Philosophical Studies

In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant portrays the supreme moral principle as an unconditional imperative that applies to all of us because we freely choose to impose upon ourselves a law of pure practical reason. Morality is revealed to be a matter of autonomy. Today, this approach to ethical theory is as perplexing, controversial and inspiring as it was in 1785, when the Groundwork was first published. The essays in this volume, by international Kant scholars and moral philosophers, discuss Kant's philosophical development and his rejection of earlier moral theories, the role of happiness and inclination in the Groundwork, Kant's moral metaphysics and theory of value, and his attempt to justify the categorical imperative as a principle of freedom. They reflect the approach of several schools of interpretation and illustrate the lively diversity of Kantian ethics today.

Recent decades have seen a gradual resurgence of what has, by its critics, traditionally been called naïve realism, and in the last few years it has become a serious contender in the philosophy of perception. 1 The position may be characterized as the view that the objects of perception are just what they appear to be to our untutored, pre-philosophical (hence 'naïve') way of encountering the world, namely mind-independent, macroscopic individuals (both things and events) that have at least the manifest properties and relations we perceive them to have. Hume declares in a well-known passage on the assumed mind-independence of the objects of perception (or as he tellingly phrases it, "sensible objects or [sive] perceptions") that "a very little 1 Among recent book-length treatments of the topic see for example Moltke S. Gram, Direct Realism: A Study of

It has been argued that assertion is governed by both a knowledge norm and a surety norm. According to a standard view (Unger, 1975; Williamson, 2000), the knowledge norm is more fundamental. The surety norm can be derived from the knowledge norm. This orthodoxy has recently been challenged. Goodman and Holguin (2022) have argued for an alternative picture in which the surety norm is more fundamental. The knowledge norm can be derived from the surety norm and a further norm according to which one should be sure only of what one knows. In this paper, I defend the orthodox view from Goodman and Holguin's challenges. I provide objections to their account of how the knowledge and surety norms are related and to their arguments against the orthodox view.

Determinism is thought to pose a problem for moral responsibility to the extent that we agree with the principle that someone is only to be held morally responsible for an action if s/he could have done otherwise. The worry, of course, is that if determinism is true, nobody could ever have done otherwise. Utilitarians might seem to be in a better position than other, less enlightened, theorists in this regard. Holding someone responsible, they point out, and related notions such as praise, blame, punishment and reward, are all actions that themselves can be assessed in terms of their consequences. So, the question of whether to hold someone responsible for an action is to be settled by reference to the consequences of the act of holding someone responsible. Whether someone could have done otherwise is, at best, indirectly related to the question of whether and how to hold them responsible. Similarly, the question of whether an act is right or wrong is simply a matter of whether the act was optimal, and has nothing to do with whether the agent could have done otherwise. The problem with this response, of course, is that, if determinism is true, every action is both optimal and pessimal. Every action is both the best and the worst of all the acts that are possible for the agent, because every action is the only action that is possible for the agent. This also applies to the actions of holding responsible, praising, blaming, etc. The solution is to appeal to the conversational context of praising, blaming, judging right and wrong, holding responsible, and the like. Even if, strictly speaking, an agent couldn't have done otherwise, conversational context may select certain counterpossible alternatives as the relevant ones with which to compare the 2 action. We may, therefore, be able to make sense of a negative (or positive) judgment of an action based on a comparison of the action with an alternative that was not, strictly speaking, available to the agent. Determinism is thought to pose a problem for moral responsibility to the extent that we agree with the principle that someone is only to be held morally responsible for an action if s/he could have done otherwise. The worry, of course, is that if determinism is true, nobody could ever have done otherwise. Utilitarians might seem to be in a better position than other, less enlightened, theorists in this regard. The standard utilitarian response to the possibility of determinism (or indeterminism), well articulated by Sidgwick, is twofold. First, holding someone responsible, and related notions such as desert, praise, blame, punishment and reward, are all actions that themselves can be assessed in terms of their consequences. ..the Determinist can give to the terms ``ill-desert'' and ``responsibility'' a signification which is not only clear and definite, but, from an utilitarian point of view, the only suitable meaning. In this view, if I affirm that A is responsible for a harmful act, I mean that it is right to punish him for it; primarily, in order that the fear of punishment may prevent him and others from committing similar acts in future. (ME Bk. I ch. V sec. 4) So, the question of whether to hold someone responsible for an action is to be settled by reference to the consequences of the act of holding someone responsible. Whether someone could have done otherwise is, at best, indirectly related to the question of

The Standard consequentialist approach to harm is illustrated by the following principle, defended by Derek Parfit: (C6) An act benefits someone if its consequence is that someone is benefited more. An act harms someone if its consequence is that someone is harmed more. (69) How should we understand what it is for someone to be ''harmed more''? Intuitively, it is for someone to be made worse off by the action. But worse off than what? With what do we compare the result of the action? One suggestion that we can quickly dispense with is that we should compare the welfare of the victim before and after the action. Consider a case involving a doctor, named 'Doctor' and a patient, named 'Patient'. Call this case Doctor: Patient is terminally ill. His condition is declining, and his suffering is increasing. Doctor cannot delay Patient's death. The only thing she can do is to slow the rate of increase of Patient's suffering by administering various drugs. The best available drugs completely remove the pain that Patient would have suffered as a result of his illness. However, they also produce, as a side-effect, a level of suffering that is dramatically lower than he would have experienced without them, but significantly higher than he is now experiencing. So the result of administering the drugs is that Patient's suffering continues to increase, but at a slower rate than he would have experienced without them. The very best thing she can do has the consequence that Patient's suffering increases. That is, after Doctor's action Patient is suffering N amount of suffering as a direct result of Doctor's action, and N is more than Patient was suffering before the action. Has Doctor harmed Patient if she slows the rate of increase of Patient's suffering as much as she can? This hardly seems plausible. It is a far more plausible

Especially since the appearance of Richard Rorty's popular, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , Wilfrid Sellars critique of the "Myth of the Given" has become widely regarded as a major step forward in twentieth-century philosophy, and as able to speak across differing philosophical traditions. As presented in his 1956 lectures published as Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind (Sellars 1997), Sellars critique is complex and multi-sided, but the core elements of what might be considered to have become its prototypical form-the critique of earlier twentieth-century empiricist "sense-datum theories"-are easily stated. Sense-datum theorists such as Bertrand Russell in The Principles of Philosophy had sought to ground empirical knowledge in the mind's certain and immediate knowledge of "sense-data" given immediately in experience. But, Sellars asked, how could anything conceived as a type of sensed particular play the appropriate role of providing evidence for the truth of some non-inferential judgment meant to be grounded on it? Qua particular, the sense-datum simply lacks the requisite logical form required to support such rational relations, the sense-datum theorist seeming to "sever the logical connection between sense data and non-inferential knowledge" (Sellars 1997, 18). In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Rorty had paired Sellars critique with arguments from the later Wittgenstein, Quine and Davidson (Rorty 1979, ch. 4) in an effort to undermine the entire project of regarding the mind as capable of representing or "mirroring" the world. In his 1994 book, Mind and World, John McDowell similarly links Sellars critique to Donald Davidson's apparently complementary claim that "nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief" (Davidson 2001, 141; McDowell 2009, 268). 1 But McDowell also points to the dangers of the Davidson-Rorty dismissal of perceptual experience, attempting to preserve some fundamental sense of our "being open" to the world in such experience. McDowell especially highlights the relation of Sellars critique to the earlier critiques of empiricism made by Kant and Hegel, thereby playing an important role in recent attempts to breathe life back into these approaches to philosophy. This paper is in the spirit of such a project, attempting to preserve some sense of the role of perceptual experience in McDowell he worries goes missing in the approaches of Rorty and Davidson. But my efforts will be directed to an attempt to reframe the debate about the role of the givenness in perceptual experience, in a way that distinguishes between the approaches of Kant and Hegel, by relocating this discussion to a different terrain. If we use the upper-case "Given" to capture what Sellars refers to as "a piece of professional-epistemologicalshoptalk" (Sellars 1997, 13 emphasis added), we might retain the lower-case in relation to the 1 Davidson had offered this as being "in agreement with Rorty" (Davidson 2001, 141).

I argue that properties and relations are in the same boat with respect to quantum mechanics. That just as properties cannot be considered as “hidden variables" so also neither can the relation of being
correlated with. Nevertheless properties and relations can both be understood as incomplete expressions: they are both contextual, properly understood. The argument on this leverages a neglected proof by Adán Cabello. We show that this latter argument extends and strengthens an argument given by van Fraassen in his (2006). The argument given also considerably strengthens the arguments given previously by Cao (2003) and Psillos (2006). I end by sketching a way of understanding that this contextuality is similar across relativity theory and quantum theory.

In this respect, Hume goes a step beyond Berkeley, who ascribes a distinct temporal structure to each mind. I do not believe that Hume uses the term 'moment' to describe temporal structure in quite the way that Baxter does. But that does not affect the substantial correctness of Baxter's interpretation.

Bird’s Ultimate Argument sought to show that Armstrong’s N relationships involving categorical universals can’t entail nomic regularities. In N’s place Bird offered the non-categorical SR relation. Two kinds of objection have been raised: either Bird’s own alternative metaphysics fails in just the same way as Armstrong’s or the target of Bird’s argument may anyway have a way out of the problem. My aim is to reclaim the victory for Bird. I argue that the responses in defence of Armstong’s N relationships fail to acknowledge that Bird was explicitly concerned with Armstrong’s commitment to a categoricalist view of universals. Moreover, Bird’s alternative account does not suffer the same problem since his metaphysics of properties is essentialist. Nevertheless, Bird’s account does need elaborating on to explainwhySR relationships entail their regularities. I offer Schaffer’s Axiomatic Solution as a candidate for this purpose.

MEANING AND ATTITUDE ASCRIPTIONS** 1. Soames distinguishes two conceptions of sentence meaning. On the first, a (non-indexical, non-ambiguous) sentence's meaning is what ''the sentence ''says'', which ... is closely related to what speakers say, and convey, when they assertively utter'' it. ( ) 1 This he calls a sentence's semantic content. On the second, ''the meaning of an expression is information grasp of which explains speakers' ability to understand it, and to be able to use it competently.'' (56) It is semantic content which is being discussed when, for example, a Millian says or a Fregean denies that sentences in which *Please turn to the author for any kind of information regarding this article.

Steve Stich used to be an eliminativist. As far as I can tell, he renounced eliminativism about the time that he moved from the west to the east pole.1 Stich was right to reject eliminativism, though I am not convinced that he rejected it for the right reasons. Stich 1983 contains a comprehensive attack on representational content, a central feature of both folk psychology and the Representational Theory of Mind, the leading philo-sophical construal of scientific psychology. Stich’s current position on the role of content in psychological explanation is not entirely clear. One of my aims in this chapter is simply to invite Stich to clarify his views on representational content; the question that forms the title of this chapter is therefore addressed directly to Stich. I begin by sketch-ing his original anti-content argument. I then trace some later developments in his thinking about content. I argue that content does play an important role in scientific psy-chology, for precisely th...

In Word and Object 1 Quine gives the following formulation of the thesis of the indeterminacy of translation: Manuals for translating one language into another can be set up in divergent ways, all compatible with the totality of speech dispositions, yet incompatible with one another. In countless places they will diverge in giving, as their respective translations of a sentence of the one language, sentences of the other language which stand to each other in no plausible sort of equivalence however loose. (WO, p. 27) He goes on to urge that this thesis can most clearly be seen to be true if we consider radical translation-translation where the linguist confronts native speakers without the benefit of even partially bilingual interpreters. (WO, p. 28) Now it is a commonplace of contemporary philosophy of science that theories are underdetermined by data (that it is a commonplace is due in part to Quine's own efforts, of course). And it is tempting to see the indeterminacy of radical translation simply as an instance of this principle. 2 Consider what Quine's 'jungle linguist' has to do. He must first identify those acts by native speakers which are in fact linguistic. Then he must find criteria by which to group individual instances of speech acts into types. Next he must give a phonemic, syntactic and semantic analysis of these linguistic types. Finally, he must use a syntactic and semantic theory of his own 'home' language in setting up a translation manual between the two languages. At each of these steps the linguist must use a tentative theory, and at the syntactic and semantic stages especially we may except the theories used to be highly abstract. Thus on general epistemological principle, as noted above, Quine's thesis is prima faeie reasonable and straightforward, since radical translation seems just the kind of enterprise where we should expect a multiplicity of different theories. (This is especially so if we think of the 'native speakers' as nonhuman, for example robots from another planet or super-intelligent

We defend hylomorphism against Maegan Fairchild's purported proof of its inconsistency. We provide a deduction of a contradiction from SH?, which is the combination of ''simple hylomorphism'' and an innocuous premise. We show that the deduction, reminiscent of Russell's Paradox, is proof-theoretically valid in classical higher-order logic and invokes an impredicatively defined property. We provide a proof that SH? is nevertheless consistent in a free higher-order logic. It is shown that the unrestricted comprehension principle of property abstraction on which the purported proof of inconsistency relies is analogous to naı ¨ve unrestricted set-theoretic comprehension. We conclude that logic imposes a restriction on property comprehension, a restriction that is satisfied by the ramified theory of types. By extension, our observations constitute defenses of theories that are structurally similar to SH?, such as the theory of singular propositions, against similar purported disproofs.

We defend hylomorphism against Maegan Fairchild's purported proof of its inconsistency. We provide a deduction of a contradiction from SH?, which is the combination of ''simple hylomorphism'' and an innocuous premise. We show that the deduction, reminiscent of Russell's Paradox, is proof-theoretically valid in classical higher-order logic and invokes an impredicatively defined property. We provide a proof that SH? is nevertheless consistent in a free higher-order logic. It is shown that the unrestricted comprehension principle of property abstraction on which the purported proof of inconsistency relies is analogous to naı ¨ve unrestricted set-theoretic comprehension. We conclude that logic imposes a restriction on property comprehension, a restriction that is satisfied by the ramified theory of types. By extension, our observations constitute defenses of theories that are structurally similar to SH?, such as the theory of singular propositions, against similar purported disproofs.

Walruses are clumsy on land. You're not to affirm it or deny it or otherwise judge it. Just consider it. ''Merely'' entertain the thought. Wayne Davis believes that many of our current theories of meaning and communication, and large class of theories in cognitive psychology, have neglected a crucial aspect of human psychology. By focusing so much on the cognitive attitudes of beliefs and desires, theorists have not attended enough to what he calls pure cogitative thinking. Such thinking is just what you did a moment agoentertained or considered a proposition, without necessarily entering any judgment or having any belief about that proposition. Why be so invested in and concerned with such ''pure'' attitudinally neutral thought? Davis thinks that, by and large, Grice was right about how to best understand meaning. The familiar story is that words mean what thinkers make them mean. And thinkers make words mean what they mean by their intentions. Thinkers mean what they do when they intend to produce a certain response in their audience, in particular to produce certain beliefs. So meaning is ultimately accounted for in terms of audience-directed intentions. Davis thinks that this analysis is roughly correct as an account of informing and communicating, but it is not an analysis of meaning. For, according to Davis, we should not regard meaning as the attempt to communicate. We sometimes express ourselves even though we have no intentions to inform or communicate. To correct for this defect, Davis proposes that we supplant intentions to produce audience's beliefs with intentions to produce an indication that one has certain mental states. And so, for Davis, instead of beliefs, thoughts and their constituent concepts come to be primitives within his theory of meaning.

Bill Lycan has offered us a big and controversial thesis: human beings do not and should not reason deductively.1 The more I think about this issue, the less convinced I am that Lycan is right. So what I'd like to do here is explain why I believe that human beings so frequently reason deductively, and moreover, why they should. I don't, of course, believe that deductive inference is the only kind of inference human beings do or should engage in; I don't believe that human beings do or should try to draw out all of the deductive consequences of their beliefs. But then again, no one has ever believed these things. What I do believe, and what is widely believed, is that deductive inference is an important part of human reasoning, both from a descriptive and from a normative perspective; and this, of course, is just what Lycan denies. As an illustration of the larger claim he wishes to make about deductive inference, Lycan discusses the case of Modus Ponens. He argues that people do not, and should not, reason in accord with that rule. Since this rule is about as obviously valid as deductive rules get, and since people do seem to reason in accord with it, this is a particularly important case. If Lycan is right about Modus Ponens, then the case for a mental logic is, at a minimum, badly weakened. I do not believe, however, that Lycan is right about Modus Ponens. Although Lycan anticipates the kind of move I wish to make [see 236], and quickly rejects it, I want to spell out the case in favor of Modus Ponens, and with it mental logic, in a bit more detail. In the end, I have a number of worries about Lycan's position, both in points of detail and in overall conception. I think I understand what is involved in the research program of discovering a mental logic, but I am less clear about what would be involved if we were to sign on with

Chapter 1: The causal relata. Ordinary talk suggests that entities from different ontological categories can cause and be caused: Kathy's throw, the fact that Kathy threw, and Kathy herself can all cause the window to break. But according to the majority view, causation exclusively relates events. This chapter defends the contrary view that the causal relata are as miscellaneous as ordinary talk suggests. A question remains: is there an ontological kind K such that causal relations on entities of that kind are somehow more fundamental than causal relations on the non-Ks? I argue that there is such a kind: facts. I defend this claim against objections. Chapter 2. Causation by omission. Ordinary talk also suggests that omissions can be causes. For example, if Barry promised to water Alice's plant, didn't water it, and the plant then dried up and died, then Barry's not watering the plant-his omitting to water the plant-is a cause of its death. But there are reasons to think that either there is no causation by omission, or there is far more of it than common sense allows. I argue that neither disjunct is acceptable, and propose that we avoid the dilemma by embracing the view that causation has a normative component. The proposal faces the objection that causation is a paradigmatic example of a natural, and so entirely non-normative, relation. I argue that the objection can be defused once we are clear about the kind of normativity that plays a role in causation by omission. Chapter 3. Causation and the Making!Allowing Distinction. Common sense morality suggests that it can matter morally whether an agent makes an outcome occur or merely allows it to occur. For example, it is far worse to pinch your little brother than to allow him to be pinched. I argue against the assumption that the making/allowing distinction is exclusive: in fact, the categories of making and allowing overlap. I go on to offer a positive account of makings, and a positive account of allowings.

Epistemology in philosophy of mind is a difficult endeavor. Those who believe that our phenomenal life is different from other domains suggest that self-knowledge about phenomenal properties is certain and therefore privileged. Usually, this so called privileged access is explained by the idea that we have direct access to our phenomenal life. This means, in contrast to perceptual knowledge, self-knowledge is non-inferential. It is widely believed that, this kind of directness involves two different senses: an epistemic sense and a metaphysical sense. Proponents of this view often claim that this is due to the fact that we are acquainted with our current experiences. The acquaintance thesis, therefore, is the backbone in justifying privileged access. Unfortunately the whole approach has a profound flaw. For the thesis to work, acquaintance has to be a genuine explanation. Since it is usually assumed that any knowledge relation between judgments and the corresponding objects are merely causal and contingent (e.g. in perception), the proponent of the privileged access view needs to show that acquaintance can do the job. In this thesis, however, I claim that the latter cannot be done. Based on considerations introduced by Levine, I conclude that this approach involves either the introduction of ontologically independent properties or a rather obscure knowledge relation. A proper explanation, however, cannot employ either of the two options. The acquaintance thesis is, therefore, bound to fail. Since the privileged access intuition seems to be vital to epistemology within the philosophy of mind, I will explore alternative justifications. After discussing a number of options, I will focus on the so called revelation thesis. This approach states that by simply having an experience with phenomenal properties, one is in the position to know the essence of those phenomenal properties. I will argue that, after finding a solution for the controversial essence claim, this thesis is a successful replacement explanation which maintains all the virtues of the acquaintance account without necessarily introducing ontologically independent properties or an obscure knowledge relation. The overall solution consists in qualifying the essence claim in the relevant sense, leaving us with an appropriate ontology for phenomenal properties. On the one hand, this avoids employing mysterious independent properties, since this ontological view is physicalist in nature. On the other hand, this approach has the right kind of structure to explain privileged self-knowledge of our phenomenal life. My final conclusion consists in the claim that the privileged access intuition is in fact veridical. It cannot, however, be justified by the popular acquaintance approach, but rather, is explainable by the controversial revelation thesis.

Any scientific theory (here we consider physical theories only) has an underlying logic, even if it is not totally made explicit. The role of the underlying logic of a theory T is mainly to guide the proofs and the accepted consequences of the theory's principles, mainly when described by its axioms. In this sense, the theorems of the underlying logic are also theorems of the theory. In most cases, if pressed, the scientist will say that the underlying logic of most physical theories is classical logic or some fragment of a set theory suitable for accommodating the theory's mathematical and logical concepts. We argue that no physical theory and no philosophical discussion based on the theory should dismiss its underlying logic, so the arguments advanced by some philosophers of physics in that certain entities (the considered case deals with quantum entities) can be only weakly discerned or be just 'relational' and that they cannot be absolutely identified by a monadic property, are fallacious once one remains within a 'standard' logico-mathematical framework, grounded on classical logic. We also discuss the (to us) unjustifiable claim that some properties (such as those that came from logic) would be 'illegitimate' for discerning these entities. Thus, this paper may interest logicians, physicists, and philosophers.

Intentionality ('directedness', 'aboutness') is both a central topic in contemporary philosophy of mind, phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, and one of the themes with which both analytic and Continental philosophers have separately engaged starting from Brentano and Edmund Husserl's ground-breaking Logical Investigations (1901) through Roderick M. Chisholm, Daniel C. Dennett's The Intentional Stance, John Searle's Intentionality, to the recent work of Tim Crane, Robert Brandom, Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, among many others. In this paper, I shall review recent discussions of intentionality, including some recent explorations of the history of the concept (paying particular attention to Anselm), and suggest some ways the phenomenological approach of Husserl and Heidegger can still offer insights for contemporary philosophy of mind and consciousness.

In the first section of the paper I present Alan Turing's notion of effective memory, as it appears in his 1936 paper 'On Computable Numbers, With an Application to The Entscheidungsproblem'. This notion stands in surprising contrast with the way memory is usually thought of in the context of contemporary computer science. Turing's view (in 1936) is that for a computing machine to remember a previously scanned string of symbols is not to store an internal symbolic image of this string. Rather, memory consists in the fact that the past scanning of the string affects the behavior of the computer in the face of potential future inputs. In the second, central section of the paper I begin exploring how this view of Turing's bears upon contemporary discussions in the philosophy of mind. In particular, I argue that Turing's approach can be used to lend support to dispositional conceptions of the propositional attitudes, like the one recently presented by , and that his effective memory manifests some of the characteristics of pushmepullyou mental states.

Humanity has entered the phase of autoevolution, when the main factor determining the further evolution of both man himself and many other species is the activities of people themselves and, above all, scientific and technological progress. The question arises: where should we evolve? This article is devoted to consideration of this issue.

Metaphorical utterances are construed as falling into two broad categories, in one of which are cases amenable to analysis in terms of semantic content, speaker meaning, and satisfaction conditions, and where image-construction is permissible but not mandatory. I call these image-permitting metaphors, and contrast them with image-demanding metaphors (IDM's) comprising a second category and whose understanding mandates the construction of a mental image. This construction, I suggest, is spontaneous, is not restricted to visual imagery, and its result is typically somatically marked sensu Damasio. IDM's are characteristically used in service of self-expression, and thereby in the elicitation of empathy. Even so, IDM's may reasonably provoke banter over the aptness of the imagery they evoke.

This paper models knowledge in cases where an agent has multiple experiences over time. Using this model, we introduce a series of observations that undermine the pretheoretic idea that the evidential significance of experience depends on the extent to which that experience matches the world. On the basis of these observations, we model knowledge in terms of what is likely given the agent's experience. An agent knows p when p is implied by her epistemic possibilities. A world is epistemically possible when its probability given the agent's experiences is not significantly lower than the probability of the actual world given that experience. 3 Here, we don't assume that this setup correctly describes the actual facts about human ability to perceive water temperature. We are simply imagining a possible creature who perceives water temperature in this way.

This paper examines the mind and language of an omniscient being from a supervaluationist perspective. Two questions hall receive special attention. How ought the supervaluationist explicate the concept of omniscience? And what ought the supervaluationist expect an omniscient speaker to say about a Sorites series? How ought we to conceive of an omniscient mind in light of the phenomenon of vagueness? Working within the framework of one of the more promising approaches to vagueness -supervaluationism -this paper explores the mind (and language) of God. In section 1 I sketch the barebones of supervaluationism, familiar to most readers. Section 2 is concerned with how the supervaluationist ought to define omniscience. Section 3 describes, from a supervaluationist perspective, how the divine mind would engage with a Sorites series. Finally, in section 4, I address a thought experiment concerning omniscient speakers offered by Timothy Williamson, designed to support the view that there are epistemically inaccessible hidden boundaries associated with ordinary vague predicates. I conclude by noting the broader philosophical significance of the themes explored here. The supervaluationist traces the existence of vagueness to the phenomenon of semantic indecision. Consider a simple example from David Lewis: 1 It is vague whether an external carport is part of a house. Let us call the fusion of the main body of some house with its external carport 'Big', the body of the house 'Little'. It is plausible to suppose that the English language delivers no verdict as to whether it is Big or Little that merits the predicate 'is a house'. That indecision of this sort exists will often not matter. If I say 'The house is majestic', that may well be unobjectionable on

Claims of the form 'I know P and it might be that not-P' tend to sound odd. One natural explanation of this oddity is that the conjuncts are semantically incompatible: in its core epistemic use, 'Might P' is true in a speaker's mouth only if the speaker does not know that not-P. In this paper I defend this view against an alternative proposal that has been advocated by Trent Dougherty and Patrick Rysiew and elaborated upon in Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath's recent Knowledge in an Uncertain World.

It is tempting to posit an intimate relationship between belief and assertion. The speech act of assertion seems like a way of transferring the speaker's belief to his or her audience. If this is 1 right, then you might think that the evidential warrant required for asserting a proposition is just the same as the warrant for believing it. In other words, when you have sufficient evidence to entitle you to believe something, you have sufficient evidence to entitle you to assert it. This is a natural consequence of the assumption that you should only try to induce someone else to share a belief if you are entitled to have the belief yourself. Let's call the thesis that the level of evidence that entitles one to belief a proposition is the same as that which entitles one to assert it entitlement equality. Even philosophers who disagree about the norms of assertion can agree on entitlement equality. For example, Williamson and Lackey both seem to be committed to entitlement equality, despite their different accounts of the norms of assertion. Williamson [ , 2000, chapter , chapter 8] advocates a knowledge norm for assertion, arguing that a constitutive norm of assertion is that you must only assert p if you know p. Williamson also (more tentatively) endorses the thesis that a knowledge norm governs belief: you must only believe p if you know p. So Williamson seems 2 committed to entitlement equality. Lackey [2007] disagrees with Williamson about the norm of * We are grateful to

In this paper, we propose a novel account of desire reports, i.e. sentences of the form S wants p . Our theory is partly motivated by Phillips-Brown's (2021) observation that subjects can desire things even if those things aren't best by the subject's lights. That is, being best isn't necessary for being desired. We compare our proposal to existing theories, and show that it provides a neat account of the central phenomenon.

This paper presents an new epistemicist account of vagueness, one that avoids standard arbitrariness worries by exploiting a plenitudinous metaphysic. There are two natural objections to epistemicist accounts of vagueness that one frequently encounters in conversation (objections that are frequently run together). 1 One objection is that it is hard to live without an informative answer to the question as to how the non-semantic facts-non-relational and relational-about a given individual determine the semantic profile of that individual. Let us call this the Bruteness worry. A second objection is that it seems metaphysically arbitrary that just one of the many candidate cut-offs for, say, baldness, should be associated with some ordinary pattern of use of the term 'bald'. Let us call this the Arbitrariness worry. In this paper we sketch an epistemicist approach to vagueness that provides a distinctive perspective on these foundational issues. On the one hand, it affords epistemicism protection against the Arbitrariness worry, by combining the evenhandedness typically associated with supervaluationism with the logic and semantics distinctive of epistemicism. 2 And on the other, it renders the Bruteness objection less pressing by assimilating it to a kind of bruteness that many of us have

The adjective ‘is justified’ has all the hallmarks of a gradable adjective. But the relationship between gradable uses and straightforward predications of the form ‘x is justified’ has been underexplored by epistemologists. In this paper we undertake to do some ground clearing as a prelude to better understanding this relationship.

Ginger Schultheis offers a novel and interesting argument against epistemic permissivism. While we think that her argument is ultimately uncompelling, we think its faults are instructive. We explore the relationship between epistemic permissivism, Margin-for-Error principles, and an epistemological version of Dominance reasoning.

Certain passages in Kaplan's 'Demonstratives' are often taken to show that non-vacuous sentential operators associated with a certain parameter of sentential truth require a corresponding relativism concerning assertoric contents: namely, their truth values also must vary with that parameter. Thus, for example, the non-vacuity of a temporal sentential operator 'always' would require some of its operands to have contents that have different truth values at different times. While making no claims about Kaplan's intentions, we provide several reconstructions of how such an argument might go, focusing on the case of time and temporal operators as an illustration. What we regard as the most plausible reconstruction of the argument establishes a conclusion similar enough to that attributed to Kaplan. However, the argument overgenerates, leading to absurd consequences. We conclude that we must distinguish assertoric contents from compositional semantic values, and argue that once they are distinguished, the argument fails to establish any substantial conclusions. We also briefly discuss a related argument commonly attributed to Lewis, and a recent variant due to Weber.

This paper engages with two compelling challenges to physicalism, each designed to show that the nature of experience is elusive from the standpoint of physical science. It is argued that the physicalist is ultimately well placed to meet both challenges. We can all agree that such predicates as 'is in pain', 'feel like I did yesterday' and 'am having enjoyable experiences' are often true of us. The physicalist about experience takes on an additional commitment: that the properties expressed by experience-describing predicates are identical to properties whose natures are revealed by some idealized physical science. 1 There are two compelling challenges to physicalism. Each purports to show that the nature of experience is elusive if one restricts oneself to the tools that physical science provides. One of these challenges is very familiar, the other not so. The first and best known challenge proceeds from the thesis that it is possible that there be physical duplicates of ourselves which lack sensations to the conclusion that facts about sensation are something over and above the physical facts. 2 Following custom, let us call this the Zombie Argument. The second, less familiar challenge, proceeds from the thesis that physical science reveals the role of a property but not its quiddity to the conclusion that even if experiential properties were identical to physical properties, their natures would be something over and above what physical science reveals. Let us call this the Quiddity Argument (more on the notion of a quiddity later). 3 My goal in this paper is to offer advice to physicalists about how to respond to each challenge. David Chalmers' The Conscious Mind will serve as my main foil: for while neither of the challenges originates with Chalmers, his work nevertheless provides the most sophisticated current articulation of them. Part One of this paper explores two kinds of strategies for responding to the Zombie Argu-

It is tempting to posit an intimate relationship between belief and assertion. The speech act of assertion seems like a way of transferring the speaker's belief to his or her audience. If this is 1 right, then you might think that the evidential warrant required for asserting a proposition is just the same as the warrant for believing it. In other words, when you have sufficient evidence to entitle you to believe something, you have sufficient evidence to entitle you to assert it. This is a natural consequence of the assumption that you should only try to induce someone else to share a belief if you are entitled to have the belief yourself. Let's call the thesis that the level of evidence that entitles one to belief a proposition is the same as that which entitles one to assert it entitlement equality. Even philosophers who disagree about the norms of assertion can agree on entitlement equality. For example, Williamson and Lackey both seem to be committed to entitlement equality, despite their different accounts of the norms of assertion. Williamson [ , 2000, chapter , chapter 8] advocates a knowledge norm for assertion, arguing that a constitutive norm of assertion is that you must only assert p if you know p. Williamson also (more tentatively) endorses the thesis that a knowledge norm governs belief: you must only believe p if you know p. So Williamson seems 2 committed to entitlement equality. Lackey [2007] disagrees with Williamson about the norm of * We are grateful to

It is often thought that materialism about themind can be clarified using the concept of supervenience. But there is a difficulty. Amaterialist should admit the possibility ofghosts and thus should allow that a world mightduplicate the physical character of our worldand enjoy, in addition, immaterial beings withmental properties. So materialists can't claimthat every world that is physicallyindistinguishable from our world is alsomentally indistinguishable; and this is wellknown. What is less understood are thedifferent ways that immaterial add-ons can maketrouble for supervenience-theoreticformulations of materialism. In this paper, Ishall present a problematic kind of add-on thathas been ignored and look at threesupervenience-theoretic attempts to formulatematerialism in that light.

David Lewis has recently deployed a contextualist strategy for defending ordinary claims to know. 1 In this paper, I wish to extend that strategy to ordinary claims about freedom. 2 The result is a species of compatibilism that, while foreign to current debates, has a good deal going for it.

In this paper, we wish to motivate a radical cluster of metaphysical pictures that have tempted philosophers from a variety of traditions. These pictures share one important theme -they refuse to accord countable entities any place in the fundamental scheme of things. Put another way, they all suggest that the concept of an object has no place in a perspicuous characterization of reality. Such pictures suffer from a number of fairly obvious prima facie difficulties. They seem to fly in the face of common sense. They seem to suggest that just about everything we say is false. They seem to gesture at a noumenal reality that human language is unable to describe. And so on. Our aim is to meet such difficulties head on and, by doing so, vindicate this sort of radical picture as one that deserves to be taken seriously. This paper is organised into four sections. In section one, we examine various forms of this radical metaphysic and discuss their historical precedents, both in this century and in previous ones. In section two, we consider how the most radical of these metaphysical pictureswhat we call 'ontological nihilism' -might be fleshed out into a rich, articulate, theory. In section three, we consider what the proponent of such a picture should say concerning the truth or falsity of ordinary discourse. In section four, we consider what the motivations for this apparently perverse metaphysic might be. One notable feature of our account will be that it at no time appeals to irrealist views about meaning and/or truth, which either deny that our thoughts have evidence-transcendent truth conditions or which deny that truth is a radically non-epistemic notion. In this way, our paper provides a useful addition to Michael Devitt's discussion of the relation between realism about truth and realism about objects. 1 Devitt argues, fairly persuasively, that the latter does not entail the former. We also