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Bilateralism, collapsing modalities, and the logic of assertion and denial Theoria Pub Date : 2024-03-17 Nils Kürbis
Rumfitt has given two arguments that in unilateralist verificationist theories of meaning, truth collapses into correct assertibility. In the present paper I give similar arguments that show that in unilateral falsificationist theories of meaning, falsehood collapses into correct deniability. According to bilateralism, meanings are determined by assertion and denial conditions, so the question arises
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Sidgwick and Bentham's “double aspect” of utilitarianism revisited Theoria Pub Date : 2024-03-09 Yanxiang Zhang
In “Sidgwick on Bentham: the ‘Double Aspect’ of Utilitarianism”, Schofield argued that Bentham did not regard his psychological theory as part of his utilitarianism and that natural benevolence is at his disposal to mitigate the problem of the “double aspect” of utilitarianism. This paper argues that Bentham regarded his psychological theory as part of his utilitarianism and that, in a manner quite
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Metaphysical explanations: The case of singleton sets revisited Theoria Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Kai Michael Büttner
Many contemporary metaphysicians believe that the existence of a contingent object such as Socrates metaphysically explains the existence of the corresponding set {Socrates}. This paper argues that this belief is mistaken. The argument proposed takes the form of a dilemma. The expression “{Socrates}” is a shorthand either for the expression “the set that contains all and only those objects that are
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Friendship and the grades of doxastic partiality Theoria Pub Date : 2024-02-20 Hamid Vahid
It has been claimed that friendship not only involves partial treatment of one's friends but that it also involves some degree of doxastic partiality towards them. Taking these claims as their starting points, some philosophers have argued that friendship not only involves such partiality but that this is also what is normatively required. This gives rise to the possibility of conflict between the
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Acting and pretending Theoria Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Yuchen Guo
What is the nature of the kind of behaviour English speakers call “acting”? A popular strategy is to say that acting is a kind of pretence, and onstage actors pretend to do and say what the character does and says. This paper aims to reject this “pretence theory of acting”. To do so, first, I introduce several counterexamples showing that actors do not engage in pretending but still enact their characters;
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What's a(t) stake? On stakes, encroachers, knowledge Theoria Pub Date : 2024-02-10 Peter Baumann
According to subject-sensitive invariantism (SSI), whether S knows that p depends not only on the subject's epistemic position (the presence of a true belief, sufficient warrant, etc.) but also on non-epistemic factors present in the subject's situation; such factors are seen as “encroaching” on the subject's epistemic standing. Not the only such non-epistemic factor but the most prominent one consists
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Reductivism versus perspectivism versus holism: A key theme in philosophy of science, and its application to modern linguistics Theoria Pub Date : 2023-12-21 Finn Collin, Per Durst-Andersen
We use recent developments within philosophy of science and within certain strands of linguistic research to throw light on each other. According to Ronald Giere's perspectivist philosophy of science, the scientific understanding of reality must proceed along different, mutually irreducible lines of approach. Giere's proposal, however, leaves unresolved the problem of how to integrate the ever-growing
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A developmental logic: Habermas's theory of social evolution Theoria Pub Date : 2023-12-17 Keunchang Oh
In the paper, I first consider how his theory of social norms is connected to his theory of social evolution by examining the importance of learning in his theory of both social norms and social evolution. Then I turn to David Owen and Amy Allen's critiques of Jürgen Habermas. My aim is to develop their critique of Habermas by elucidating an important but neglected distinction between the developmental
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Direct reference and the Goldbach puzzle Theoria Pub Date : 2023-12-06 Stefan Rinner
So-called Neo-Russellians, such as Salmon, Braun, Crimmins, and Perry, hold that the semantic content of ‘n is F’ in a context c is the singular proposition ⟨o, P⟩, where o is the referent of the name n in c, and P is the property expressed by the predicate F in c. This is also known as the Neo-Russellian theory. Using truth ascriptions with names designating propositions, such as ‘Goldbach's conjecture’
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Moral explanation of moral judgements Theoria Pub Date : 2023-11-23 Ryo Chonabayashi
“The wrongness of Albert's action causally explains why Jane judged that his action was wrong”. This type of causal moral explanation has been extensively discussed in the recent metaethical literature. This paper motivates the following claims about this type of moral explanation. First, a typical defence of this type of moral explanation suggested in the literature does not work because it predicts
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On the social nature of artefacts Theoria Pub Date : 2023-11-20 Tim Juvshik
Recent work in metaphysics has focused on the nature of artefacts, most accounts of which assume that artefacts depend on the intentions of their individual makers. Artefacts are thus importantly different from institutional kinds, which involve collective intentions. However, recent work in social ontology has yielded renewed focus on the social dimensions of various kinds, including artefacts. As
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A philosophical analysis of the emergence of language Theoria Pub Date : 2023-11-20 Hamed Tabatabaei Ghomi, Antonio Benítez-Burraco
There is a research programme in linguistics that is founded on describing language as an emergent phenomenon. This paper clarifies how the core concept of emergence is deployed in this emergentist programme. We show that if one adopts the weak understandings of the concept of language emergence, the emergentist programme is not fundamentally different from the other non-emergentist research programmes
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On the criteria of the imitation for the artificial intelligent systems in the moral imitation game Theoria Pub Date : 2023-11-14 Jolly Thomas
To assess the intelligence of machines, Alan Turing proposed a test of imitation known as the imitation game, famously known as the Turing test. To assess whether artificial intelligent (AI) systems could be moral or not, Colin Allen et al. developed a test of imitation in the context of morality, a test known as the Moral Turing Test (MTT), which I will, in this paper, call the moral imitation game
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On a body-switching argument in defence of the immateriality of human nature Theoria Pub Date : 2023-11-14 Pirooz Fatoorchi
In an earlier paper in Theoria, I discussed an argument based on the idea of “soul-switching” that attempted to undermine the immaterialist account of human beings. The present paper deals with a parity argument against that argument in which the idea of “body-switching” plays a pivotal role. I call these two arguments, that have been reported by Razi (d. 1210), respectively “the soul-switching argument”
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Two levels in the feeling of familiarity Theoria Pub Date : 2023-11-13 Sonia Maria Lisco, Francesca Ervas
This paper explores the role of phenomenology in the understanding of the cognitive processes of coupling/decoupling, defending the Wittgensteinian idea that phenomenology can play a crucial role as a description of immediate (social) experience. We argue that epistemic feelings can provide a phenomenological description of the development of a subject's everyday experience, tracking the transition
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Online democracy: Applying Hannah Arendt's model of democracy to the internet Theoria Pub Date : 2023-11-10 Sylvie Bláhová
The internet is a major part of our lives today. This applies to politics as well, and accordingly, the question of whether it is possible to realize democracy on the internet has arisen. Using the arguments of Hannah Arendt, the paper aims to determine what online democracy should look like. It is argued that the internet's decentralized structure is advantageous because it facilitates the implementation
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An empirically informed account of numbers as reifications Theoria Pub Date : 2023-11-02 César Frederico dos Santos
The field of numerical cognition provides a fairly clear picture of the processes through which we learn basic arithmetical facts. This scientific picture, however, is rarely taken as providing a response to a much-debated philosophical question, namely, the question of how we obtain number knowledge, since numbers are usually thought to be abstract entities located outside of space and time. In this
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Sources of hyperintensionality Theoria Pub Date : 2023-10-24 Giorgio Lenta
A wide variety of concepts are nowadays considered to be hyperintensional, and some of them do not seem to involve our representational attitudes. This led some philosophers to identify and defend a notion of worldly hyperintensionality: the idea that some hyperintensional phenomena derive from features of objective reality, independently of how we represent it. Against this view, Darragh Byrne and
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Frege: A fusion of horizontals Theoria Pub Date : 2023-10-22 Francesco Bellucci, Daniele Chiffi, Luca Zanetti
In Die Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (I, §48), Frege introduces his rule of the fusion of horizontals, according to which if an occurrence of the horizontal stroke is followed by another occurrence of the same stroke, either in isolation or “contained” in a propositional connective, the two occurrences can be fused with each other. However, the role of this rule, and of the horizontal sign more generally
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Reason monolithism: A Darwinian dilemma for “relaxed” realism Theoria Pub Date : 2023-10-22 Gloria Mähringer
Street formulated a Darwinian Dilemma for realist theories of value. Much criticism of her formulation of the dilemma targets the second horn, posed by the scientifically implausible assumption of a tracking relation between our attitudes and evaluative truth. This paper shows how a recent wave of metaethical realism, most prominently defended by Scanlon, succeeds without a tracking relation and thus
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Sexual exclusion and the right to sex Theoria Pub Date : 2023-10-04 Raja Halwani
Philosophers have recently expressed interest in the question as to whether there is a right to sex, a right whose justification is motivated by the existence of sexually excluded people – people who suffer from involuntary long-term sexual deprivation (owing, say, to a chronic medical condition). This paper, after offering preliminary remarks about what a right to sex and its objects might be and
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The suppression task and first-order predicate calculus Theoria Pub Date : 2023-10-04 Miguel López-Astorga
The suppression task challenges classical logic. Classical logic is monotonic. However, in the suppression task, an inference with the form of modus ponendo ponens is inhibited by adding a new premise. Several explanations have been given to account for this fact. The present paper indicates three of them as examples: that of the theory of mental models, that based on logic programming and closed world
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The Law of Peoples and Rectificatory Justice Theoria Pub Date : 2023-10-02 Eleonora d'Annibale
In this paper, I argue that a principle of rectification for past wrongdoings could and should be added to Rawls's Law of Peoples on the ground that unrectified past injustice undermines the notion of equality of peoples. I base this work on a conception of rectification that includes apologies as well as economic compensation, and I focus on the step of compensation. To do so, I briefly discuss how
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Structural realism and theory classification Theoria Pub Date : 2023-09-14 Federico Benitez
Ontic structural realism constitutes a promising take on scientific realism, one that avoids the well-known issues that realist stances have with underdetermination and theory change. In its most radical versions, ontic structural realism proposes a type of eliminativism about theoretical entities, ascribing ontological commitment only to the structures, and not to the objects appearing in our theories
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The role of imagination and recollection in the method of phenomenal contrast Theoria Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Hamid Nourbakhshi
The method of phenomenal contrast (in perception) invokes the phenomenal character of perceptual experience as a means to discover its contents. The method implicitly takes for granted that ‘what it is like’ to have a perceptual experience e is the same as ‘what it is like’ to imagine or recall it; accordingly, in its various proposed implementations, the method treats imaginations and/or recollections
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Emotional actions: A new approach Theoria Pub Date : 2023-08-24 David Pineda
The recent philosophical literature on emotional action is divided between Humeans, who think that emotional action, for all its peculiarities, can in fact be explained along Humean lines, that is, with belief–desire pairs; and emotionists, who think that emotional actions can only be explained by appealing to emotions and some of their special features. After reviewing this philosophical discussion
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An embodied theorisation: Arend Heyting's hypothesis about how the self separates from the outer world finds confirmation Theoria Pub Date : 2023-08-22 Miriam Franchella
At the beginning of the twentieth century, among the foundational schools of mathematics appeared ‘intuitionism’ by Dutchman L. E. J. Brouwer, who based arithmetic on the intuition of time and all mental constructions that could be made out of it. His pupil Arend Heyting was the first populariser of intuitionism, and he repeatedly emphasised that no philosophy was required to practise intuitionism
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Unruh's hybrid account of harm Theoria Pub Date : 2023-08-09 Erik Carlson, Jens Johansson, Olle Risberg
Charlotte Unruh has recently put forward a hybrid account of what it is to suffer harm – one that combines comparative and non-comparative elements. We raise two problems for Unruh's account. The first concerns killing and death; the second concerns the causing of temporarily low or high welfare.
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Dennett’s prime-mammal objection to the consequence argument Theoria Pub Date : 2023-07-15 Johan E. Gustafsson
The Consequence Argument is the classic argument for the incompatibility of determinism and our ability to do otherwise. Daniel C. Dennett objects that the Consequence Argument suffers from the same error as a clearly unconvincing argument that there are no mammals. In this paper, I argue that these arguments do not suffer from the same error. The argument that there are no mammals is unconvincing
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Zombies Incorporated Theoria Pub Date : 2023-07-11 Olof Leffler
How should we understand the relation between corporate agency, corporate moral agency and corporate moral patienthood? For some time, corporations have been treated as increasingly ontologically and morally sophisticated in the literature. To explore the limits of this treatment, I start off by redeveloping and defending a reductio that historically has been aimed at accounts of corporate agency which
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Metaphysics of concepts: In defense of the abilitist approach Theoria Pub Date : 2023-06-27 Ilya Bulov
Abilitism is an approach to the metaphysics of concepts according to which each concept consists of a managing cognitive ability coordinating other abilities (cognitive and non-cognitive) and a set of subordinate abilities associated with this managing ability. As I argue here, if we accept the abilitist approach, we can efficiently solve such puzzles in the metaphysics of concepts as the partial possession
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Machines and metaphors: Challenges for the detection, interpretation and production of metaphors by computer programs Theoria Pub Date : 2023-06-21 Jacob Hesse
Powerful transformer models based on neural networks such as GPT-4 have enabled huge progress in natural language processing. This paper identifies three challenges for computer programs dealing with metaphors. First, the phenomenon of Twice-Apt-Metaphors shows that metaphorical interpretations do not have to be triggered by syntactical, semantic or pragmatic tensions. The detection of these metaphors
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The balance and weight of reasons Theoria Pub Date : 2023-06-15 Nicholas Makins
The aim of this paper is to provide a detailed characterisation of some ways in which our preferences reflect our reasons. I will argue that practical reasons can be characterised along two dimensions that influence our preferences: their balance and their weight. This is analogous to a similar characterisation of the way in which probabilities reflect the balance and weight of evidence in epistemology
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Meaning in derogatory social practices Theoria Pub Date : 2023-06-14 Deborah Mühlebach
Verbal derogation is not only a linguistic but also, and perhaps more importantly, a political phenomenon. In this paper, I argue that to do justice to the political relevance of derogatory terms, we must not neglect the social practices and structures in which the use of these terms is embedded. I aim to show that inferentialist semantics is especially helpful to account for this social embeddedness
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Conditional analyses of options for action: A partial defence Theoria Pub Date : 2023-06-06 Jacob Rosenthal
The idea of multiple options for action in a specific situation is essential for choice and deliberation. But what exactly is an option for action? A simple and natural approach to this question is via conditional analyses. While conditional analyses of dispositions and abilities face well-known objections and are widely considered untenable, I argue that several of these objections do not apply to
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A defence of conceptual analysis as a linguistic endeavour Theoria Pub Date : 2023-05-29 Jumbly Grindrod
In this paper, I outline and defend a traditional yet controversial view of conceptual analysis, particularly as it is used in epistemology. I will defend the view against a number of objections, all of which focus on the idea that conceptual analysis relies upon linguistic intuitions. Rather than trying to deny this claim, I will seek to vindicate the use of conceptual analysis within epistemology
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Why beliefs are not dispositional stereotypes Theoria Pub Date : 2023-05-27 Andrew Garford Moore, George Botterill
In a series of papers, Schwitzgebel has attempted to revive the dispositionalist account of belief by tweaking it a little and claiming a previously unconsidered advantage over representationalism. The tweaks are to include phenomenal and cognitive responses, in addition to overt behaviour, in the manifestations of a given belief; and to soften the account of dispositions by allowing for dispositional
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Inferentialism and social delusion Theoria Pub Date : 2023-05-23 Kamil Lemanek
This work sets out to present how the notion of delusion may be understood (and extended) within the semantic framework of Robert Brandom's inferentialism. The mechanisms of reliability and community-oriented proprieties, among others, provide inferentialists with effective tools for understanding commitments (and so beliefs) in communities. These tools may be used to describe and assess both commitments
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Rules, practices, and assessment of linguistic behaviour Theoria Pub Date : 2023-05-22 Bartosz Kaluziński
In this paper, I focus on the idea that language is a rule-constituted and rule-governed practice. This notion has been criticised recently. It has been claimed that, even if linguistic meaning is determined by rules, these rules are not genuinely normative because they do not govern actions within the practice by themselves. It has been emphasised that one needs to consent (e.g., has relevant intention
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The myth of true lies Theoria Pub Date : 2023-05-20 Jesper Kallestrup
Suppose you assert a proposition p that you falsely believe to be false with the intention to deceive your audience. The standard view has it that you lied. This paper argues against orthodoxy: deceptive lying requires that p be in actual fact false, in addition to your intention to deceive by means of untruthfully asserting that p. We proceed as follows. First, an argument is developed for such falsity
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Précis Theoria Pub Date : 2023-05-02 Øystein Linnebo
Thin Objects has two overarching ambitions. The first is to clarify and defend the idea that some objects are ‘thin’, in the sense that their existence does not make a substantive demand on reality. The second is to develop a systematic and well-motivated account of permissible abstraction, thereby solving the so-called ‘bad company problem’. Here I synthesise the book by briefly commenting on what
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Thin objects: An overview Theoria Pub Date : 2023-04-23 Massimiliano Carrara, Luca Zanetti
In Thin objects: an abstractionist account (Oxford University Press, 2018), Øystein Linnebo claims that ‘mathematical objects are thin in the sense that very little is required for their existence’. Linnebo articulates his view in an abstractionist manner: according to Linnebo, the truth of the right-hand side of a Fregean abstraction principle, which states that two items stand in a given equivalence
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Sellars, practical reality, and practical truth Theoria Pub Date : 2023-04-22 Stefanie Dach
Wilfrid Sellars is usually read as claiming that only the unobservable, theoretical objects which science would postulate at the ideal end of inquiry are real. Against this, Willem deVries has suggested that we can develop a notion of practical reality in the context of Sellars's philosophy which would pertain primarily to commonsense objects. I use deVries's suggestion as a foil to clarify Sellars's
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An anchored joint acceptance account of group justification Theoria Pub Date : 2023-04-04 Lukas Schwengerer
When does a group justifiedly believe that p? One answer to this question has been developed first by Schmitt and then by Hakli: when the group members jointly accept a reason for the belief. Call this the joint acceptance account of group justification. Their answer has great explanatory power, providing us with a way to account for cases in which the group's justification can diverge from the justification
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Change of logic, without change of meaning Theoria Pub Date : 2023-03-29 Hitoshi Omori, Jonas R. B. Arenhart
Change of logic is typically taken as requiring that the meanings of the connectives change too. As a result, it has been argued that legitimate rivalry between logics is under threat. This is, in a nutshell, the meaning-variance argument, traditionally attributed to Quine. In this paper, we present a semantic framework that allows us to resist the meaning-variance claim for an important class of systems:
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Informal provability and dialetheism Theoria Pub Date : 2023-02-14 Pawel Pawlowski, Rafal Urbaniak
According to the dialetheist argument from the inconsistency of informal mathematics, the informal version of the Gödelian argument leads us to a true contradiction. On one hand, the dialetheist argues, we can prove that there is a mathematical claim that is neither provable nor refutable in informal mathematics. On the other, the proof of its unprovability is given in informal mathematics and proves
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From thin objects to thin concepts? Theoria Pub Date : 2023-02-08 Massimiliano Carrara, Ciro De Florio, Francesca Poggiolesi
In this short paper we consider Linnebo's thin/thick dichotomy: first, we show that it does not overlap with the very common one between abstract/concrete objects; second, on the basis of some difficulties with the distinction, we propose, as a possible way out, to move from thin/thick objects to thin/thick concepts.
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Feit on the normative importance of harm Theoria Pub Date : 2023-02-07 Anna Folland
An important objection to the Counterfactual Comparative Account (CCA) of harm is that the account fails to cohere with standard views about the normative significance of harm. In response, some proponents of CCA suggest that the concept of harm should play a more limited role in normative theorising than philosophers might usually think. This paper addresses the most elaborate defence of CCA of this
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Reasonable Disagreement and Metalinguistic Negotiation Theoria Pub Date : 2023-02-07 Saranga Sudarshan
This paper defends a particular view of explaining reasonable disagreement: the Conceptual View. The Conceptual View is the idea that reasonable disagreements are caused by differences in the way reasonable people use concepts in a cognitive process to make moral and political judgements. But, that type of explanation is caught between either an explanatory weakness or an unparsimonious and potentially
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Correction to ‘A new bridge principle for the normativity of logic’ Theoria Pub Date : 2023-02-07
Orilia, F. (2022) A new bridge principle for the normativity of logic. Theoria, 88( 6), 1274– 1292. In page 1275, line 23, ‘Cr+, Co+r, and Co+’ should be ‘the above-mentioned Cr+, Cr+k, Co+, and Cp+’. The correct sentence is shown below: ‘As expected, the above-mentioned Cr+, Cr+k, Co+, and Cp+ do not meet such desiderata’. In page 1284, line 10, ‘or+b*’ should be ‘Wr+b*’. The correct sentence is shown
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The particularity of photographic experience Theoria Pub Date : 2023-02-05 René Jagnow
A common view in the philosophy of perception holds that states of seeing objects face to face have particular contents. When you see, say, a dog face to face, your visual state represents the particular dog that is in front of you. In this paper, I argue for a related claim about states of seeing objects in conventional photographs. When you see a dog in a photograph, for example, your visual state
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Casting inference to the best explanation's lot with active inference Theoria Pub Date : 2023-02-02 Majid D. Beni
This paper draws on the resources of computational neuroscience (an account of active inference under the free energy principle) to address Bas van Fraassen's bad lot objection to the inference to the best explanation (IBE). The general assumption of this paper is that IBE is a finessed form of active inferences that self-organising systems perform to maximise the chance of their survival. Under this
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Truth-value relations and logical relations Theoria Pub Date : 2023-01-06 Lloyd Humberstone
After some generalities about connections between functions and relations in Sections 1 and 2 recalls the possibility of taking the semantic values of n-ary Boolean connectives as n-ary relations among truth-values rather than as n-ary truth functions. Section 3, the bulk of the paper, looks at correlates of these truth-value relations as applied to formulas, and explores in a preliminary way how their
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Not every truth could have a truthmaker Theoria Pub Date : 2022-12-04 John Stigall
Mark Jago argues for truthmaker maximalism in some recent papers based on a key premise: that every truth could have a truthmaker. Jago contends that many would pretheoretically accept this principle and that counterexamples to it would be difficult to find. In this note, I show how truthmaker non-maximalists can use a modified version of Peter Milne's argument against maximalism to provide a counterexample
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Merely verbal disputes and common ground Theoria Pub Date : 2022-12-02 J. T. M. Miller
In this paper I offer a new characterisation of what makes a dispute merely verbal. This new characterisation builds on the framework initially outlined by Jenkins and additionally makes use of Stalnaker's notion of ‘common ground’. I argue that this ‘common ground account’ can better classify disputes as merely verbal, and can better explain cases of playing devil's advocate.
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Naming and analyticity Theoria Pub Date : 2022-11-24 Antonio Capuano
My aim in this paper is to connect naming and analyticity and to argue that, like “Hesperus is Hesperus”, “Hesperus is Phosphorus” is analytic. In the paper, I also discuss several other unexpected cases of analytic truth like “Aristotle existed”.
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Closure, Underdetermination and the peculiarity of Sceptical scenarios Theoria Pub Date : 2022-11-20 Guido Tana
Epistemologists understand radical scepticism as arising from two principles: closure and underdetermination. Both possess intuitive prima facie support for their endorsement. Understanding how they engender scepticism is crucial for any reasonable anti-sceptical attempt. The contemporary discussion has focused on elucidating the relationship between them to ascertain whether they establish distinct