Mind

Wishon, Donovan

doi: 10.1093/mind/fzv193pmid: N/A

AbstractIn this paper, I argue that a number of recent Russell interpreters, including Evans, Davidson, Campbell, and Proops, mistakenly attribute to Russell what I call ‘the received view of acquaintance’: the view that acquaintance safeguards us from misidentifying the objects of our acquaintance. I contend that Russell’s discussions of phenomenal continua cases show that he does not accept the received view of acquaintance. I also show that the possibility of misidentifying the objects of acquaintance should be unsurprising given underappreciated aspects of Russell’s overall theory of knowledge and acquaintance. Finally, I consider the radical impact that Russell’s actual views on acquaintance have for our understanding of his well-known George IV case in ‘On Denoting’. In particular, I argue that Russell’s treatment of the George IV case is not a one-size-fits-all solution to Frege’s Puzzle and provides no support for the received view of acquaintance.

Incurvati, Luca; Murzi, Julien

doi: 10.1093/mind/fzv192pmid: N/A

Paul Horwich (1990) once suggested restricting the T-schema to the maximally consistent set of its instances. But Vann McGee (1992) proved that there are multiple incompatible such sets, none of which, given minimal assumptions, is recursively axiomatizable. The analogous view for set theory—that Naive Comprehension should be restricted according to consistency maxims—has recently been defended by Laurence Goldstein (2006, 2013). It can be traced back to W. V. Quine (1951), who held that Naive Comprehension embodies the only really intuitive conception of set and should be restricted as little as possible. The view might even have been held by Ernst Zermelo (1908), who, according to Penelope Maddy (1988), subscribed to a ‘one step back from disaster’ rule of thumb: if a natural principle leads to contradiction, the principle should be weakened just enough to block the contradiction. We prove a generalization of McGee’s Theorem, and use it to show that the situation for set theory is the same as that for truth: there are multiple incompatible sets of instances of Naive Comprehension, none of which, given minimal assumptions, is recursively axiomatizable. This shows that the view adumbrated by Goldstein, Quine, and perhaps Zermelo, is untenable.

Douven, Igor; Decock, Lieven

doi: 10.1093/mind/fzv194pmid: N/A

Edgington has proposed a solution to the sorites paradox in terms of ‘verities’, which she defines as degrees of closeness to clear truth. Central to her solution is the assumption that verities are formally probabilities. She is silent on what verities might derive from and on why they should be probabilities. This paper places Edgington’s solution in the framework of a spatial approach to conceptualization, arguing that verities may be conceived of as deriving from how our concepts relate to each other. Building on work by Kamp and Partee, this paper further shows how verities, thus conceived of, may plausibly be assumed to have probabilistic structure. The new interpretation of verities is argued to also help answer the question of what the verities of indicative conditionals are, a question which Edgington leaves open. Finally, the question of how to accommodate higher-order vagueness, given this interpretation, is addressed.

Waxman, Daniel

doi: 10.1093/mind/fzv182pmid: N/A

Many philosophers believe that a deflationist theory of truth must conservatively extend any base theory to which it is added (roughly: talking about truth shouldn't allow us to establish any new claims about subject-matters not involving truth). But when applied to arithmetic, it's argued, the imposition of a conservativeness requirement leads to a serious objection to deflationism: for the Gödel sentence for Peano Arithmetic (PA) is not a theorem of PA, but becomes one when PA is extended by adding plausible principles governing truth. This paper argues that no such objection succeeds. The issue turns on how we understand the notion of logical consequence implicit in any conservativeness requirement, and whether we possess a categorical conception of the natural numbers (i.e. whether we can rule out so-called "non-standard models"). I offer a disjunctive response: if we possess a categorical conception of arithmetic, then deflationists have principled reason to accept a rich notion of logical consequence according to which the Gödel sentence follows from PA. But if we do not, then the reasons for requiring the derivation of the Gödel sentence lapse, and deflationists are free to accept a conservativeness requirement stated proof-theoretically. Either way, deflationism is in the clear.

Spencer, Jack

doi: 10.1093/mind/fzv183pmid: N/A

AbstractAccording to a widely held principle—the poss-ability principle—an agent, S, is able to only if it is metaphysically possible for S to . I argue against the poss-ability principle by developing a novel class of counterexamples. I then argue that the consequences of rejecting the poss-ability principle are interesting and far-reaching.

Krämer, Stephan

doi: 10.1093/mind/fzv187pmid: N/A

AbstractOn its intended interpretation, logical, mathematical and metaphysical discourse sometimes seems to involve absolutely unrestricted quantification. Yet our standard semantic theories do not allow for interpretations of a language as expressing absolute generality. A prominent strategy for defending absolute generality, influentially proposed by Timothy Williamson in his paper ‘Everything’ (2003), avails itself of a hierarchy of quantifiers of ever increasing orders to develop non-standard semantic theories that do provide for such interpretations. However, as emphasized by Øystein Linnebo and Agustín Rayo (2012), there is pressure on this view to extend the quantificational hierarchy beyond the finite level, and, relatedly, to allow for a cumulative conception of the hierarchy. In his recent book, Modal Logic as Metaphysics (2013), Williamson yields to that pressure. I show that the emerging cumulative higher-orderist theory has implications of a strongly generality-relativist flavour, and consequently undermines much of the spirit of generality absolutism that Williamson set out to defend.

Gomes, Anil

doi: 10.1093/mind/fzw009pmid: N/A

AbstractEarly twentieth-century philosophers of perception presented their naïve realist views of perceptual experience in anti-Kantian terms. For they took naïve realism about perceptual experience to be incompatible with Kant’s claims about the way the understanding is necessarily involved in perceptual consciousness. This essay seeks to situate a naïve realist account of visual experience within a recognisably Kantian framework by arguing that a naïve realist account of visual experience is compatible with the claim that the understanding is necessarily involved in the perceptual experience of those rational beings with discursive intellects. The resultant view is middle way between recent conceptualist and non-conceptualist interpretations of Kant, holding that the understanding is necessarily involved in the kind of perceptual consciousness that we, as rational beings, enjoy whilst allowing that the relations of apprehension which constitute perceptual consciousness are independent of acts of the understanding.

Chandler, Jake

doi: 10.1093/mind/fzv154pmid: N/A

AbstractIn a recent pair of publications, Richard Bradley has offered two novel no-go theorems involving the principle of Preservation for conditionals, which guarantees that one’s prior conditional beliefs will exhibit a certain degree of inertia in the face of a change in one’s non-conditional beliefs. We first note that Bradley’s original discussions of these results—in which he finds motivation for rejecting Preservation, first in a principle of Commutativity, then in a doxastic analogue of the rule of modus ponens—are problematic in a significant number of respects. We then turn to a recent U-turn on his part, in which he winds up rescinding his commitment to modus ponens, on the grounds of a tension with the rule of Import-Export for conditionals. Here we offer an important positive contribution to the literature, settling the following crucial question that Bradley leaves unanswered: assuming that one gives up on full-blown modus ponens on the grounds of its incompatibility with Import-Export, what weakened version of the principle should one be settling for instead? Our discussion of the issue turns out to unearth an interesting connection between epistemic undermining and the apparent failures of modus ponens in McGee’s famous counterexamples.

Bradley, Richard

doi: 10.1093/mind/fzw003pmid: N/A

AbstractI argue that two of the standard axioms of the AGM theory of belief revision stand in the way of it serving as the basis for an adequate account of defeasible reasoning, because they respectively disallow the adoption of beliefs not logically entailed by those previously learned and the abandonment of those not contradicted by them.

Rott, Hans

doi: 10.1093/mind/fzw028pmid: N/A

Richard Bradley has initiated a new debate, with Brian Hill and Jake Chandler as further participants, about the implications of a number of so-called triviality results surrounding the Ramsey test for conditionals. I comment on this debate and argue that ‘Inclusion’ and ‘Preservation’, which were originally introduced as postulates for the rational revision of factual beliefs, have little to recommend them in the first place when extended to languages containing conditionals. I question the philosophical method of postulation that was applied in the new debate, and instead base my arguments on explicit representations of belief states and canonical constructions of belief state revisions.