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On the dilemma for partial subjunctive supposition Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-22 Snow Zhang
In ‘The logic of partial supposition’, Eva and Hartmann present a dilemma for a normative account of partial subjunctive supposition: the natural subjunctive analogue of Jeffrey conditionalization is Jeffrey imaging, but this rule violates a natural monotonicity constraint. This paper offers a partial defence of Jeffrey imaging against Eva and Hartmann’s objection. I show that, although Jeffrey imaging
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A puzzle about weak belief Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-22 Joshua Edward Pearson
I present an intractable puzzle for the currently popular view that belief is weak – the view that expressions like ‘S believes p’ ascribe to S a doxastic attitude towards p that is rationally compatible with low credence that p. The puzzle concerns issues that arise on considering beliefs in conditionals. I show that proponents of weak belief either cannot consistently apply their preferred methodology
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Fragility and strength Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-19 Teodor-Tiberiu Călinoiu, Daniele Bruno Garancini
It is customarily assumed that paracomplete and paraconsistent solutions to liar paradoxes require a logical system weaker than classical logic. That is, if a logic is not fragile to liar paradoxes, it must be logically weaker than classical logic. Defenders of classical logic argue that the losses of weakening it outweigh the gains. Advocates of paracomplete and paraconsistent solutions disagree.
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Alan Author strikes again: more on confirming conjunctions of disconfirmed hypotheses Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-10 Jakob Koscholke
The so-called Alan Author Effect is a surprising phenomenon in Bayesian Confirmation Theory. It occurs when a piece of evidence e confirms the conjunction of two hypotheses h1∧h2 but at the same time disconfirms each hypothesis h1 and h2 individually. In this paper, I present a new and prima facie stronger version of this effect where additionally, the evidence e confirms the conjunction of the negated
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A problem not peculiar to counterfactual sufficiency Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-08-03 Chaoan He
The Consequence Argument for incompatibilism is beset by two rival interpretations: the counterfactual sufficiency interpretation and the counterfactual might interpretation. In a 2023 paper Waldrop argued that the counterfactual sufficiency interpretation conflicts with certain principles governing the logic of counterfactuals. In this paper, I show that Waldrop’s argument can be adapted to prove
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Understanding reality and presence in dreams through imagery Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-07-30 Gabriele Ferretti
It is generally said that dreams are experienced as real. But the notion of reality is often used, in the philosophical literature, along with that of presence. A big problem, in this respect, is that both these terms may assume different meanings. So understanding the nature of presence and reality in dreams depends on the way we conceive these two notions. This paper contributes to the literature
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Sentimental perceptualism and affective imagination Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-07-18 Uku Tooming
According to sentimental perceptualism, affect grounds evaluative or normative knowledge in a similar way to the way perception grounds much of descriptive knowledge. In this paper, we present a novel challenge to sentimental perceptualism. At the centre of the challenge is the assumption that if affect is to ground knowledge in the same way as perception does, it should have a function to accurately
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Primitive conditional probabilities, subset relations and comparative regularity Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-07-06 Joshua Thong
Rational agents seem more confident in any possible event than in an impossible event. But if rational credences are real-valued, then there are some possible events that are assigned 0 credence nonetheless. How do we differentiate these events from impossible events when we order events? De Finetti (1975), Hájek (2012) and Easwaran (2014) suggest that, when ordering events, conditional credences and
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The role of imagination in protest Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-06-14 Megha Devraj
Recent literature on social movements assigns a central role to the imagination. One way for activists to further their aims is through dramatic, confrontational acts of protest. I argue that transcendent imagining is key to understanding what protest does qua act of speech. A common approach to protest sees it as a speech act of condemning some feature of the socio-political world and appealing for
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Stable dystopia: a critique of the circular definition of stability in Nozick’s model of utopia Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-06-11 Susumu Cato, Hun Chung
In Part III of Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), Robert Nozick presents what he calls ‘the model of possible worlds’ (307) to examine the formal properties of utopia, defined as ‘the best of all possible worlds’ (298). The basic idea is that each person is given the power to create any possible world and its inhabitants by imagining them. Two definitions of stability have been proposed: (a) the non-circular
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Counterfactuals and indeterminate possibility Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-05-23 Jonas Werner
This paper discusses a puzzle raised by Sharon Berry, published in Analysis. The question in the background of this puzzle is how we should deal with seemingly plausible possibility judgements that commit us to counterfactual truths that find no basis in reality. Three answers to this question and their corresponding solutions to the puzzle will be discussed. The last answer provides a way to make
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Enacted appreciation and the meta-normative structure of urgency Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-05-07 Elliot Porter
Some considerations are urgent and others are not. Sometimes we invite criticism if we neglect the urgency of our situation, even if our action seems adequate to respond to it. Despite this significance, the literature does not offer a satisfactory analysis of the normative structure of urgency. I examine three views of urgency, drawn from philosophical and adjacent literature, which fail to explain
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Against God of the truth-value gaps Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-04-25 T Parent
Beall and Cotnoir propose that ‘God can create an unliftable stone’ is a truth-value gap (neither true nor false). However, this yields a revenge paradox on whether God can eschew gaps. Can God avoid gappy ascriptions of power? Either way, God’s power seems to have limits. In response, it may be said that ascribing God the power to avoid gaps is itself gappy – it concerns a power that God neither has
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Against the no-difference argument Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-03-25 Adam Elga
There are 1,000 of us and one victim. We each increase the level at which a ‘discomfort machine’ operates on the victim – leading to great discomfort. Suppose that consecutive levels of the machine are so similar that the victim cannot distinguish them. Have we acted permissibly? According to the ‘no-difference argument’ the answer is ‘yes’ because each of our actions was guaranteed to make the victim
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Rights against the world Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-02-29 Gopal Sreenivasan
For philosophers, rights against the world are equivalent to rights in rem. Contrary to what Hart thought, however, this does not make them equivalent to general rights. Rights in rem contrast with rights in personam, whereas general rights contrast with special rights. As I explain, rights against the world can be either general rights or special rights. My explanation follows Waldron’s strategy of
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The desire machine Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-02-06 Paul Forrester
The experience machine poses the most important problem for hedonist theories of well-being. I argue that desire satisfactionism faces a similar problem: the desire machine. Upon entering this machine, your desires are altered through some minor neurosurgery. In particular, the machine causes you to desire everything that actually happens. The experience machine constructs a simulated world that matches
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How to ground powers Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-02-02 David Builes
According to the grounding theory of powers, fundamental physical properties should be thought of as qualities that ground dispositions. Although this view has recently been defended by many different philosophers, there is no consensus for how the view should be developed within a broader metaphysics of properties. Recently, Tugby has argued that the view should be developed in the context of a Platonic
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The problem of taste to the experimental test Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-29 Filippo Contesi, Enrico Terrone, Marta Campdelacreu, Ramón García-Moya, Genoveva Martí
A series of recent experimental studies have cast doubt on the existence of a traditional tension that aestheticians have noted in our aesthetic judgements and practices, namely the problem of taste. The existence of the problem has been acknowledged since Hume and Kant, though not enough has been done to analyse it in depth. In this paper, we remedy this by proposing six possible conceptualizations
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Logic in the deep end Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2024-01-08 Graham Leach-Krouse, Shay Allen Logan, Blane Worley
Weak enough relevant logics are often closed under depth substitutions. To determine the breadth of logics with this feature, we show there is a largest sublogic of R closed under depth substitutions and that this logic can be recursively axiomatized.
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Artificial achievements Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-12-23 Phillip Hintikka Kieval
State-of-the-art machine learning systems now routinely exceed benchmarks once thought beyond the ken of artificial intelligence (AI). Often these systems accomplish tasks through novel, insightful processes that remain inscrutable to even their human designers. Taking AlphaGo’s 2016 victory over Lee Sedol as a case study, this paper argues that such accomplishments manifest the essential features
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The symmetry regained Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-12-12 Tien-Chun Lo
Collin (2022) attempts to break the symmetry between the modal ontological argument for the existence of God and the reverse modal ontological argument against the existence of God by drawing on some Kripkean lessons about a posteriori necessity. He argues that there is an undercutting defeater for taking God’s non-existence to be possible. In this paper, I reply that taking the Kripkean considerations
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Anti-haecceitism and indiscernibility Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-11-07 Alexander Roberts
It is often presumed that anti-haecceitists are not committed to the identity of indiscernibles. However, I argue that anti-haecceitism implies a particularly strong thesis about when individuals are indiscernible which motivates the identity of indiscernibles. The argument is first sketched intuitively and then formalized in a system of higher-order modal logic.
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Resolving a puzzle about the fixity of the past Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-10-31 Alexander Geddes
In his 2022 article ‘A puzzle about the fixity of the past’, Lampert argues that standard views concerning knowledge and the semantics of ‘actually’ conflict with a widely held principle concerning the fixity of the past. I show that his attempt to establish the conflict fails, as it rests on the implicit assumption that a past mental state or utterance involving a modal indexical must have the same
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Do formal objections to the error theory overgeneralize? Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-08-25 Bart Streumer, Daniel Wodak
We recently argued that formal objections to the normative error theory generalize to other error theories that have the same form. Since many of these other error theories are very plausible, we concluded that such objections overgeneralize. Christine Tiefensee and Gregory Wheeler disagree: they grant that formal objections generalize quite far, but deny that they overgeneralize, since they take the
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A new paradox for well-being subjectivism Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-08-25 Ben Davies
Subjectivists think that our well-being is grounded in our subjective attitudes. Many such views are vulnerable to variations on the ‘paradox of desire’, where theories cannot make determinate judgements about the well-being of agents who take a positive valuing attitude towards their life going badly. However, this paradox does not affect all subjectivist theories; theories grounded on agents’ prudential
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God, gluts and evil Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-08-25 Jc Beall
Traditional monotheism appears to many to involve contradiction in basic 'omni' properties (e.g. omnipotence and too-heavy stones, etc.). A glut-theoretic account of such problems treats them as gluts (dual to familiar truth-value gaps): 'omnipotence' is both true of and false of God. Many philosophers, glut theorists and otherwise, acknowledge that such a glut-theoretic account of at least some traditional
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According to law Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-08-25 Adam Perry
Legal discourse consists largely of legal claims. These are claims that there is a legal obligation, legal right, or other legal incident. What is the meaning of “legal obligation”, “legal right” and so on in legal claims? The standard view among philosophers of law is that “legal” indicates that, according to law, there is a moral obligation, moral right or other moral incident. Here I set out a new
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Meaning without Gricean intentions Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-08-23 Carlotta Pavese, Alexandru Radulescu
Gricean theories analyse meaning in terms of certain complex intentions on the part of the speaker – the intention to produce an effect on the addressee, and the intention to have that intention recognized by the addressee. By drawing an analogy with cases widely discussed in action theory, we propose a novel counterexample where the speaker lacks these intentions but nonetheless means something and
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Symmetry’s revenge Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-08-22 Joseph C Schmid
James Henry Collin recently developed a new symmetry breaker favouring the ontological argument’s possibility premiss over that of the reverse ontological argument. The symmetry breaker amounts to an undercutting defeater for the reverse possibility premiss based on Kripkean cases of a posteriori necessity. I argue, however, that symmetry re-arises in two forms. First, I challenge the purported asymmetry
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Explanatory virtues and reasons for belief Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-08-22 Noah D Mckay
In this essay, I address an objection to inference to the best explanation due to Bas C. van Fraassen, according to which explanatory virtues cannot confirm a theory, since they make the theory more informative and thus less likely to be true given the probability axioms. I try to show that van Fraassen’s argument, once made precise, is deductively invalid, and that even an ampliative version of the
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Why we should not assume that ‘normal’ is ambiguous Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-08-22 Jon Bebb
There is a widespread and largely unchallenged assumption within philosophy that the word ‘normal’ is ambiguous: i.e., that it can mean different things in different contexts. This assumption appears in work within topics as varied as the philosophy of biology, medicine, justification, causation, and more. In this paper I argue that we currently lack any independent reason for adopting such an assumption
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Jeffrey imaging revisited Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-08-03 Melissa Fusco
In ‘The logic of partial supposition’ (Analysis vol. 81), Benjamin Eva and Stephan Hartmann investigate partial imaging , a credence-revision method which combines the partiality familiar from Jeffrey Conditioning(The Logic of Decision , 1983 ) with the formal notion of imaging familiar from Lewis’s ‘Causal decision theory’ (1981 ). They argue that because partial imaging is non-monotonic, it ‘fail[s]
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Following all the rules: intuitionistic completeness for generalized proof-theoretic validity Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-07-20 Will Stafford, Victor Nascimento
Prawitz conjectured that the proof-theoretically valid logic is intuitionistic logic. Recent work on proof-theoretic validity has disproven this. In fact, it has been shown that proof-theoretic validity is not even closed under substitution. In this paper, we make a minor modification to the definition of proof-theoretic validity found in Prawitz’s 1973 paper ‘Towards a foundation of a general proof
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Are good leaders truly good? Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-07-19 Susumu Cato, Akira Inoue
This paper offers a new insight on the Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT) in the theory of epistemic democracy. This theorem states that democratic decision-making leads us to correct outcomes under certain assumptions. One key assumption is the ‘independence condition’, which requires that voters form their beliefs independently when they vote. This paper examines the role of an opinion leader as an informational
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A novel Process Reliabilist response to the Swamping Problem Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-07-19 Sanford Goldberg
This paper aims to provide a novel response on behalf of Process Reliabilism to the Swamping Problem. Unlike previous responses, the present response does not involve conditional probabilities (as Goldman and Olsson do), it does not appeal to permissivism or attitudes towards epistemic risk (as Pettigrew does), it will not depend on the generality of the problem (as Carter and Jarvis do) and it does
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Neppur si muove! Reply to Correia and Rosenkranz Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-07-18 Roberto Loss
Correia and Rosenkranz have recently argued in Analysis (2020, 2022) that tense realism (understood as the view that there is a real difference between past, present and future) entails realism about temporal passage (and thus the idea that there is some change in which time is the present time). I argue that their argument is either unsound or question-begging.
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The procreation asymmetry, improvable-life avoidance and impairable-life acceptance Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-07-14 Elliott Thornley
Many philosophers are attracted to a complaints-based theory of the procreation asymmetry, according to which creating a person with a bad life is wrong (all else equal) because that person can complain about your act, whereas declining to create a person who would have a good life is not wrong (all else equal) because that person never exists and so cannot complain about your act. In this paper, I
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Does the unity of reason imply that epistemic justification is factive? Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-07-11 Jaakko Hirvelä
Some externalists have recently argued that the unity of theoretical and practical reason implies that epistemic justification is factive. It is argued that arguments for the factivity of epistemic justification either (i) equate two actions that are in fact different, or (ii) make the unwarranted assumption that the by-relation transmits justification. The unity of reason does not imply that epistemic
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Grounding identity in existence facts: a reply to Wilhelm Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-06-10 Neil Mehta
What grounds facts of the form
? One promising answer is: facts of the form . A different promising answer is: xitself. Isaac Wilhelm has recently argued that the second answer is superior to the first. In this paper, I rebut his argument. -
Austerity in Mohist ethics Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-05-20 Bradford Jean-Hyuk Kim
Fraser highlights an unattractive feature of Mohist ethics: the Mohists, while criticizing their Confucian contemporaries, restrict one’s pursuits to the most basic sorts of goods. Fraser suggests that the Mohists assume the perpetuity of scarce resources, which leads to a commitment to austerity, which in turn leads them to deny a plausible third way between austerity and excess. In their defence
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Lying: revisiting the ‘intending to deceive’ condition Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-04-14 Vladimir Krstić
This paper refines the received analysis of deceptive lies. This is done by assessing some cases of lies that are supposedly not intended to deceive and by arguing that they actually involve sophisticated strategies of intentional deception. These lies, that is, merely seem not to be intended to deceive and this is because our received analysis of deceptive lies is insufficiently sophisticated. We
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Why Aren’t I Part of a Whale? Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-04-14 David Builes, Caspar Hare
We start by presenting three different views that jointly imply that every person has many conscious beings in their immediate vicinity, and that the number greatly varies from person to person. We then present and assess an argument to the conclusion that how confident someone should be in these views should sensitively depend on how massive they happen to be. According to the argument, sometimes
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There is no aesthetic experience of the genuine Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-04-05 Mark Windsor
Many hold that aesthetic appreciation is sensitive to the authenticity or genuineness of an object. In a recent body of work, Carolyn Korsmeyer has defended the claim that genuineness itself is an aesthetic property. Korsmeyer’s aim is to explain our aesthetic appreciation of objects that afford a sense of being ‘in touch with the past’. In this paper, I argue that genuineness cannot explain our appreciation
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Bullshit questions Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-03-31 Dennis Whitcomb
This paper argues that questions can be bullshit. First it explores some shallowly interrogative ways in which that can happen. Then it shows how questions can also be bullshit in a way that is more deeply interrogative.
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Against classical paraconsistent metatheory Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-03-31 Koji Tanaka, Patrick Girard
There was a time when ‘logic’ just meant classical logic. The climate is slowly changing, and non-classical logic cannot be dismissed off-hand. However, a metatheory used to study the properties of non-classical logic is often classical. In this paper, we will argue that this practice of relying on classical metatheories is problematic. In particular, we will show that it is a bad practice because
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A modified Kripkean theory of negative existentials Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2023-01-14 Chaoan He
In a 2019 paper, Hausmann raised a new and interesting problem for Kripke’s account of negative existentials. He argued that Kripke’s account leads to the absurd consequence that anybody who has good reasons to believe that there are no propositions also has good reasons to believe that he or she does not exist. In this paper I propose a modified Kripkean theory, which is invulnerable to a Hausmann-like
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Absence of evidence against belief as credence 1 Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-12-27 Andrew del Rio
On one view of the traditional doxastic attitudes, belief is credence 1, disbelief is credence 0 and suspension is any precise credence between 0 and 1. In ‘Rational agnosticism and degrees of belief’ (2013) Jane Friedman argues, against this view, that there are cases where a credence of 0 is required but where suspension is permitted. If this were so, belief, disbelief and suspension could not be
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Demonstratives and cognitive significance revisited Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-11-01 Filipe Martone
The issue of whether a theory of demonstratives should be able to handle Frege’s Puzzle seems rather old hat, but it was not so much resolved as left hanging. This paper tries to remedy that. I argue that a major problem not previously noticed affects any theory of demonstratives that aims at dealing with Frege’s Puzzle. This problem shows itself in cases in which the cognitive significance of a single
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Epistemic excuses and the feeling of certainty Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-10-17 Jacques-Henri Vollet
Gerken’s On Folk Epistemology, 2017). In this paper, I rely on independent work in epistemology and cognitive science to suggest a novel account of epistemic excuses in terms of epistemic feelings. In contrast to other existing accounts, this account is immune from the above objection and can thus be used to rescue the knowledge norm.
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Do tiny contributions make a difference? Reply to Barnett Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-10-08 Martin Montminy
Barnett’s 2017 paper ‘No free lunch’, the answer is ‘yes’: even tiny contributions can make a morally relevant difference. To defend this answer, Barnett raises an objection against the rival view that tiny contributions never make any difference. I argue that we should reject both Barnett’s and the rival view. I propose an alternative account that reflects the vagueness at play in the outcome of tiny
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Correction to: Be modest: you’re living on the edge Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-04-24 Kevin Dorst
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A puzzle about the fixity of the past Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-04-23 Fabio Lampert
Abstract It is a widely held principle that no one is able to do something that would require the past to have been different from how it actually is. This principle of the fixity of the past has been presented in numerous ways, playing a crucial role in arguments for logical and theological fatalism, and for the incompatibility of causal determinism and the ability to do otherwise. I will argue that
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Erratum to: Moral worth and accidentally right actions Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-03-26 Allen Coates
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Multidisjunctivism’s no solution to the screening-off problem Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-03-23 Haiming Hua
Abstract Naïve realism is the view that veridical experiences are fundamentally relations of acquaintance to external objects and their features, and multidisjunctivism is the conjunction of naïve realism and the view that hallucinatory experiences don’t share a common fundamental kind. Multidisjunctivism allegedly removes the screening-off worry over naïve realism, and the relevant literature suggests
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The actual challenge for the ontological argument Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-03-22 Marco Hausmann
Abstract Many versions of the ontological argument have two shortcomings: First, despite the arguments put forward, for example, by Hugh Chandler and Nathan Salmon, they assume that S5 is the correct modal logic for metaphysical modality. Second, despite the classical arguments put forward, for example, by David Hume and Immanuel Kant or the more recent arguments put forward, for example, by John Findlay
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Justification and being in a position to know Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-03-18 Daniel Waxman
Abstract According to an influential recent view, S is propositionally justified in believing p iff S is in no position to know that S is in no position to know p. I argue that this view faces compelling counterexamples.
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Erratum to: Is global consequentialism more expressive than act consequentialism? Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-03-16 Elliott Thornley
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On a causal principle in an argument for a necessary being Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-03-03 Noël Blas Saenz
Abstract In Necessary Existence, Pruss and Rasmussen give an argument for a necessary being employing a modest causal principle. Here I note that, when applied to highly general and fundamental matters, the principle may well be false (or at least not so obvious).
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Universalism doesn’t entail extensionalism Analysis (IF 1.1) Pub Date : 2022-02-28 Loss R.
AbstractIn the literature on mereology it is often accepted that mereological universalism entails extensionalism. More precisely, many accept that, if parthood is assumed to be a partial order (and, thus, the relevant theory of parthood is taken to be at least as strong as ‘core mereology’), the thesis that every plurality of entities has a mereological fusion entails the thesis that different composite