five strong beats, separated by weaker off-beats. …
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1672108.548824
While effective altruists (EAs) spend a lot of time researching which ways to do good are the most effective, historically many have assumed, with relatively little argument, that the benchmark for membership in the movement is a commitment to donate 10% of your earnings. This points to an asymmetry between the two halves of effective altruism: EAs tend to have relatively restricted standards for effectiveness (where to give), but they have much looser standards for altruism (how much to give). I investigate explanations for this asymmetry. While some possible justifications may work (pending empirical support), others look flimsier. I conclude that this means EA likely is, or anyway ought to be, more demanding than some of its proponents currently claim.
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1712339.548837
Legend has it that Damion Searls learnt Norwegian in order to translate Jon Fosse, whom he had read in German and identified as a genius. Searls’ translations of Fosse are, by all accounts, superb. So it is intriguing to learn that he has now translated Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, joining other post-centenary interpreters, Michael Beaney, a historian of early analytic philosophy, and Alexander Booth, a poet. …
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1816128.548848
The current literature on norms of inquiry features two families of norms: norms that focus on an inquirer’s ignorance and norms that focus on the question’s soundness. I argue that, given a factive conception of ignorance, it’s possible to derive a soundness-style norm from a version of the ignorance norm. A crucial lemma in the argument is that just as one can only be ignorant of a proposition if the proposition is true, so one can only be ignorant with respect to a question if the question is sound.
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1874010.548858
In this paper, I aim to discuss what puns, metaphysically, are. I argue that the type-token view of words leads to an indeterminacy problem when we consider puns. I then outline an alternative account of puns, based on recent nominalist views of words, that does not suffer from this indeterminacy.
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1992948.548868
GeneBcally complete yet authorless artworks seem possible, yet it’s hard to understand how they might really be possible. A natural way to try to resolve this puzzle is by construcBng an account of artwork compleBon on the model of accounts of artwork meaning that are compaBble with meaningful yet authorless artworks. I argue, however, that such an account of artwork compleBon is implausible. So, I leave the puzzle unresolved.
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2172109.548879
This paper examines different kinds of definite descriptions denoting purely contingent, necessary or impossible objects. The discourse about contingent/impossible/necessary objects can be organised in terms of rational questions to ask and answer relative to the modal profile of the entity in question. There are also limits on what it is rational to know about entities with this or that modal profile. We will also examine epistemic modalities; they are the kind of necessity and possibility that is determined by epistemic constraints related to knowledge or rationality. Definite descriptions denote so-called offices, roles, or things to be. We explicate these -offices as partial functions from possible worlds to chronologies of objects of type , where is mostly the type of individuals. Our starting point is Prior’s distinction between a ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ definite article ‘the’. In both cases, the definite description refers to at most one object; yet, in the case of the weak ‘the’, the referred object can change over time, while in the case of the strong ‘the’, the object referred to by the definite description is the same forever, once the office has been occupied. The main result we present is the way how to obtain a Wh-knowledge about who or what plays a given role presented by a hyper-office, i.e. procedure producing an office. Another no less important result concerns the epistemic necessity of the impossibility of knowing who or what occupies the impossible office presented by a hyper-office.
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2855510.54889
In this paper, I examine Max Deutsch’s dilemma for the implementation of newly engineered concepts. In the debate over this dilemma, the goal of conceptual engineering tends to be set either too high or too low. As a result, implementation tends to be seen as either very unlikely to succeed or too easily achievable. This paper aims to offer a way out of this dilemma. I argue that the success conditions for implementation can be better understood if we distinguish between different stages in the implementation process. Implementation is a complex process involving several stages, each of which can be evaluated as a success or a failure. I argue that even if an implementation does not reach the final stage in which a new concept is widely used in the society at large, it may not be a complete failure: conceptual engineers may not even aim for a new concept to be widely used in the society at large; or even if they do and a new concept only circulates in a smaller subgroup, this can still be a significant achievement. The upshot is that we should take more seriously the possibility that conceptual engineering can be implemented locally at the subgroup level.