This index is intended as a complete bibliographical source for work published in MIND. Entries are divided into two sections: Articles, Symposia, Discussions, Critical Notices, Editorial Introductions, and Graduate Essay Prize 2017 and Book Reviews. Articles, symposia, discussions, and editorial introductions are listed by the title and by the author's name. Critical notices and book reviews are listed

In this paper, I use interventionist causal models to identify some novel Newcomb problems, and subsequently use these problems to refine existing interventionist treatments of causal decision theory. The new Newcomb problems that make trouble for existing interventionist treatments involve so-called ‘exotic choice’—that is, decision-making contexts where the agent has evidence about the outcome of

This index is intended as a complete bibliographical source for work published in MIND. Entries are divided into two sections: Articles, Symposia, Discussions, Critical Notices, Editorial Introductions, and Graduate Essay Prize 2017 and Book Reviews. Articles, symposia, discussions, and editorial introductions are listed by the title and by the author's name. Critical notices and book reviews are listed

The phenomenological movement begins in the Prolegomena to Husserl’s Logical Investigations as a philosophy of logic. Despite this, remarkably little attention has been paid to Husserl’s arguments in the Prolegomena in the contemporary philosophy of logic. In particular, the literature spawned by Gilbert Harman’s work on the normative status of logic is almost silent on Husserl’s contribution to this

AbstractIt is widely held that every person is a person essentially, where being a person is having special mental properties such as intelligence and self-consciousness. It follows that nothing can acquire or lose these properties. The paper argues that this rules out all familiar psychological-continuity views of personal identity over time. It also faces grave difficulties in accounting for the

What is a bias? Standard philosophical views of both implicit and explicit bias focus this question on the representations one harbours, for example, stereotypes or implicit attitudes, rather than the ways in which those representations (or other mental states) are manipulated. I call this approach representationalism. In this paper, I argue that representationalism taken as a general theory of psychological

It is widely held within contemporary metaethics that there is a lack of linguistic support for evaluative expressivism. On the contrary, it seems that the predictions that expressivists make about evaluative discourse are not borne out. An instance of this is the so-called problem of missing Moorean infelicity. Expressivists maintain that evaluative statements express non-cognitive states of mind

In a recent article, Hofweber (2019) presents a new, and surprising, argument for idealism. His argument is surprising because it starts with an apparently innocent premiss from the philosophy of language: that ‘that’-clauses do not refer. I do not think that Hofweber's argument works, and my first aim in this paper is to explain why. However, I agree with Hofweber that what we say about ‘that’-clauses

AbstractThe paper discusses Ian Wells’s recent argument (Wells 2019) that there is a decision problem in which followers of Evidential Decision Theory end up poorer than followers of Causal Decision Theory despite having the same opportunities for money. It defends Evidential Decision Theory against Wells’s argument, on the following grounds. (i) Wells's has not presented a decision problem in which

This paper argues that evidential decision theory is incompatible with options having objective values. If options have objective values, then it should always be rationally permissible for an agent to choose an option if they are certain that the option uniquely maximizes objective value. But, as we show, if options have objective values and evidential decision theory is true, then it is not always

What is the relationship between conceptual engineering and metasemantic externalism? Sally Haslanger has argued that metasemantic externalism justifies the seemingly counterintuitive consequences of her proposed conceptual revisions. But according to Herman Cappelen, metasemantic externalism makes conceptual engineering effectively impossible in practice. After raising objections to Haslanger’s and

When one has both epistemic and practical reasons for or against some belief, how do these reasons combine into an all-things-considered reason for or against that belief? The question might seem to presuppose the existence of practical reasons for belief. But we can rid the question of this presupposition. Once we do, a highly general ‘Combinatorial Problem’ emerges. The problem has been thought to

AbstractThis paper proposes a new model of graded modal judgement. It begins by problematizing the phenomenon: given plausible constraints on the logic of epistemic modality, it is impossible to model graded attitudes toward modal claims as judgements of probability targeting epistemically modal propositions. This paper considers two alternative models, on which modal operators are non-proposition-forming:

The Limits of Blame, by KellyErin I.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. 221.

Many philosophers hold that if an agent acts intentionally, she must know what she is doing. Although the scholarly consensus for many years was to reject the thesis in light of presumed counterexamples by Donald Davidson, several scholars have recently argued that attention to aspectual distinctions and the practical nature of this knowledge shows that these counterexamples fail. In this paper I defend

Hilary Putnam on Logic and Mathematics, edited by HellmanGeoffrey and CookRoy T. Cham: Springer, 2018. Pp. x + 274.

INTRODUCTION Imagine you are approaching a stop sign at an empty intersection. It is clear that no one else is on the road. You would like to pass right through, to save time, gasoline, and wear on your breaks. But you also worry about the small chance that a patrol officer may be watching, and you do not want a fine. In such a circumstance, would it ever make sense to base your decision—whether to

The Significance of the New Logic, by QuineW. V. Edited and translated by Walter Carnielli, Frederique Janssen-Lauret, and William Pickering. Introduced by the editors with a scholarly essay by Frederique Janssen-Lauret. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. xxv + 217.

The Greatest Possible Being, by SpeaksJeff. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 192.

Wittgenstein on Logic as the Method of Philosophy: Re-examining the Roots and Development of Analytic Philosophy, by KuuselaOskari. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xi + 297.

AbstractThe notion of supererogation—going above and beyond the call of duty—is typically discussed in a moral context. However, in this paper we argue for the existence of rationally supererogatory actions: that is, actions that go above and beyond the call of rational duty. In order to establish the existence of such actions, we first need to overcome the so-called paradox of supererogation: we need

There seems to be a deep tension between two aspects of aesthetic appreciation. On the one hand, we care about getting things right. Our attempts at aesthetic judgments aim at correctness. On the other hand, we demand autonomy. We want appreciators to arrive at their aesthetic judgments through their own cognitive efforts, rather than through deferring to experts. These two demands seem to be in tension;

AbstractThe twenty-first century will witness an unprecedented decline in the diversity of the world’s languages. While most philosophers will likely agree that this decline is lamentable, the question of what exactly is lost with a language has not been systematically explored in the philosophical literature. In this paper, I address this lacuna by arguing that language loss constitutes a problematic

In the matter of the body, even comparative language—the very use of English today—is soaked through and through with the Cartesian version of the intuition of dualism: the idea that we are fundamentally a mind and a body that must be either related ingeniously, or else reduced to one another. Instead, by deliberately looking at genres that pertain to other aspects of being human, I seek to go deeper

Infinity, Causation, and Paradox, by PrussAlexander. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xiii + 207.

AbstractThis paper concerns a puzzle about the interaction of epistemic modals and future tense. In cases of predictable forgetfulness, speakers cannot describe their future states of mind with epistemic modals under future tense, but promising theories of epistemic modals do not predict this. In §1, I outline the puzzle. In §2, I argue that it undermines a very general approach to epistemic modals

Categories We Live by: The Construction of Sex, Gender, Race, and Other Social Categories, by Ásta. Oxford: OUP, 2018. Pp. 160.

There are at least two threads in our thought and talk about rationality, both practical and theoretical. In one sense, to be rational is to respond correctly to the reasons one has. Call this substantive rationality. In another sense, to be rational is to be coherent, or to have the right structural relations hold between one's attitudinal mental states, independently of whether those states are justified

Experiences like pains, pleasures, and emotions have affective phenomenal character: they feel pleasant or unpleasant. Imperativism proposes to explain affective phenomenal character by appeal to imperative content, a kind of intentional content that directs rather than describes. We argue that imperativism is on the right track, but has been developed in the wrong way. There are two varieties of imperativism

Is the mammalian embryo/fetus a part of the organism that gestates it? According to the containment view, the fetus is not a part of, but merely contained within or surrounded by, the gestating organism. According to the parthood view, the fetus is a part of the gestating organism. This paper proceeds in two stages. First, I argue that the containment view is the received view; that it is generally

Smith (2018) argues that, unlike other forms of evidence, naked statistical evidence fails to satisfy normic support. This is his solution to the puzzles of statistical evidence in legal proof. This paper focuses on Smith’s claim that DNA evidence in cold-hit cases does not satisfy normic support. I argue that if this claim is correct, virtually no other form of evidence used at trial can satisfy normic

AbstractIn the past two decades, epistemologists have significantly expanded the focus of their field. To the traditional question that has dominated the debate — under what conditions does belief amount to knowledge? — they have added questions about testimony, epistemic virtues and vices, epistemic trust, and more. This broadening of the range of epistemic concern has coincided with an expansion

AbstractMany take the possibility of hallucinations to imply that a relationalist account, according to which perceptual experiences are constituted by direct relations to ordinary mind-independent objects, is false. The common reaction among relationalists is to adopt a disjunctivist view that denies that hallucinations have the same nature as perceptual experiences. This paper proposes a non-disjunctivist

AbstractWhy would philosophers interested in the points or functions of our conceptual practices bother with genealogical explanations if they can focus directly on paradigmatic examples of the practices we now have?? To answer this question, I compare the method of pragmatic genealogy advocated by Edward Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker—a method whose singular combination of fictionalising

Although idealism was widely defended in the history of philosophy, it is nowadays almost universally considered a non-starter. This holds in particular for a strong form of idealism, which asserts that not just minds or the mental in general, but our human minds in particular are metaphysically central to reality. Such a view seems to be excessively anthropocentric and contrary to what we by now know

A prominent objection against the logicality of second-order logic is the so-called Overgeneration Argument. However, it is far from clear how this argument is to be understood. In the first part of the article, we examine the argument and locate its main source, namely the alleged entanglement of second-order logic and mathematics. We then identify various reasons why the entanglement may be thought

KK is the thesis that if you can know p, you can know that you can know p. Though it’s unpopular, a flurry of considerations have recently emerged in its favor. Here we add fuel to the fire: standard resources allow us to show that any failure of KK will lead to the knowability and assertability of abominable indicative conditionals of the form, ‘If I don’t know it, p.’ Such conditionals are manifestly

Self-locating beliefs cause a problem for conditionalization. Miriam Schoenfield (2016) offers a solution: that on learning E, agents should update on the fact that they learned E. However, Schoenfield is not explicit about whether the fact that they learned E is self-locating. I will argue that if the fact that they learned E is self-locating then the original problem has not been addressed, and if

Inquiry into the meaning of logical terms in natural language (‘and’, ‘or’, ‘not’, ‘if ’) has generally proceeded along two dimensions. On the one hand, semantic theories aim to predict native speaker intuitions about the natural language sentences involving those logical terms. On the other hand, logical theories explore the formal properties of the translations of those terms into formal languages

In a probabilistic universe, different possible futures have different chances of occurring. We can think of the chance distribution at t as a probability measure on the class of those metaphysically possible worlds that are compatible with the actual history up to t and with the actual laws of nature. Given this connection between chance and modality, one’s views about modal space can have significant

Epistemologists have recently noted a tension between (i) denying access internalism and (ii) maintaining that rational agents cannot be epistemically akratic, believing claims akin to ‘P, but I shouldn’t believe P’. I bring out the tension, and develop a new way to resolve it. The basic strategy is to say that access internalism is false, but that counterexamples to it are ‘elusive’ in a way that

When does evidence suffice for conviction? Martin Smith (Glasgow) There is something puzzling about statistical evidence. One place this manifests is in the law, where courts are reluctant to use evidence of this kind, in spite of the fact that it is quite capable of meeting the standards of proof enshrined in legal doctrine. After surveying some proposed solutions to this problem, I shall outline

In this paper, I raise a problem for standard precisifications of The Relational Analysis. The problem I raise involves so–called ‘counterfactual’ attitude verbs, such as ‘wish’. In short, the trouble is this: there are true attitude reports ‘S wishes that P’ but there is no suitable referent for the term ‘that P’. The problematic reports illustrate that the content of a subject’s wish is intimately

The growing block view of time holds that the past and present are real whilst the future is unreal; as future events become present and real, they are added on to the growing block of reality. Surprisingly, given the recent interest in this view, there is very little literature on its origins. This paper explores those origins, and advances two theses. First, I show that although C. D. Broad’s (1923)

A dogma of contemporary ethical theory maintains that the nature of normative support for affective attitudes is the very same as the nature of normative support for actions. The prevailing view is that normative reasons provide the support across the board. I argue that the nature of normative support for affective attitudes 10 is importantly different from the nature of normative support for actions

Epistemic Permissivists face a special problem about the relationship between our firstand higher-order attitudes. They claim that rationality often permits a range of doxastic responses to the evidence. Given plausible assumptions about the relationship between your firstand higher-order attitudes, I show that you can’t be on the edge of the range, so there can’t be a range at all. Permissivism, in

Statements about the future are central in everyday conversation and reasoning. How should we understand their meaning? The received view among philosophers treats will as a tense: in ‘Cynthia will pass her exam’, will shifts the reference time forward. Linguists, however, have produced substantial evidence for the view that will is a modal, on a par with must and would. The different accounts are

This paper re-examines Kierkegaard's work with respect to the question whether truth is one or many. I argue that his famous distinction between objective and subjective truth is grounded in a unitary conception of truth as such: truth as self-coincidence. By explaining his use in this context of the term ‘redoubling’ [Fordoblelse], I show how Kierkegaard can intelligibly maintain that truth is neither

We often speak as if there are merely possible people—for example, when we make such claims as that most possible people are never going to be born. Yet most metaphysicians deny that anything is both possibly a person and never born. Since our unreflective talk of merely possible people serves to draw non-trivial distinctions, these metaphysicians owe us some paraphrase by which we can draw those distinctions

In this paper, we argue that this proposed analysis of ‘will’ both lacks linguistic motivation and faces a variety of significant problems. We show that the standard arguments for Russell’s treatment of definite descriptions fail to apply to statements of the form ‘will(f)’. Hence, one can agree with Russell on definite descriptions, without that providing any motivation for the claim that statements

Edgington has proposed a solution to the sorites paradox in terms of ‘verities’, which she defines as degrees of closeness to clear truth. Central to her solution is the assumption that verities are formally probabilities. She is silent on what verities might derive from and on why they should be probabilities. This paper places Edgington’s solution in the framework of a spatial approach to conceptualization

Early twentieth-century philosophers of perception presented their naive realist views of perceptual experience in anti-Kantian terms. For they took naive realism about perceptual experience to be incompatible with Kant’s claims about the way the understanding is necessarily involved in perceptual consciousness. This essay seeks to situate a naive realist account of visual experience within a recognisably

I discuss three observations about backtracking counterfactuals not predicted by existing theories, and then motivate a theory of counterfactuals that does predict them. On my theory, counterfactuals quantify over a suitably restricted set of historical possibilities from some contextually relevant past time. I motivate each feature of the theory relevant to predicting our three observations about

We offer a new argument in favor of metanormative contextualism, the thesis that the semantic value of a normative ‘ought’ claim of the form ‘S ought to Φ’ depends on the value of one or more parameters whose values vary in a way that is determined by the context of utterance. The debate over this contextualist thesis has centered on cases that involve ‘ought’ claims made in the face of uncertainty

Some philosophers have recently argued that decision-makers ought to take normative uncertainty into account in their decisionmaking. These philosophers argue that, just as it is plausible that we should maximize expected value under empirical uncertainty, it is plausible that we should maximize expected choice-worthiness under normative uncertainty. However, such an approach faces two serious problems:

The poss-ability principle states that each of an agent’s abilities must be witnessed by a possible exercising thereof; i.e., if S is able to φ, then there must be some possible world in which S (exercises her ability and) φs. As we will see, quite a lot turns on whether the poss-ability principle is true. The poss-ability principle is a premise in some of the main arguments for incompatibilism, a

The twin goals of this essay are: (i) to investigate a family of cases in which the goal of guaranteed convergence to the truth is beyond our reach; and (ii) to argue that each of three strands prominent in contemporary epistemological thought has undesirable consequences when confronted with the existence of such problems. Approaches that follow Reichenbach in taking guaranteed convergence to the

Mill’s harm principle is commonly supposed to rest on a distinction between self-regarding conduct, which is not liable to interference, and other-regarding conduct, which is. As critics have noted, this distinction is difficult to draw. Furthermore, some of Mill’s own applications of the principle, such as his forbidding of slavery contracts, do not appear to fit with it. This article proposes that

The literature on the indispensability argument for mathematical realism often refers to the ‘indispensable explanatory role’ of mathematics. I argue that we should examine the notion of explanatory indispensability from the point of view of specific conceptions of scientific explanation. The reason is that explanatory indispensability in and of itself turns out to be insufficient for justifying the

I present an internal problem for David Lewis’s genuine modal realism. My aim is to show that his analysis of modality is inconsistent with his metaphysics. I consider several ways of modifying the Lewisian analysis of modality, but argue that none are successful. I argue that the problem also affects theories related to genuine modal realism, including the stage theory of persistence and modal fictionalism