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Why future contingents are not all false* Analytic Philosophy 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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
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Is the abstract vs concrete distinction exhaustive & exclusive? Four reasons to be suspicious Analytic Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-12-15 Travis Dumsday
There is a widespread consensus within analytic metaphysics that the abstract versus concrete distinction, if valid at all, must be thought of as exhaustive and exclusive. I present four arguments designed to cast doubt on this consensus.
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Validity as (material!) truth-preservation in virtue of form Analytic Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-12-05 Tristan Grøtvedt Haze
According to a standard story, part of what we have in mind when we say that an argument is valid is that it is necessarily truth-preserving: if the premises are true, the conclusion must also be true. But—the story continues—that's not enough, since ‘Roses are red, therefore roses are coloured’, for example, while it may be necessarily truth-preserving, is not so in virtue of form. Thus we arrive
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An instrumentalist explanation of pragmatic encroachment Analytic Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-11-11 Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen
Many have found it plausible that practical circumstances can affect whether someone is in a position to know or rationally believe a proposition. For example, whether it is rational for a person to believe that the bank will be open tomorrow can depend not only on the person's evidence but also on how practically important it is for the person not to be wrong about the bank being open tomorrow. This
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Neo-humean rationality and two types of principles Analytic Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-11-08 Caj Strandberg
According to the received view in metaethics, a Neo-Humean theory of rationality entails that there cannot be any objective moral reasons, i.e. moral reasons that are independent of actual desires. In this paper, I argue that there is a version of this theory that is compatible with the existence of objective moral reasons. The key is to distinguish between (i) the process of rational deliberation
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Familiar properties and phenomenal properties Analytic Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-11-08 Thomas Raleigh
Sometimes when we describe our own sensory experiences, we seem to attribute to experience itself the same sorts of familiar properties—such as shape or colour—as we attribute to everyday physical objects. But how literally should we understand such descriptions? Can there really be phenomenal elements or aspects to an experience which are, for example quite literally square? This paper examines how
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Consistent desires and climate change Analytic Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-11-01 Daniel Coren
Philosophers have described the human perspective on climate change as a perfect moral storm. I take a new angle on that storm: I argue that our relevant desires feature a particularly problematic case of seemingly consistent but genuinely inconsistent desires. We have, first, non-indexical desires such as a desire to (make the sacrifices necessary to) stop polluting our environment at some point.
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Epistemic obligations and free speech Analytic Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-11-01 Boyd Millar
Philosophical discussions of free speech often focus on moral considerations such as the harm that certain forms of expression might cause. However, in addition to our moral obligations, we also have a distinct set of epistemic obligations—and even when a false belief doesn't harm anyone, it constitutes an epistemically bad outcome. Moreover, the existing psychological evidence suggests that human
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Deceiving versus manipulating: An evidence-based definition of deception Analytic Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-11-01 Don Fallis
What distinguishes deception from manipulation? Cohen (Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 96, 483 and 2018) proposes a new answer and explores its ethical implications. Appealing to new cases of “non-deceptive manipulation” that involve intentionally causing a false belief, he offers a new definition of deception in terms of communication that rules out these counterexamples to the traditional definition
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Against the very idea of a perceptual belief Analytic Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-10-27 Grace Helton, Bence Nanay
The aim of this paper is to argue that there is no unproblematic way of delineating perceptual beliefs from non-perceptual beliefs. The concept of perceptual belief is one of the central concepts not only of philosophy of perception but also of epistemology in a broad foundationalist tradition. Philosophers of perception talk about perceptual belief as the interface between perception and cognition
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Against the inside out argument1 Analytic Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-09-15 Amy Seymour
Bailey (2021) offers a clever argument for the compatibility of determinism and moral responsibility based on the nature of intrinsic intentions. The argument is mistaken on two counts. First, it is invalid. Second, even setting that first point aside, the argument proves too much: we would be blameworthy in paradigm cases of non-blameworthiness. I conclude that we cannot reason from intentions to
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Wittgenstein on necessity: ‘Are you not really an idealist in disguise?’ Analytic Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-08-01 Sam W. A. Couldrick
Wittgenstein characterises ‘necessary truths’ as rules of representation that do not answer to reality. The invocation of rules of representation has led many to compare his work with Kant's. This comparison is illuminating, but it can also be misleading. Some go as far as casting Wittgenstein's later philosophy as a specie of transcendental idealism, an interpretation that continues to gather support
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How to choose normative concepts Analytic Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-07-25 Ting Cho Lau
Matti Eklund (2017) has argued that ardent realists face a serious dilemma. Ardent realists believe that there is a mind-independent fact as to which normative concepts we are to use. Eklund claims that the ardent realist cannot explain why this is so without plumping in favor of their own normative concepts or changing the topic. The paper first advances the discussion by clarifying two ways of understanding
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The null hypothesis for fiction and logical indiscipline Analytic Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-07-25 John Collins
1 INTRODUCTION The literature on the semantics of fiction is long-standing and voluminous. The null hypothesis, however, is rarely seriously entertained. Such a hypothesis simply denies that the fiction/non-fiction distinction is a semantic one, and so just like other statements, fictive ones of all kinds might be true or false depending on how the world is, and their truth conditions involve no ontological
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Flow and presentness in experience Analytic Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-05-26 Giuliano Torrengo, Daniele Cassaghi
In the contemporary landscape about temporal experience, debates concerning the “hard question” of the experience of the flow—as opposed to debates concerning more qualitative aspects of temporality, such as change, movement, succession and duration—are gaining more and more attention. The overall dialectics can be thought of in terms of a debate between the realists (who take the phenomenology of
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Consequentializing agent-centered restrictions: A Kantsequentialist approach Analytic Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-04-12 Douglas W. Portmore
There is, on a given moral view, an agent-centered restriction against performing acts of a certain type if that view prohibits agents from performing an instance of that act-type even to prevent two or more others from each performing a morally comparable instance of that act-type. The fact that commonsense morality includes agent-centered restrictions is often seen as a decisive objection to act-consequentialism
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Perception as controlled hallucination Analytic Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-03-29 Justin Tiehen
“Perception is controlled hallucination,” according to proponents of predictive processing accounts of vision. I say they are right that something like this is a consequence of their view but wrong in how they have pursued the idea. The focus of my counterproposal is the causal theory of perception, which I develop in terms of a productive concept of causation. Cases of what otherwise seem like successful
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Freedom and the open future Analytic Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-03-26 Yishai Cohen
I draw upon Helen Steward's concept of agential settling to argue that freedom requires an ability to change the truth-value of tenseless future contingents over time from false to true and that this ability requires a metaphysically open future.
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Who are “we”?: Animalism and conjoined twins Analytic Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-03-26 Robert Francescotti
Various cases of conjoined twinning have been presented as problems for the animalist view that we are animals. In some actual and possible cases of human dicephalus that have been discussed in the literature, it is arguable that there are two persons but only one human animal. It is also tempting to believe that there are two persons and one animal in possible instances of craniopagus parasiticus
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The coherence objection to dream scepticism Analytic Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-03-21 Krasimira Filcheva
The dream sceptic argues that our ordinary beliefs are not justified because we cannot know that we have not always been dreaming. This is the Always Dreaming Hypothesis (ADH). I develop the traditional coherence objection to dream scepticism and argue that the coherence objection can be reformulated in a way that makes it both plausible and defensible. Considerations about the incoherence of dreams