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Categorial versus naturalized epistemology Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-09-18 Nick Zangwill
How do we know what kinds of things constitute knowledge or justified belief? Naturalized epistemology is committed to denying a priori insight into the kinds of kinds that are and are not knowledge or justification makers. By contrast, it is argued here that knowledge of these matters is a priori knowledge of a special kind. Such knowledge may be called “categorial.” The dialectical give and take
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Naked statistical evidence and verdictive justice Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-09-03 Sherrilyn Roush
What is it for the verdict of a criminal trial to be just? It is widely agreed that a Guilty verdict is just only if the defendant did the relevant deed, and only if his rights were not violated in the process of apprehending, charging, and convicting him. I argue that more is required: he must be found Guilty because he is guilty, and not solely for other reasons. The conviction must be based on the
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Bringing the deep self back to the racecourse: Rethinking accountability and the deep self Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-07-17 Ke Zhang
Deep self views of moral responsibility suggest that an agent fully satisfies the freedom condition for responsibility if and only if her actions or omissions issue from, and so express, her deep self. This analysis generates both false negatives and false positives regarding people's responsibility, and counterexamples proliferate. I defend a novel version of the deep self view by offering a necessary
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Defending The Open Future: Replies to MacFarlane, Green, Wasserman, and Bigg & Miller Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-06-27 Patrick Todd
In this symposium piece, I reply to the diverse and wide‐ranging set of objections to my book (The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False) set forth by MacFarlane, Green, Wasserman, and Bigg & Miller.
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Virtue and its moral psychology Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-06-26 Gopal Sreenivasan
Emotion and virtue (2020) defends positions about virtue on two adjacent expanses of philosophical terrain. One is a matter of moral psychology, while the other concerns the theory of virtue. My primary thesis identifies a central role for emotion in the psychological constitution of exemplars of virtue. In this symposium, four outstanding commentators take turns examining some of the theses defended
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Reason and reciprocity: A response to Emotion and Virtue Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-06-26 Roger Crisp
This paper is a review of Emotion and Virtue, by Gopal Sreenivasan. Besides providing an overview of the book, it is suggested that the view of the virtues which gives less weight to the emotions remains plausible, as does the thesis of the unity of virtue.
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Varieties of future‐contingency Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-06-26 Mitchell Green
I here examine some of the main contentions of Todd's “The Open Future”. I argue first that a future contingent need not contain locutions such as “will” or cognates and that once this is recognized a trilemma emerges for Todd, putting pressure on him to relinquish one of the book's main aims. Then after noting (Section II) Todd's response to a puzzle A.N. prior had raised for betting on an open‐future
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Modeling action: Recasting the causal theory Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-06-24 Megan Fritts, Frank Cabrera
Contemporary action theory is generally concerned with giving theories of action ontology. In this paper, we make the novel proposal that the standard view in action theory—the Causal Theory of Action—should be recast as a “model,” akin to the models constructed and investigated by scientists. Such models often consist in fictional, hypothetical, or idealized structures, which are used to represent
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Fitting emotions and virtuous judgment Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-06-24 Justin D'Arms
I discuss a tension between two broadly Aristotelian ideas about the role of emotions in virtue and consider its implications for the original and attractive theory of virtuous judgment that Gopal Sreenivasan develops in Emotion and Virtue. One is the idea that a virtuous person has fitting emotions. The other idea is that the virtuous person has emotions that point her toward performing a virtuous
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Comments on Emotion and Virtue by Gopal Sreenivasan Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-06-24 Julia Driver
This essay provides a critical discussion of Gopal Sreenivasan's integral account of virtue in his book Emotion and Virtue. This discussion focuses on his account of the paradigm virtue of compassion, arguing that the view does not have most of the advantages Sreenivasan suggests it has when compared to competing models of virtue.
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‘Emotions’ in Gopal Sreenivasan's Emotion and Virtue Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-06-24 Mauro Rossi
In his remarkable new book, Emotion and Virtue, Sreenivasan defends the view that, in the case of many virtues, in order for an exemplar of each of these virtues to be a reliable judge of what that virtue requires in specific circumstances, she must possess a particular, morally rectified, emotional trait. In this article, I raise two challenges to “the argument from salience” that Sreenivasan offers
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A metapragmatic stereotype‐based account of reclamation Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-05-29 Nicolás Lo Guercio, Fernando Carranza
Group‐based slurs are words that express derogatory attitudes toward some group demarcated by a property that has historically caused social antagonism, for example, gender or ethnicity, among others. Reclamation, in turn, is the process whereby a slur starts being used non‐derogatorily by members of the target group to express a positive attitude. Some content‐based theories of slurs (which pin the
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What physicalism could be Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-05-27 Michael J. Raven
The physicalist credo is that the world is physical. But some phenomena, such as minds, morals, and mathematics, appear to be nonphysical. While an uncompromising physicalism would reject these, a conciliatory physicalism need not if it can account for them in terms of an underlying physical basis. Any such account must refer to the nonphysical. But will not this unavoidable reference to the nonphysical
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Curry, dialectic and the modal ontological argument Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-05-24 Eric T. Updike
A course of dialogical reasoning involving the atheist and the theist reveals a connection between the Curry phenomenon and the step‐wise construction of a sound version of the modal ontological argument. The exercise is both adversarial and cooperative as the participants are committed to the norms of shared truth‐seeking, respect for one's opponents and a desire to continue the dialectic for as long
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Personal‐identity non‐cognitivism* Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-05-21 Kristie Miller
In this paper, I outline and defend a new approach to personal‐identity—personal‐identity non‐cognitivism—and argue that it has several advantages over its cognitivist rivals. On this view utterances of personal‐identity sentences express a non‐cognitive attitude towards relevant person‐stages. The resulting view offers a pleasingly nuanced picture of what we are doing when we utter such sentences
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Why future contingents are not all false* Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-01-17 John MacFarlane
Patrick Todd argues for a modified Peircean view on which all future contingents are false. According to Todd, this is the only view that makes sense if we fully embrace an open future, rejecting the idea of actual future history. I argue that supervaluational accounts, on which future contingents are neither true nor false, are fully consistent with the metaphysics of an open future. I suggest that
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On the idea that all future tensed contingents are false Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2024-01-16 Anthony Bigg, Kristie Miller
1 INTRODUCTION In ‘The Open Future’ (2021), Patrick Todd argues that the future is open and that, as a consequence, all future contingents are false (as opposed to the more common view that they are neither true nor false). Very roughly, this latter claim is motivated by the idea that (a) presentism is true, and so future (and indeed past) things1 do not exist, and (b) if future things do not exist
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Lucky artists Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-12-22 Christopher Prodoehl
Imagine an artist creating new work, a painter applying paint to canvas with a brush, for example. Assuming she acts intentionally, is she responsible for the work she creates? Is she responsible, in particular, for whatever value her finished work has? In the first part of the paper, I formulate an argument for the claim she is not; I call this the Luck Argument. According to that argument, an important
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Is distinct location evidence of distinct objects? Multilocation and the problem of parsimony Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-12-13 David Harmon
For an object to be multilocated is for it to wholly occupy disjoint spatial regions simultaneously. If multilocation is possible, it is possible that a multilocated particle is wholly located at 1080 distinct locations, such that it constitutes a particle-for-particle duplicate of the actual universe. Such a universe would presumably be perceptually identical to the actual universe. If we take multilocation
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The good and the powers Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-11-28 Michele Paolini Paoletti
Neo-Aristotelian views of goodness hold that the goodness of something is strictly connected with its goal(s). In this article, I shall present a power-based, Neo-Aristotelian view of goodness. I shall claim that there are certain powers (i.e., Goodness-Conferring Powers, or GC-powers in short) that confer goodness upon their bearers and upon the resulting actions. And I shall suggest that GC-powers
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Bullshit activities Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-11-28 Kenny Easwaran
Frankfurt gave an account of “bullshit” as a statement made without regard to truth or falsity. Austin argued that a large amount of language consists of speech acts aimed at goals other than truth or falsity. We don't want our account of bullshit to include all performatives. I develop a modification of Frankfurt's account that makes interesting and useful categorizations of various speech acts as
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Total pragmatic encroachment and belief–desire psychology Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-11-06 Simon Langford
Pragmatic encroachment in epistemology is the idea that whether one knows some proposition depends on whether one can rely on it practically. Total pragmatic encroachment affirms that practical considerations of this sort encroach not just on knowledge but on all interesting normative epistemic statuses a belief might have. Ichikawa, Jarvis, and Rubin (2012) have argued that this stronger thesis conflicts
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An open problem for the metaphysics of constitutive standards Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-10-27 Yohan Molina
Jeremy Fix, in ‘Two Sorts of Constitutivism’ (2021), makes a case for the possibility of contingent essential properties to account for the metaphysical status of constitutive standards of things. In this brief note, I will present an open problem affecting Fix's conception, namely, the explanation of the membership of particulars to a genus, which is necessary to identify particulars subject to standards
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From indeterminacy in a fundamental theory to fundamental indeterminacy? Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-10-27 Chanwoo Lee
In this paper, I examine a case for fundamental indeterminacy (FI) by Elizabeth Barnes and offer my counterarguments. Barnes' account of FI includes both the characterization of FI and why we need to accept it. I argue that her reasons for accepting FI can be challenged even when we accept her characterization of FI. Her main claim is that finding a fundamental proposition that our fundamental theory
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Politics and suffering Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-10-20 David Enoch
Political philosophy should focus not on uplifting ideals, but rather, so I argue, on minimizing serious suffering. This is so not because other things do not ultimately matter (they do), but rather because in the political context, the stakes in terms of suffering are usually extremely high, so that any other considerations are almost always outweighed. Put in moderately deontological terms: the high
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Minimalism's continued creep: Subject matter Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-10-17 Joshua Gert
The problem of creeping minimalism is the problem of drawing a principled distinction between expressivists and non-expressivists. Explanationism is a popular strategy for solving the problem, but two of its forms—ontological explanationism and representational explanationism—have fatal problems. Christine Tiefensee and Matthew Simpson have recently, and independently, endorsed a third form: subject
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Towards a Fregean psycholinguistics Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-10-13 Thorsten Sander
This paper is partly exegetical, partly systematic. I argue that Frege's account of what he called “colouring” contains some important insights on how communication is related to mental states such as mental images or emotions. I also show that the Fregean perspective is supported by current research in psycholinguistics and that a full understanding of some linguistic phenomena that scholars have
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Visual indeterminacy Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-10-13 Michael Tye
An account is proposed of the nature of indeterminacy in visual experience. Along the way, alternative proposals by Block, Morrison, Munton, Prettyman, Stazicker and Nanay are considered.
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What can preemption do? Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-10-13 Yuval Avnur, Chigozie Obiegbu
Evidential Preemption occurs when a speaker asserts something of the form “Others will tell you Q, but I say P,” where P and Q are incompatible in some salient way. Typically, the aim of this maneuver is to get the audience to accept P despite contrary testimony of others, who might otherwise be trusted on the matter. Phenomena such as echo chambers, conspiracy theories, and other political speech
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Agent-switching, plight inescapability and corporate agency Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-10-07 Olof Leffler
Realists about group agency, according to whom corporate agents may have mental states and perform actions over and above those of their individual members, think that individual agents may switch between participating in individual and corporate agency. My aim is, however, to argue that the inescapability of individual agency spells out a difficulty for this kind of switching – and, therefore, for
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Experiential parts Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-09-21 Philippe Chuard
Several disputes about the nature of experience operate under the assumption that experiences have parts, including temporal parts. There's the widely held view, when it comes to temporal experiences, that we should follow James' exhortation that such experiences aren't mere successions of their temporal parts, but something more. And there's the question of whether it is the parts of experiences which
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Grounding and boundaries Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Giulio Sciacca
This paper discusses a recent puzzle concerning the notions of boundary parthood and dependence, and offers a new solution. The puzzle was originally presented by Jeroen Smid and successively elaborated upon by Claudio Calosi. I first reformulate some of the troublesome premises. Particularly, whereas Smid and Calosi discuss the puzzle in terms of an underspecified notion of dependence, I propose to
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Advice as a model for reasons Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-09-16 Andrew Sneddon
Smith (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 55, 1995, 109) and Manne (Philosophical Studies, 167, 2014, 89), both following Williams (Making sense of humanity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995), have developed advice-based models of practical reasons. However, advice is not an apt model for reasons. The case for such pessimism is made by examining the positions of Smith and Manne first
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Frege on logical axioms and non-evidential epistemic warrants: A paragraph from Grundgesetze Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-09-07 Junyeol Kim
Criticizing psychologism about logic in the Foreword of Grundgesetze, Frege examines an answer to the question of how we can justify our acknowledgment of logical axioms as true—the logical laws that cannot be proved from other laws. The answer he entertains states that we cannot reject logical axioms if we do not want to give up our judgment altogether. Suspending his judgment about this answer, Frege
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Reasons, attenuators, and virtue: A novel account of pragmatic encroachment Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-09-04 Eva Schmidt
In this paper, I explicate pragmatic encroachment by appealing to pragmatic considerations attenuating, or weakening, epistemic reasons to believe. I call this the ‘Attenuators View’. I will show that this proposal is better than spelling out pragmatic encroachment in terms of reasons against believing – what I call the ‘Reasons View’. While both views do equally well when it comes to providing a plausible
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Can we combine practical and epistemic reason? Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-08-07 Darren Bradley
This paper offers a theory of how epistemic and practical reasons for belief can be combined into all-things-considered reason. Unlike alternative theories, it does not involve any sharp cut-offs or lexical priorities among types of reason. The theory allows that the relative strengths of the practical and epistemic reasons matter, as does the distance between the epistemically rational credence and
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Giving up gratitude Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-08-03 Daniel Coren
Resentment is a negative reaction to expressions of bad will. Gratitude is a positive reaction to expressions of good will. To give up resentment, when someone has wronged you, is to forgive them. We might expect an analog for giving up gratitude. The practice features in some ordinary and extraordinary moments in our lives. But it is unnamed and unstudied. I clarify what giving up gratitude is. I
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Platonic qua predication Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-06-08 Rachel Barney
Platonic arguments often have premises of a particular form which is misunderstood. These sentences look like universal generalizations, but in fact involve an implicit qua phrase which makes them a fundamentally different kind of predication. Such general implicit redoubled qua predications (girqps) are not an expression of Plato's proprietary views; they are also very common in everyday discourse
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The act-type theory of propositions as a theory of what is said Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-06-07 Thomas Hodgson
I propose a version of the act-type theory of propositions, following Hanks and Soames. According to the theory, propositions are types of act of predication. The content of a sentence is the type of such act performed when that sentence is uttered. A consequence of this theory is that the structure of the content of a sentence will mirror the structure of that sentence. I defend this consequence of
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Kripkean conceivability and epistemic modalities Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-05-30 Vittorio Morato
In this article, I show that (i) from what I call a “Kripkean” account of the relations between conceivability and metaphysical necessities, (ii) an apparently plausible principle relating conceivability and epistemic modality, and (iii) the duality of epistemic modalities, one can show the utterly anti-Kripkean result that every metaphysical necessity is an epistemic necessity. My aim is to present
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Expressing 2.0 Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-05-20 Trip Glazer
William P. Alston argues in “Expressing” (1965) that there is no important difference between expressing a feeling in language and asserting that one has that feeling. My aims in this paper are (1) to show that Alston's arguments ought to have led him to a different conclusion—that “asserting” and “expressing” individuate speech acts at different levels of analysis (the illocutionary and the locutionary
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Endurantism, presentism, and the problem of temporary intrinsics Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-05-15 Yanssel Garcia
The most common form of endurantism takes enduring objects to be wholly located at every time they occupy. Such a view is believed to give rise to a problem concerning intrinsic change. My laptop may have been shut before, but it is currently open. Yet, if we understand endurantism as above, then my laptop is in possession of two contradictory properties: the shapes of being open and shut. This problem
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Metaethics as conceptual engineering Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-04-18 Knut Olav Skarsaune
On the traditional approach to metaethics, theories are expected to be faithful to ordinary normative discourse—or at worst (if we think the ordinary discourse is metaphysically unsound) to deviate from it as little as possible. This paper develops an alternative, “conceptual engineering” approach to metaethical enquiry, which is not in this way restricted by our present discourse. On this approach
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Do substances have formal parts? Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-04-10 Graham Renz
Hylomorphism is the Aristotelian theory according to which substances are composed of matter and form. If a house is a substance, then its matter would be a collection of bricks and timbers, and its form is something like the structure of those bricks and timbers. It is widely agreed that matter bears a mereological relationship to substance; the bricks and timbers are parts of the house. But with
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Glad to be alive: How we can compare a person's existence and her non-existence in terms of what is better or worse for this person Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-03-29 Christian Piller
This paper defends the claim that if a person P exists, there can be true positive comparisons between P's existence and P's never having existed at all in terms of what is better or worse for P. If correct, this view will have significant implications for various fundamental issues in population ethics. I try to show how arguments to the contrary fail to take note of a general ambiguity in comparisons
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Freedom and its unavoidable trade-off Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-03-27 Lars J. K. Moen
In the debate on how we ought to define political freedom, some definitions are criticized for implying that no one can ever be free to perform any action. In this paper, I show how the possibility of freedom depends on a definition that finds an appropriate balance between absence of interference and protection against interference. To assess the possibility of different conceptions of freedom, I
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Perceptual constancy and perceptual representation Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-03-13 E. J. Green
Perceptual constancy has played a significant role in philosophy of perception. It figures in debates about direct realism, color ontology, and the minimal conditions for perceptual representation. Despite this, there is no general consensus about what constancy is. I argue that an adequate account of constancy must distinguish it from three distinct phenomena: mere sensory stability through proximal
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On being a lonely brain-in-a-vat: Structuralism, solipsism, and the threat from external world skepticism Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-03-08 Grace Helton
David Chalmers has recently developed a novel strategy of refuting external world skepticism, one he dubs the structuralist solution. In this paper, I make three primary claims: First, structuralism does not vindicate knowledge of other minds, even if it is combined with a functionalist approach to the metaphysics of minds. Second, because structuralism does not vindicate knowledge of other minds,
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The causal structure of Frankfurt- and PAP-style cases Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-03-08 Matthew Rellihan
Frankfurt-style cases suggest that an agent's moral responsibility for an action supervenes on the causal history of that action—at least when epistemic considerations are held constant. However, PAP-style cases suggest that moral responsibility does not supervene on causal history, for judgments concerning an agent's responsibility for an action are also sensitive to the presence of alternative—and
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Meaning change Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-02-28 Indrek Reiland
The linguistic meaning of a word in a language is what fully competent speakers of the language have a grasp of merely in virtue of their semantic competence. The meanings of words sometimes change over time. ‘Meat’ used to mean ‘solid food’, but now means ‘animal flesh eaten as food’. This type of meaning change comes with change of topic, what we are talking about. Many people interested in conceptual
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Linnebo on reference by abstraction Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-02-28 Bahram Assadian
According to Øystein Linnebo's account of abstractionism, abstraction principles, received as Fregean criteria of identity, can be used to reduce facts about singular reference to objects such as directions and numbers to facts that do not involve such objects. In this article, first I show how the resources of Linnebo's metasemantics successfully handle Dummett's challenge against the referentiality
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Social construction and indeterminacy Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-02-28 Kevin Richardson
An increasing number of philosophers argue that indeterminacy is metaphysical (or worldly) in the sense that indeterminacy has its source in the world itself (rather than how the world is represented or known). The standard arguments for metaphysical indeterminacy are centered around the sorites paradox. In this essay, I present a novel argument for metaphysical indeterminacy. I argue that metaphysical
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Cross-temporal grounding Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-02-22 Fabrice Correia, Giovanni Merlo
Cross-temporal grounding is a type of grounding whereby present facts about the past (for example that Caesar was alive) are explained in terms of past facts (for example that Caesar is alive) rather than in terms of other present facts. This paper lays the foundations for a theory of cross-temporal grounding. After introducing the general idea of a type of grounding connecting facts to past facts
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On scepticism about personal identity thought experiments Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-02-16 Andrew J. Latham, Kristie Miller, Caroline West, Wen Yu
Many philosophers have become sceptical of the use of thought experiments in theorising about personal identity. In large part, this is due to work in experimental philosophy that appears to confirm long-held philosophical suspicions that thought experiments elicit inconsistent judgements about personal identity and hence judgements that are thought to be the product of cognitive biases. If so, these
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Truth and imprecision Analytic Philosophy (IF 0.6) Pub Date : 2023-01-17 Josh Armstrong
Our ordinary assertions are often imprecise, insofar as the way we represent things as being only approximates how things are in the actual world. The phenomenon of assertoric imprecision raises a challenge to standard accounts of both the norm of assertion and the connection between semantics and the objects of assertion. After clarifying these problems in detail, I develop a framework for resolving