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Measurement and desert: Why grades cannot be deserved Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-12-14 Toby Napoletano
It is typically thought that a student deserves—or at least can deserve—a grade in a class. The students who perform well on assessments, who display a high degree of competence, and who complete all of the required work, deserve a good grade. Students who perform poorly on assessments, who fail to understand the course material, and who fail to complete the required work, deserve a bad grade. In this
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Ways of being have no way of being useful Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-12-11 Wouter Adriaan Cohen
I critically discuss two kinds of argument in favour of ontological pluralism and argue that they fail to show that ways of being are explanatorily fruitful.
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The inescapability of moral luck Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-12-10 Taylor W. Cyr
I argue that any account attempting to do away with resultant or circumstantial moral luck is inconsistent with a natural response to the problem of constitutive moral luck. It is plausible to think that we sometimes contribute to the formation of our characters in such a way as to mitigate our constitutive moral luck at later times. But, as I argue here, whether or not we succeed in bringing about
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On performatives being statements too Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-11-18 Ori Simchen
Performative utterances such as ‘I promise you to φ’, issued under suitable conditions, have been claimed by Austin (1962) to constitute the enactment of something rather than the stating of something. They are thus not to be assessed in terms of truth and falsity. Subsequent theorists have typically contested half of this Austinian view, agreeing that a performative utterance such as ‘I promise you
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A defense of the supervenience requirement on physicalism Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-10-14 Torin Alter
The supervenience requirement on physicalism says roughly that if physicalism is true then mental properties supervene on fundamental physical properties. After explaining the basis of the requirement, I defend it against objections presented by Lei Zhong (“Physicalism without supervenience,” Philosophical Studies 178 (5), 2021: 1529–44), Barbara Gail Montero (“Must physicalism imply supervenience
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An equivocation in the simple argument for downward causation Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-09-22 Matthew Rellihan
I argue that Kroedel's 'Simple Argument' for downward causation fails and that this failure has consequences for any attempt to establish the reality of downward causation by appealing to counterfactual theories thereof. A central premise in Kroedel's argument equivocates. On one reading, it is true but renders the argument invalid; on another, it renders the argument valid but is likely false. I dedicate
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The importance of being Ernie Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-09-12 Marcela Herdova
Alfred Mele presents an influential argument for incompatibilism which compares an agent, Ernie, whose life has been carefully planned by the goddess Diana, to normal deterministic agents. The argument suggests both that Ernie is not free, and that there is no relevant difference between him and normal deterministic agents in respect of free will. In this paper, I suggest that what drives our judgement
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Normative generics: Against semantic polysemy Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-06-28 Samia Hesni
Generic sentences are sometimes characterized as normative or descriptive. Descriptive generics make generalized claims about things: dogs bark, birds fly, doughnuts have holes. Normative generics do something more complicated; they seem to communicate how things should be: boys don't cry, children are seen and not heard, friends don't let friends drive drunk. The latter set of sentences express something
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Reviving the performative hypothesis? Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-06-21 Peter van Elswyk
A traditional problem with the performative hypothesis is that it cannot assign proper truth-conditions to a declarative sentence. This paper shows that the problem is solved by adopting a multidimensional semantics on which sentences have more than just truth-conditions. This is good news for those who want to at least partially revive the hypothesis. The solution also brings into focus a lesson about
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Seeing and attending wholes and parts: A reply to Prettyman Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-06-17 Bradley Richards
Prettyman argues that global attention to an identity crowded display entails attention to the individual items, and that in virtue of seeing the entire display, a global object, one sees the crowded items. This is a novel objection to Block's use of identity crowding as a counterexample to the necessity of attention for conscious object seeing. However, attending the whole display does not entail
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Disjunctive luminosity Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-03-28 Drew Johnson
Williamson's influential anti-luminosity argument aims to show that our own mental states are not “luminous,” and that we are thus “cognitively homeless.” Among other things, this argument represents a significant challenge to the idea that we enjoy basic self-knowledge of our own occurrent mental states. In this paper, I summarize Williamson's anti-luminosity argument, and discuss the role that the
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Need knowing and acting be SSS-Safe? Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-04-04 Jaakko Hirvelä, Niall Paterson
Throughout the years, Sosa has taken different views on the safety condition on knowledge. In his early work, he endorsed the safety condition, but later retracted this view when first developing his much discussed virtue epistemology. Recently, Sosa has further developed his virtue theory with the notion of competence and has developed an accompanying, modified safety condition that he maintains is
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Separating the evaluative from the descriptive: An empirical study of thick concepts Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-04-05 Pascale Willemsen, Kevin Reuter
Thick terms and concepts, such as honesty and cruelty, are at the heart of a variety of debates in philosophy of language and metaethics. Central to these debates is the question of how the descriptive and evaluative components of thick concepts are related and whether they can be separated from each other. So far, no empirical data on how thick terms are used in ordinary language has been collected
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Is English consequence compact? Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-06-02 A.C. Paseau, Owen Griffiths
By mimicking the standard definition for a formal language, we define what it is for a natural language to be compact. We set out a valid English argument none of whose finite subarguments is valid. We consider one by one objections to the argument's logical validity and then dismiss them. The conclusion is that English—and any other language with the capacity to express the argument—is not compact
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Against Moral Contingentism Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-05-13 Pekka Väyrynen
The conventional wisdom in ethics is that pure moral laws are at least metaphysically necessary. By contrast, Moral Contingentism holds that pure moral laws are metaphysically contingent, and at most normatively necessary. This paper raises a normative objection to Moral Contingentism: it is worse equipped than Moral Necessitarianism to account for the normative standing or authority of the pure moral
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The consequentialist problem with prepunishment Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-05-11 Preston Greene
This paper targets a nearly universal assumption in the philosophical literature: that prepunishment is unproblematic for consequentialists. Prepunishment threats do not deter, as deterrence is traditionally conceived. In fact, a pure prepunishment legal system would tend to increase the criminal disposition of the grudgingly compliant. This is a serious problem since, from many perspectives, but especially
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Causal emergence from effective information: Neither causal nor emergent? Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-05-05 Joe Dewhurst
The past few years have seen several novel information-theoretic measures of causal emergence developed within the scientific community. In this paper I will introduce one such measure, called ‘effective information’, and describe how it is used to argue for causal emergence. In brief, the idea is that certain kinds of complex system are structured such that an intervention characterised at the macro-level
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When is epistemic dependence disvaluable? Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-04-21 Benoit Gaultier
There clearly seems to be something problematic with certain forms of epistemic dependence. However, it has proved surprisingly difficult to articulate what this problem is exactly. My aim in this paper is to make clear when it is problematic to rely on others or on artefacts and technologies that are external to us for the acquisition and maintenance of our beliefs, and why. In order to do so, I focus
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Plenitude and necessarily unmanifested dispositions Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-04-13 Jonas Werner
The principle of plenitude says that every material object coincides with abundantly many further objects that differ in their modal profiles. A necessarily unmanifested disposition is a disposition that necessarily does not manifest. This paper argues that if the principle of plenitude holds, then there are some necessarily unmanifested dispositions. These necessarily unmanifested dispositions will
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Sounds as properties Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-03-18 Nick Young
Leddington has recently put forward a new version of the idea that sounds are properties. Whereas other ‘property views’ take material objects to be the bearers of sounds (the sound of a bell being struck is a property instantiated by the bell itself), on Leddington's view sounds are borne by the source events in which these objects are participating (the sound of a bell being struck is a property
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Myers' paradox Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-03-11 Graham Priest
This note is an analysis of the paradox given by Myers (2019). It is shown, assuming that the resources available in paraconsistent logic may be applied, how the conclusion of the paradox may be perfectly acceptable, but that the argument is, nonetheless, invalid. This provides a dialethic solution to the paradox.
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Surprise, surprise: KK is innocent Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-02-16 Julien Murzi, Leonie Eichhorn, Philipp Mayr
The Surprise Exam Paradox is well‐known: a teacher announces that there will be a surprise exam the following week; the students argue by an intuitively sound reasoning that this is impossible; and yet they can be surprised by the teacher. We suggest that a solution can be found scattered in the literature, in part anticipated by Wright and Sudbury, informally developed by Sorensen, and more recently
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Comparing apples to oranges; Is it better to be human than otherwise? Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2020-12-30 Casey S. Elliott
Two popular views are prima facie incompatible. First is Attributivism, whereby there is nothing better than being a good member of one's kind; second is Hierarchy, whereby being one kind of thing can be, ceteris paribus, worse than being another. The unchallenged assumption is that those two views are at odds. As both are plausible and influential, that they conflict is a problem. In this paper, I
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Expressing consistency consistently Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-01-04 Lucas Rosenblatt
In the paraconsistent tradition, it is fairly well‐known how difficult it is to advance a theory containing a naive truth predicate together with a (classical, consistent) consistency operator. Recently, a number of theorists have risen up to the challenge by attempting to articulate such a theory. These theorists either tinker with the idea of semantic naivety, thereby imposing restrictions on the
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Nested conditionals and genericity in the de Finetti semantics Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-02-11 Daniel Lassiter, Jean Baratgin
The trivalent, truth‐functional theory of conditionals proposed by de Finetti in 1936 and developed in a scattered literature since has enjoyed a recent revival in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. However, several theorists have argued that this approach is fatally flawed in that it cannot correctly account for nested conditionals and compounds of conditionals. Focusing on nested conditionals
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Supersubstantivalism and the argument from harmony Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-01-13 Matt Leonard
The core doctrine of supersubstantivalism is that material objects are identical to their spacetime locations. One powerful consideration for the view is the argument from harmony—supersubstantivalism, it is claimed, is in a position to offer an elegant explanation of a number of platitudes concerning objects and their locations. However, I will argue that identifying material objects with their locations
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Concomitant ignorance excuses from moral responsibility Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-01-25 Robert J. Hartman
Some philosophers contend that concomitant ignorance preserves moral responsibility for wrongdoing. An agent is concomitantly ignorant with respect to wrongdoing if and only if her ignorance is non‐culpable, but she would freely have performed the same action if she were not ignorant. I, however, argue that concomitant ignorance excuses. I show that leading accounts of moral responsibility imply that
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Group nouns and pseudo‐singularity Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-02-10 Eric Snyder, Stewart Shapiro
Definite group nouns, such as “the deck of cards,” raise two important kinds of problems. Philosophically, they raise the ancient Problem of the Many: How can one deck be many cards? Linguistically, they threaten paradox: If such expressions singularly refer to groups as set‐like entities, then analyses employing such entities threaten to be incoherent, due to Russell's paradox. On the other hand,
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Collective culpable ignorance Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-02-10 Niels de Haan
I argue that culpable ignorance can be irreducibly collective. In some cases, it is not fair to expect any individual to have avoided her ignorance of some fact, but it is fair to expect the agents together to have avoided their ignorance of that fact. Hence, no agent is individually culpable for her ignorance, but they are culpable for their ignorance together. This provides us with good reason to
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A strictly stronger relative must Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-02-02 Christopher Gauker
It is widely accepted that when “might” expresses certain kinds of relative modality, the sentence “p and it might not be the case that p” is in some sense inconsistent. It has proven difficult to define a formal semantics that explicates this inconsistency while meeting certain other desiderata, in particular, that p does not imply “Must p.” This paper presents such a semantics. The key idea is that
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A puzzle for evaluation theories of desire Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-01-27 Alex Grzankowski
How we evaluate things and what we desire are closely connected. In typical cases, the things we desire are things that we evaluate as good or desirable. According to evaluation theories of desire, this connection is a very tight one: desires are evaluations of their objects as good or as desirable.1 There are two main varieties of this view. According to Doxastic Evaluativism, to desire that p is
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Yablo's paradox and forcing Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2020-12-30 Shimon Garti
We discuss the problem of self-reference in Yablo’s paradox from the point of view of the relationship between names and objects. For this end, we introduce a forcing version of the paradox and try to understand its implication on the self-referential component of the
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Beyond good and bad: Reflexive imperativism, not evaluativism, explains valence Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2020-11-10 Luca Barlassina
Evaluativism by Carruthers and reflexive imperativism by Barlassina and Hayward agree that valence—the (un)pleasantness of experiences—is a natural kind shared across all affective states. But they disagree about what valence is. For evaluativism, an experience is pleasant/unpleasant in virtue of representing its worldly object as good/bad; for reflexive imperativism, an experience is pleasant/unpleasant
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Deixis, demonstratives, and definite descriptions Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2020-11-08 Thomas J. Hughes
Definite articles and demonstratives share many features in common including a related etymology and a number of parallel communicative functions. The following paper is concerned with developing a novel proposal on how to distinguish the two types of expression. First, crosslinguistic evidence is presented to argue that demonstratives contain locational markers that are employed in deictic uses to
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Does empirical evidence support perceptual mindreading? Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2020-10-29 Joulia Smortchkova
According to perceptual accounts of mindreading, we can see, rather than cognize, other people's mental states. On one version of this approach, certain mental properties figure in the contents of our perceptual experiences. In a recent paper, Varga has appealed to empirical research to argue that intentions and emotions can indeed be seen, rather than cognized. In this paper, I argue that none of
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Redundancy masking and the identity crowding debate Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2020-10-23 Henry Taylor, Bilge Sayim
Some have claimed that identity crowding is a case where we consciously see an object to which we are unable to pay attention. Opponents of this view offer alternative explanations, which emphasise the importance of prior knowledge, amongst other factors. We review new empirical evidence showing that prior knowledge has a profound effect on identity crowding. We argue that this is problematic for the
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Desolation sound: Social practices of natural beauty Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2020-10-21 Dominic McIver Lopes
Instances of natural beauty are widely regarded as counterexamples to practice‐based theories of aesthetic value. They are not. To see that they are not, we require the correct account of natural beauty and the correct account of social practices.
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An exclusion problem for epiphenomenalist dualism Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2020-10-07 Bradford Saad
The chief motivation for epiphenomenalist dualism is its promise to solve dualism's causal exclusion problem without inducing causal overdetermination or violations of the causal closure of the physical. This paper argues that epiphenomenalist dualism is itself susceptible to an exclusion problem. The problem exploits symmetries of determination and influence generated by a wide class of physical theories
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Putting the stars in the their places Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2020-09-01 Shay Allen Logan
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Inverse enkrasia and the real self Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2020-08-31 Fernando Rudy‐Hiller
Non‐reflectivist real self views claim that people are morally responsible for all and only those bits of conduct that express their true values and cares, regardless of whether they have endorsed them or not. A phenomenon that is widely cited in support of these views is inverse akrasia, that is, cases in which a person is praiseworthy for having done the right thing for the right reasons despite
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Counterfactuals and double prevention: Trouble for the Causal Independence thesis Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2020-08-18 David Turon
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Free will as a higher‐level phenomenon? Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2020-08-18 Alexander Gebharter
List (2014, 2019) has recently argued for a particular view of free will as a higher-level phenomenon compatible with determinism. According to List, one could refute his account by showing that determinism at the physical level implies the impossibility of doing otherwise at the agential level. This paper takes up that challenge. Based on assumptions to which List's approach is committed, I provide
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Sincerely, Anonymous Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2020-04-27 Grace Paterson
Abstract This paper provides an account of anonymous speech treated as anonymized speech. It is argued that anonymous speech acts are best defined by reference to intentional acts of blocking a speaker's identification as opposed to the various epistemic effects that imperfectly correlate with these actions. The account is used to examine two important subclasses of anonymized speech: speech using
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An alternative norm of intention consistency Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2020-04-06 Carlos Núñez
Abstract In this paper, I formulate a norm of intention consistency that is immune to the kind of cases that have been put forth to argue either that rationality does not require consistency between an agent's intentions, or that, if it does, then rationality is not normative. The norm I formulate mimics refinements that have been made to the norm of means‐end coherence in response to cases where,
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How to understand the knowledge norm of assertion: Reply to Schlöder Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2020-04-03 Jonny McIntosh
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The circularity reading of Frege's indefinability argument Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2020-04-01 Junyeol Kim
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Representational indispensability and ontological commitment Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2020-04-01 John Heron
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Rejecting the “implicit consensus”: A reply to Jenkins Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2020-03-21 Rebecca Mason
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A short argument from modal rationalism to fundamental scrutability Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2020-03-06 Gabriel Oak Rabin
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In the logic of certainty, ⊃ is stronger than ⇒ Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2020-02-13 Kurt Norlin
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Ruling out solutions to Prior's dilemma for Hume's law Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2020-02-12 Aaron Wolf
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How to build a thought Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2020-02-05 Joshua Rasmussen, Andrew M. Bailey
Correspondence Joshua Rasmussen, Department of Philosophy, Azusa Pacific University, 701 E Foothill Blvd, Azusa, CA 91702. Email: jrasmus1@gmail.com Abstract We uncover a surprising discovery about the basis of thoughts. We begin by giving some plausible axioms about thoughts and their grounds. We then deduce a theorem, which has dramatic ramifications for the basis of all thoughts. The theorem implies
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The argument from sideways music Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2020-01-27 Sayid R. Bnefsi
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The knowledge norm of belief Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2020-01-27 Zachary Mitchell Swindlehurst
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Moral understanding and moral illusions Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2020-01-23 Daniel A. Wilkenfeld
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The accident of logical constants Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2020-01-23 Tristan Grøtvedt Haze
Work on the nature and scope of formal logic has focused unduly on the distinction between logical and extra-logical vocabulary; which argument forms a logical theory countenances depends not only on its stock of logical terms, but also on its range of grammatical categories and modes of composition. Furthermore, there is a sense in which logical terms are unnecessary. Alexandra Zinke has recently
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The Structure of Essentialist Explanations of Necessity Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2019-12-02 Michael Wallner
Fine, Lowe and Hale accept the view that necessity is to be explained by essences: Necessarily p iff, and because, there is some x whose essence ensures that p. Hale, however, believes that this strategy is not universally applicable; he argues that the necessity of essentialist truths cannot itself be explained by once again appealing to essentialist truths. As a consequence, Hale holds that there
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Attention and Consciousness: A Comment on Watzl's Structuring Mind Thought: A Journal of Philosophy Pub Date : 2019-09-06 Donnchadh O'Conaill