If we want to retain classical logic and standard syntax in light of the liar, we are forced to restrict the T-schema. The traditional philosophical justification for this is sentential – liar sentences somehow malfunction. But the standard formal way of implementing this is conditional, our T-sentences tell us that if “p” does not malfunction, then “p” is true if and only if p. Recently Bacon and

This paper argues that functionalist metasemantic views, such as Conceptual Role Semantics and Interpretivism, face a Euthyphro challenge. The challenge, put roughly, is this: functionalist metasemantic views reverse the order of explanation. According to such views, representational mental states have the contents that they do partly because they play certain roles in our mental lives. According to

This article develops and defends a full account of the nature and normativity of resistance to evidence, according to which resistance to evidence is an instance of input-level epistemic malfunctioning. At the core of this epistemic normative picture lies the notion of knowledge indicators, as evidential probability increasing facts that one is in a position to know; resistance to evidence is construed

Here is a widespread but controversial idea: those animals who represent correctly are likely to be selected over those who misrepresent. While various versions of this claim have been traditionally endorsed by the vast majority of philosophers of mind, recently, it has been argued that this is just plainly wrong. My aim in this paper is to argue for an intermediate position: that the correctness of

A foundationalist account of our empirical thinking divides propositions we accept into two classes, basic and derivative, and sees the warrant of derivative propositions as accruing to them through their derivation from basic propositions. Such an account needs to answer two questions: which propositions are basic, and whence do basic propositions acquire their warrant? A natural and ancient answer

I argue that when we use ‘probability’ language in epistemic contexts—e.g., when we ask how probable some hypothesis is, given the evidence available to us—we are talking about degrees of support, rather than degrees of belief. The epistemic probability of A given B is the mind-independent degree to which B supports A, not the degree to which someone with B as their evidence believes A, or the degree

Let me start by thanking Professors Santorio and Szabo for their insightful comments and careful readings of Conjoining Meanings (CM). They highlight the main theses and describe the project in helpful ways.1 So instead of multiplying summaries, let me say a little about what motivated the project. Chomsky was influential. But teaching truth-theoretic semantics, for many years, really convinced me

Perceptual Confidence is the view that our conscious perceptual experiences assign confidence. In previous papers, I motivated it using first-personal evidence (Morrison, 2016), and Jessie Munton motivated it using normative evidence (Munton, 2016). In this paper, I will consider the extent to which it is motivated by third-personal evidence. I will argue that the current evidence is supportive but

Metaethical expressivism faces the perennial objection that its commitment to non-cognitivism about moral judgment renders the view revisionary of our ordinary moral thought. The standard response to this objection is to say that since the expressivist's theoretical commitments about the nature of moral judgment are independent of normative ethics, the view cannot be revisionary of normative ethics

In this paper, I sketch a general framework for theorizing about bias and bias attributions. According to the account, paradigmatic cases of bias involve systematic departures from genuine norms. I attempt to show that the account illuminates a number of important psychological phenomena, including: the fact that accusations of bias frequently inspire not only denials but also countercharges of bias

According to expressivists, normative language expresses desire-like states of mind. According to noncognitivists, normative beliefs have a desire-like functional role. What is the relation between these two doctrines? It is widely assumed that expressivism commits you to noncognitivism, and vice versa. This paper against this assumption. I advance a view that combines a noncognitivist psychology with

Evidential decision theory (EDT) says that the choiceworthiness of an option depends on its evidential connections to possible outcomes. Causal decision theory (CDT) holds that it depends on your beliefs about its causal connections. While Newcomb cases support CDT, Arif Ahmed has described examples that support EDT. A new account is needed to get all cases right. I argue that an option A's choiceworthiness

Vows play a central role in Buddhist thought and practice. Monastics are obliged to know and conform to hundreds of vows. Although it is widely recognized that vows are important for guiding practitioners on the path to enlightenment, we argue that they have another overlooked but equally crucial role to play. A second function of the vows, we argue, is to facilitate group harmony and cohesion to ensure

Some philosophers think that if someone acts wrongly while falsely believing that her act is permissible, this moral mistake cannot excuse her wrongdoing. And some think that this is because it is morally blameworthy to fail to appreciate the moral significance of non-moral facts of which one is aware, such that mistakenly believing that one's act is permissible when it is in fact wrong is itself morally

What grounds the facts about what is identical to/distinct from what? A natural answer is: the facts about what exists. Despite its prima facie appeal, this view has received surprisingly little attention in the literature. Moreover, those who have discussed it have been inclined to reject it because of the following important challenge: why should the existence of some individuals ground their identity

I address a puzzle in Pascal's Pensées. While Pascal emphasized that God is hidden, he also seemed to think that signs of God are everywhere in nature. How does he reconcile these two claims? I offer a novel solution which emphasizes the role of love and what I call “second-personal” significance, and which results in a distinctively Pascalian account of religious experience of nature. By distinguishing

1 INTRODUCTION The main goal of Karen Neander's important book is to defend a particular version of teleosemantics, which holds that the norms necessary for the semantic evaluation of intentional mental states in cognitive science are grounded (at least in part) in the normal-proper functions of cognitive systems. The account aims to be naturalistic, explaining how intentionality is derived from non-intentional

Hoek, D. (2021). Chance and the Continuum Hypothesis. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 103 (3): 639–60. In footnote 2, the text “While ZFC + M proves the existence of such a cardinal κ, it does not state that ◂◽˙▸2ℵ0$2^{\aleph_{0}}$ itself is one –– it may be that the continuum has a countably additive measure of the appropriate kind but no ◂◽˙▸2ℵ0$2^{\aleph_{0}}$-additive measure.” was incorrect

It is a metaphysical orthodoxy that interesting non-symmetric relations cannot be reduced to symmetric ones. This orthodoxy is wrong. I show this by exploring the expressive power of symmetric theories, i.e. theories which use only symmetric predicates. Such theories are powerful enough to raise the possibility of Pythagrapheanism, i.e. the possibility that the world is just a vast, unlabelled, undirected graph

The standard conception of misleading evidence has it that e is misleading evidence that p iff e is evidence that p and p is false. I argue that this conception yields incorrect verdicts when we consider what it is for evidence to be misleading with respect to questions like whether p. Instead, we should adopt a conception of misleading evidence according to which e is misleading with respect to a

This paper presents a series of arguments aimed at showing that, for an important subclass of social rules—non-summary rules—no adequate metaphysical account has been given, and it tentatively suggests that no such account can be given. The category of non-summary rules is an important one, as it includes the rules of etiquette, fashion, chess, basketball, California state law, descriptive English

In Suffering and Virtue11 Oxford University Press (2018) , I examine and defend the idea that suffering plays vital roles in a good life, contrary to the prevailing wisdom that suffering is (always or typically) detrimental to happiness and well-being. In the book, whilst careful to acknowledge the obvious fact that suffering is in many cases deleterious to happiness, I propose that it can, nevertheless

From my perspective, replying to Santorio and Szabo was both enjoyable and challenging. There are relatively few points of clear disagreement to focus on. But regarding certain theoretical options, we're inclined to make different bets about which ones will prove most fruitful. So I'll emphasize this, if only to keep things interesting, and pass over agreement largely in silence.

The asymmetry is the view in population ethics that, while we ought to avoid creating additional bad lives, there is no requirement to create additional good ones. The question is how to embed this intuitively compelling view in a more complete normative theory, and in particular one that treats uncertainty in a plausible way. While arguing against existing approaches, I present new and general principles

If the laws are deterministic, then standard theories of counterfactuals are forced to reject at least one of the following conditionals: 1) had you chosen differently, there would not have been a violation of the laws of nature; and 2) had you chosen differently, the initial conditions of the universe would not have been different. On the relevant readings—where we hold fixed factors causally independent

The inequitable distribution of domestic and caring labour in different-sex couples has been a longstanding feminist concern. Some have hoped that having both partners at home during the COVID-19 pandemic would usher in a new era of equitable work and caring distributions. Contrary to these hopes, old patterns seem to have persisted. Moreover, studies suggest this inequitable distribution often goes

It is a consequence of the theory of imprecise credences that there exist situations in which rational agents inevitably become less opinionated toward some propositions as they gather more evidence. The fact that an agent's imprecise credal state can dilate in this way is often treated as a strike against the imprecise approach to inductive inference. Here, we show that dilation is not a mere artifact

I consider cases where you increase the risk that, e.g., someone will die, without increasing the risk that you will kill them: in particular, cases in which that increasing of risk is accompanied by a decreasing of risk of the same degree such that the risk imposition has been offset. I defend the moral legitimacy of such offsetting, including carbon-offsetting.

Our conscious thought, at least at times, seems suffused with language. We may experience thinking as if we were ‘talking in our head’, thus using inner speech to verbalize, e.g., our premises, lemmas, and conclusions. I take inner speech to be part of a larger phenomenon I call inner semiotics, where inner semiotics involves the subjective experience of expressions in a semiotic (or symbol) system

Fellow Creatures provides a way of thinking about our relation to animals that is bold, original, and urgent. But it is much more than that. It is also a meditation on a host of philosophical questions, on topics like the concept of the good, the temporality of moral standing, the nature of pleasure, and the permissibility of using dogs in the military (answer: only if the state they are drafted to

I motivate and defend a new way of theorising about trust and trustworthiness – and their relationship to each other – by locating both within a broader picture that captures largely overlooked symmetries on both the trustor's and trustee's side of a cooperative exchange. The view defended here takes good cooperation as a theoretical starting point; on the view proposed, cooperation between trustor

Numerous difficulties arising in connection with developing an ontology for linguistic entities can be thought of as manifestations of a more general problem, aptly characterized by David Lewis (1975) as a tension between two conflicting conceptions of language. On the one hand, our best theories model languages as abstract semantic systems—roughly, functions assigning meanings to expressions. On the

This paper identifies two distinct dimensions of what might be called testimonial strength: first, in the case of testimony from more than one speaker, testimony can be said to be stronger to the extent that a greater proportion of the speakers give identical testimony; second, in both single-speaker and multi-speaker testimony, testimony can be said to the stronger to the extent that each speaker

All of us have personal ideals. We are committed to being good (enough) friends, parents, neighbors, teachers, citizens, human beings, and more. In this paper, I examine the thick and thin aspects of these ideals: (i) their substance (to internalize an ideal is to endorse a particular way of being) and (ii) their accountability to reason (to internalize an ideal is to assume that this is really a good

Recent literature on Stalnaker's Thesis, which seeks to vindicate it from Lewis (1976)'s triviality results, has featured linguistic data that is prima facie incompatible with Conditionalization in iterated cases (McGee 1989, 2000; Kaufmann 2015; Khoo & Santorio, 2018). In a recent paper (2021), Goldstein & Santorio make a bold claim: they hold that these departures light the way to a new, non-conditionalizing

According to Sider, a question is metaphysically substantive just in case it has a single most natural answer. Recently, Barnes and Mikkola have argued that, given this notion of substantivity, many of the central questions in the metaphysics of gender are nonsubstantive. Specifically, it is plausible that gender pluralism—the view that there are multiple, equally natural gender kinds—is true, but

John Deigh's new volume of previously published essays covers expansive ground—from moral psychology to the history of ethics, from James, Nietzsche and Freud to Hume, Sidgwick, and Strawson. Fully one quarter of the book, however, explores the philosophy of punishment. Deigh's dominant concern in this portion of the book is to develop and defend a novel principle of proportionality in punishment,

There is a longstanding argument that purports to show that divine foreknowledge is inconsistent with human freedom to do otherwise. Proponents of this argument, however, have for some time been met with the following reply: the argument posits what would have to be a mysterious non-causal constraint on freedom. In this paper, I argue that this objection is misguided – not because after all there can

Many moral debunking arguments are driven by the idea that the correlation between our moral beliefs and the moral truths is a big coincidence, given a robustly realist conception of morality.

There is a straightforward view of perception that has not received adequate consideration because it requires us to rethink basic assumptions about the objects of perception. In this paper, I develop a novel account of these objects—the sensible qualities—which makes room for the straightforward view. I defend two primary claims. First, I argue that qualities like color and shape are “ontologically

This paper addresses a recent puzzle in the ethics of emotions concerning the fitting duration of emotions. On the one hand, many of our emotions tend to fade with time and can seem to do so fittingly. Think of attitudes like anger, grief, and regret. On the other hand, it's difficult to see how it could be fitting for these feelings to fade since the facts that make them fitting can seem to persist

A variety of interpreters have argued that Kant construes the animality of human beings as ‘transformed’, in some sense, through the possession of rationality. I argue that this interpretation admits of multiple readings and that it is either wrong, or doesn't result in the conclusion for which its proponents argue. I also explain the sense in which rationality nevertheless significantly differentiates

In this paper I defend the claim that justification is closed under conjunction, and confront its most alarming consequence – that one can have justification for believing propositions that are unlikely to be true, given one's evidence.

Ideal theorists aim to describe the ideally just society. Problem solvers aim to identify concrete changes to actual societies that would make them more just. The relation between these two sorts of theorizing is highly contested. According to the benchmark view, ideal theory is prior to problem solving because a conception of the ideally just society serves as an indispensable benchmark for evaluating

What does it take for a property to be a social property? This question is different from questions about what it takes for a property to be socially constructed. That is: it is one thing to be social, it is another to be socially constructed. Compared to questions about social construction, this question about sociality has received relatively little attention in social metaphysics. Here, I work from

Most philosophers acknowledge ways of overcoming blame, even blame directed at a culpable offender, that are not forgiving. Sometimes continuing to blame a friend for their offensive comment just isn't worth it, so we let go instead. However, despite being a common and widely recognised experience, no one has offered a positive account of letting go. Instead, it tends to be characterised negatively

Experientialism in aesthetics is the view that the artistic merit or the aesthetic value of something is determined by the final value of certain experiences of it. These are usually specified as experiences of it with understanding and appreciation. Until recently, experientialism was the dominant view. Not anymore. Experientialists are now subject to a barrage of objections, many of which they have

According to epistemological disjunctivism (ED), in paradigmatic cases of perceptual knowledge, a subject, S, has perceptual knowledge that p in virtue of being in possession of reasons for her belief that p which are both factive and reflectively accessible to S. It has been argued that ED is better placed than both knowledge internalism and knowledge externalism to undercut underdetermination-based

Many philosophers reject the view that well-being over a lifetime is simply an aggregation of well-being at every moment of one's life, and thus they reject theories of well-being like hedonism and concurrentist desire satisfactionism. They raise concerns that such a view misses the importance of the relationships between moments in a person's life or the role narratives play in a person's well-being

I use network models to simulate social learning situations in which the dominant group ignores or devalues testimony from the marginalized group. I find that the marginalized group ends up with several epistemic advantages due to testimonial ignoration and devaluation. The results provide one possible explanation for a key claim of standpoint epistemology, the inversion thesis, by casting it as a

The dominant tradition in analytic philosophy of language views reference as paradigmatically enabled by the acquisition of words from other speakers. Via chains of transmission, these words connect the referrer to the referent. Such a picture assumes the notion of a word as a stable mapping between sound and meaning. Utterances are constructed out of such stable mappings. While this picture of language

Consider three cases:

Concern, Respect and Cooperation sets out what is standardly called a normative moral theory. I prefer to call it a substantive moral theory, because it covers both the normative and evaluative content of morality (14).11 Numbers in parentheses are page-references to Concern, Respect, and Cooperation. It is helpful to distinguish these, and one of the theory's main aims is to explain the relationship

1 INTRODUCTION Cullity has written a splendid and extremely ambitious book, full of novel ideas and interesting arguments. It offers nothing less than a complete foundation of almost the whole of morality, and from this foundation Cullity derives crucial norms and values that have many illuminating applications. The number of issues covered is breath-taking, and the knowledge of the field extremely

1 A PLURALITY OF MORAL FOUNDATIONS In Concern, Respect, & Cooperation, Garrett Cullity defends a pluralist account of morality, whereby moral reasons for behaviour and attitudes rest on more than one foundation, none of which is reducible to others. Two of the pillars on which he builds his account are commonly taken to be in tension: concern for others’ welfare, and respect for their agency. Controversially

Since it tackles many topics, Concern, Respect, and Cooperation invites questions and challenges from many directions. Rather than attempting to cover all of the points raised in the commentaries, I will concentrate on what I see as the most prominent ones, grouping them thematically under five headings.

In A Confession, a memoir of his philosophical midlife crisis, Tolstoy recounts falling into despair after coming to believe that his life, and for that matter all human life, is meaningless and absurd. Although Tolstoy's account of the origin and phenomenology of his crisis is widely regarded as illuminating, his response to the crisis, namely, embracing a religious tradition that he had previously

How is what we believe related to how we act? That depends on what we mean by ‘believe’. On the one hand, there is what we're sure of: what our names are, where we were born, whether we are sitting in front of a screen. Surety, in this sense, is not uncommon – it does not imply Cartesian absolute certainty, from which no possible course of experience could dislodge us. But there are many things that

I respond to three sets of questions and objections to the account of empirical reason I offer in my book Conscious Experience: A Logical Inquiry. (i) In response to doubts expressed by Christopher Hill, I outline the case against Simple Representationalism, the view that experience confers an epistemic status on certain perceptual judgments and that it does so in virtue of its content. (ii) In response

One type of argument to sceptical paradox proceeds by making a case that a certain kind of metaphysically “heavyweight” or “cornerstone” proposition is beyond all possible evidence and hence may not be known or justifiably believed. Crispin Wright has argued that we can concede that our rational acceptance of these propositions is evidentially risky though we still remain rationally entitled to those