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48878.608156
Davide Grossi Artificial Intelligence, Bernoulli Institute, University of Groningen ILLC/ACLE, University of Amsterdam The Netherlands d.grossi@rug.nl its application varies in complexity and depends, in particular, on whether relevant past decisions agree, or exist at all. The contribution of this paper is a formal treatment of types of the hardness of case-based decisions. The typology of hardness is defined in terms of the arguments for and against the issue to be decided, and their kind of validity (conclusive, presumptive, coherent, incoherent). We apply the typology of hardness to Berman and Hafner’s research on the dynamics of case-based reasoning and show formally how the hardness of decisions varies with time.
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62516.608389
One feature of language is that we are able to make mistakes in our use of language. Amongst other sorts of mistakes, we can misspeak, misspell, missign, or misunderstand. Given this, it seems that our metaphysics of words should be flexible enough to accommodate such mistakes. It has been argued that a nominalist account of words cannot accommodate the phenomenon of misspelling. I sketch a nominalist trope-bundle view of words that can.
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115249.608403
Transitivity, Simplification, and Contraposition are intuitively compelling. Although Antecedent Strengthening may seem less attractive at first, close attention to the full range of data reveals that it too has considerable appeal. An adequate theory of conditionals should account for these facts. The strict theory of conditionals does so by validating the four inferences. It says that natural language conditionals are necessitated material conditionals: A B is true if and only if A B is true throughout a set of accessible worlds. As a result, it validates many classical inferences, including Transitivity, Simplification, Contraposition, and Antecedent Strengthening. In what follows I will refer to these as the strict inferences.
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115347.608418
Let serious propositional contingentism (SPC) be the package of views which consists in (i) the thesis that propositions expressed by sentences featuring terms depend, for their existence, on the existence of the referents of those terms, (ii) serious actualism— the view that it is impossible for an object to exemplify a property and not exist—and (iii) contingentism—the view that it is at least possible that some thing might not have been something. SPC is popular and compelling. But what should we say about possible worlds, if we accept SPC? Here, I first show that a natural view of possible worlds, well-represented in the literature, in conjunction with SPC is inadequate. Though I note various alternative ways of thinking about possible worlds in response to the first problem, I then outline a second more general problem—a master argument— which generally shows that any account of possible worlds meeting very minimal requirements will be inconsistent with compelling claims about mere possibilia which the serious propositional contingentist should accept.
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285585.608428
The relation between chance and actuality gives rise to the following puzzle. On the one hand, it may be a chancy matter what will actually happen. On the other hand, standard semantics for ‘actually’ imply that sentences beginning with ‘actually’ are never contingent. In order to elucidate this puzzle, a kind of objective semantic indeterminacy will be defended: in a chancy world, it may be a chancy matter which proposition is expressed by sentences containing ‘actually’. As an application, this thesis is brought to bear on certain counterexamples to the Principal Principle recently proposed by Hawthorne & Lasonen-Aarnio.
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392911.608451
It is widely held that if you do wrong in culpable ignorance (ignorance that you are blameworthy for), you are culpable for the wrong you do. I have long though think this is mistaken—instead we should frontload the guilt onto the acts and omissions that made one culpable for the ignorance. …
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511265.608463
Metric poetry is rhythmic language laid above, and to some degree matching, an underlying pulse. If you do not know where in that pulse you are, you may mangle the verse. In iambic pentameter the pulse is easy: five strong beats, separated by weaker off-beats. …
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548863.608473
While effective altruists (EAs) spend a lot of time researching which ways to do good are the most effective, historically many have assumed, with relatively little argument, that the benchmark for membership in the movement is a commitment to donate 10% of your earnings. This points to an asymmetry between the two halves of effective altruism: EAs tend to have relatively restricted standards for effectiveness (where to give), but they have much looser standards for altruism (how much to give). I investigate explanations for this asymmetry. While some possible justifications may work (pending empirical support), others look flimsier. I conclude that this means EA likely is, or anyway ought to be, more demanding than some of its proponents currently claim.
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589094.608486
Legend has it that Damion Searls learnt Norwegian in order to translate Jon Fosse, whom he had read in German and identified as a genius. Searls’ translations of Fosse are, by all accounts, superb. So it is intriguing to learn that he has now translated Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, joining other post-centenary interpreters, Michael Beaney, a historian of early analytic philosophy, and Alexander Booth, a poet. …
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692883.608496
The current literature on norms of inquiry features two families of norms: norms that focus on an inquirer’s ignorance and norms that focus on the question’s soundness. I argue that, given a factive conception of ignorance, it’s possible to derive a soundness-style norm from a version of the ignorance norm. A crucial lemma in the argument is that just as one can only be ignorant of a proposition if the proposition is true, so one can only be ignorant with respect to a question if the question is sound.
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750765.608506
In this paper, I aim to discuss what puns, metaphysically, are. I argue that the type-token view of words leads to an indeterminacy problem when we consider puns. I then outline an alternative account of puns, based on recent nominalist views of words, that does not suffer from this indeterminacy.
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869703.608516
GeneBcally complete yet authorless artworks seem possible, yet it’s hard to understand how they might really be possible. A natural way to try to resolve this puzzle is by construcBng an account of artwork compleBon on the model of accounts of artwork meaning that are compaBble with meaningful yet authorless artworks. I argue, however, that such an account of artwork compleBon is implausible. So, I leave the puzzle unresolved.
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1048864.608526
This paper examines different kinds of definite descriptions denoting purely contingent, necessary or impossible objects. The discourse about contingent/impossible/necessary objects can be organised in terms of rational questions to ask and answer relative to the modal profile of the entity in question. There are also limits on what it is rational to know about entities with this or that modal profile. We will also examine epistemic modalities; they are the kind of necessity and possibility that is determined by epistemic constraints related to knowledge or rationality. Definite descriptions denote so-called offices, roles, or things to be. We explicate these -offices as partial functions from possible worlds to chronologies of objects of type , where is mostly the type of individuals. Our starting point is Prior’s distinction between a ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ definite article ‘the’. In both cases, the definite description refers to at most one object; yet, in the case of the weak ‘the’, the referred object can change over time, while in the case of the strong ‘the’, the object referred to by the definite description is the same forever, once the office has been occupied. The main result we present is the way how to obtain a Wh-knowledge about who or what plays a given role presented by a hyper-office, i.e. procedure producing an office. Another no less important result concerns the epistemic necessity of the impossibility of knowing who or what occupies the impossible office presented by a hyper-office.
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1732265.608537
In this paper, I examine Max Deutsch’s dilemma for the implementation of newly engineered concepts. In the debate over this dilemma, the goal of conceptual engineering tends to be set either too high or too low. As a result, implementation tends to be seen as either very unlikely to succeed or too easily achievable. This paper aims to offer a way out of this dilemma. I argue that the success conditions for implementation can be better understood if we distinguish between different stages in the implementation process. Implementation is a complex process involving several stages, each of which can be evaluated as a success or a failure. I argue that even if an implementation does not reach the final stage in which a new concept is widely used in the society at large, it may not be a complete failure: conceptual engineers may not even aim for a new concept to be widely used in the society at large; or even if they do and a new concept only circulates in a smaller subgroup, this can still be a significant achievement. The upshot is that we should take more seriously the possibility that conceptual engineering can be implemented locally at the subgroup level.
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1775310.608547
Kripke's thesis that meaning is normative is typically interpreted, following Boghossian, as the thesis that meaningful expressions allow of true or warranted use. I argue for an alternative interpretation centered on Wittgenstein's conception of the normativity involved in “knowing how to go on” in one's use of an expression. Meaning is normative for Kripke because it justifies claims, not to be saying something true, but to be going on as one ought from previous uses of the expression. I argue that this represents a distortion of Wittgenstein's conception of the normativity of meaning, and that Wittgenstein's conception is preferable.
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1800498.608568
According to stereotype, analytic philosophers love nothing more than analyzing concepts, filling the ellipsis in
x is F if and only if …
with conditions held to be implicit in the meaning of a word. It’s an anachronistic vision, both because “analytic truth” plays a minimal role in contemporary philosophy—there’s more interest in “real definition,” the metaphysical project of explaining what it is to be F—and because philosophers are willing to treat concepts as primitive: undefined but well-understood. …
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1847730.608579
In stark contrast with the prominent role both traditional and contemporary commentators typically think Mengzi’s doctrine of human nature plays in his overall philosophy, the term human nature doesn’t explicitly appear often in Mengzi. (I’ll use italic for the book Mengzi to set it apart from Mengzi the philosopher.) The discussion of human nature is largely implicit. The word “nature” (xing 性) appears in just 16 passages in the book and only 2 of them contain the word explicitly in the form of the term “human nature”(ren xing 人性); and in those 2 passages 6A1 and 6A2, “human nature” is used only 3 times, only 1 of which is from Mengzi’s mouth (the other two are uttered by his philosophical rival Gaozi). Part of the difficulty in interpreting Mengzi’s doctrine of human nature lies in the fact that no explicit statement was offered regarding what is meant by terms like “nature” and “human nature” even in the rare occasions where he used them.
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1847761.608588
How is it that a speaker S can at once make it obvious to an audience A that she intends to communicate some proposition p, and yet at the same time retain plausible deniability with respect to this intention? The answer is that S can bring it about that A has a high justified credence that ‘S intended p’ without putting A in a position to know that ‘S intended p’. In order to achieve this S has to exploit a sense in which communication can be lottery-like. After defending this view of deniability I argue that it compares favorably to a rival account recently developed by Dinges and Zakkou (2023).
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1854651.608598
In Moral Misdirection, I argued that honest communication aims to increase the importance-weighted accuracy of your audience’s beliefs. Discourse that predictably does the opposite on a morally important matter—even if the explicit assertions are technically true—constitutes moral misdirection. …
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2180335.608609
This paper investigates the conditions under which diagonal sentences can be taken to constitute paradigmatic cases of self-reference. We put forward well-motivated constraints on the diagonal operator and the coding apparatus which separate paradigmatic self-referential sentences, for instance obtained via Gödel’s diagonalization method, from accidental diagonal sentences. In particular, we show that these constraints successfully exclude refutable Henkin sentences, as constructed by Kreisel.
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2180403.608619
We introduce and analyze a new axiomatic theory CD of truth. The primitive truth predicate can be applied to sentences containing the truth predicate. The theory is thoroughly classical in the sense that CD is not only formulated in classical logic, but that the axiomatized notion of truth itself is classical: The truth predicate commutes with all quantifiers and connectives, and thus the theory proves that there are no truth value gaps or gluts. To avoid inconsistency, the instances of the T-schema are restricted to determinate sentences. Determinateness is introduced as a further primitive predicate and axiomatized. The semantics and proof theory of CD are analyzed.
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2291700.608634
The notion of a single object or of being one is an important notion in metaphysics, and it is presupposed by any account of the notion of number in the philosophy of mathematics. The notion of being a single object contrasts with that of being a mere plurality, a plurality ‘as many’, as well as with the notion of mere ‘stuff’ or, as it is somewhat misleadingly called, a ‘portion’ or a ‘quantity’.
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2372676.608645
Recent studies claim to show that language delayed deaf subjects typically display long-lingering deficits in Theory of Mind (ToM) development, despite suffering no known deficits in other cognitive domains. These claims are supported by experimental evidence indicating that such subjects fare poorly on False Belief (FB) tasks. This paper turns a critical eye on these claims. In particular, I argue that the reported results raise important questions about the status of FB tasks as evidence, and about how such evidence should be weighted against naturalistic observations of subjects engaged in everyday activities requiring complex social coordination. I conclude that these studies give us no decisive reason to believe that language delayed deaf subjects suffer distinctively and symptomatically in the domain of social cognition. To the contrary, the attribution of significant socio-cognitive impairment is potentially stigmatizing and may not help us understand the unique challenges these subjects face or suggest remedial strategies to aid them in overcoming these challenges.
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3060599.608656
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License <www.philosophersimprint.org/000000/> logically null generic operator called ‘Gen’. Recently, a number of theorists have questioned the standard view and revived a competing proposal according to which generics involve the predication of properties to kinds. This paper offers a novel argument against the kind-predication approach on the basis of the invalidity of Generic Excluded Middle, a principle according to which any sentence of the form ⌜Either Fs are G or Fs are not G⌝ is true. I argue that the kind-predication approach erroneously predicts that GEM is valid, and that it can only avoid this conclusion by either collapsing into a form of the quantificational analysis or otherwise garnering unpalatable metaphysical commitments. I also show that, while the quantificational approach does not validate GEM as a matter of logical form, the principle may be validated on certain semantic analyses of the generic operator, and so, such theories should be rejected.
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3118388.608666
Within contemporary metaethics, it is widely held that there is a “presumption of realism” in moral thought and discourse. Anti-realist views, like error theory and expressivism, may have certain theoretical considerations speaking in their favor, but our pretheoretical stance with respect to morality clearly favors objectivist metaethical views. This article argues against this widely held view. It does so by drawing from recent discussions about so-called “subjective attitude verbs” in linguistics and philosophy of language. Unlike pretheoretically objective predicates (e.g., “is made of wood”, “is 185 cm tall”), moral predicates embed felicitously under subjective attitude verbs like the English “find”. Moreover, it is argued that the widespread notion that moral discourse bears all the marks of fact-stating discourse is rooted in a blinkered focus on examples from English. Cross-linguistic considerations suggest that subjective attitude verbs are actually the default terms by which we ascribe moral views to people. Impressions to the contrary in English have to do with some unfortunate quirks of the term “think”.
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3126408.608676
Rumfitt has given two arguments that in unilateralist verificationist theories of meaning, truth collapses into correct assertibility. The present paper I give similar arguments that show that in unilateral falsificationist theories of meaning, falsehood collapses into correct deniability. According to bilateralism, meanings are determined by assertion and denial conditions, so the question arises whether it succumbs to similar arguments. I show that this is not the case. The final section considers the question whether a principle central to Rumfitt’s first argument, ‘It is assertible that A if and only if it is assertible that it is assertible that A’, is one that bilateralists can reject and concludes that they cannot. It follows that the logic of assertibility and deniability, according to a result by Williamson, is the little known modal logic K4 studied by Soboci ´nski. The paper ends with a plaidoyer for bilateralists to adopt this logic.
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3157490.608687
According to a popular view about counterfactuals, a counterfactual hypothesis 'if A had happened…' shifts the world of evaluation to worlds that are much like the actual world until shortly before the time of A, at which point they start to deviate from the actual world in a minimal way that allows A to happen. …
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3233756.608696
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Philosophy at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Philosophy Department Faculty Publication Series by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact scholarworks@library.umass.edu.
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3361117.608714
It is generally acknowledged that existence in natural language can be conveyed by existence predicates, foremost of course the predicate exist. The standard view about existence in philosophy has been that existence is a univocal notion applying just to anything there is. Thus, Meinongians take exist to be a predicate that is true of existent objects and false of nonexistents; other philosophers try to avoid a commitment to nonexistents and take exist to apply to all entities entities and yield false sentences with a non-referring subject (in one way of another).
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3406971.608725
How do we use language to refer to whatever we have in mind? The question is deceptively simple. The complications are right there, however, for everyone to see. The question invokes language language use reference, and human minds and we should not pretend to know the whole truth about any of these things. In Talking About, however, I try to answer the question by integrating a great deal of both classic and current work—in philosophy, cognitive science, and elsewhere— and by making some very specific assumptions about the four troublemakers, again; language use reference minds The central notion is pragmatic competence. This is the capacity to perform speech acts with a suite of specific audience-directed intentions. The capacity is grounded and explained by the normal operation of some biological, cognitive mechanism in humans. Aliens and AIs might certainly have something similar or functionally equivalent but still, the target is to understand the human capacity. The capacity to perform speech acts in which one refers to a single object is a very sophisticated aspect of pragmatic competence. I argue that such acts of reference have a proper function, namely, that they provide evidence of a referential intention. I think referential intentions are real phenomena in human brains, basically, they are sometimes part of the initial planning stages of utterance production. Moreover, I argue that such intentions can, in certain very specific circumstances, be irredeemably confused. Strictly speaking, on my view, those who are confused in this way will fail to refer to anything by the relevant utterances, because the intentions fail to determine any single object as the referent.