THE INADEQUACY OF PARAPHRASE IS THE DOGMA OF METAPHOR

Philosophers have alleged that paraphrases of metaphors are inadequate. They have presented this inadequacy as a datum predicted by, and thus a reason to accept, particular accounts of ‘metaphorical meanings.’ But to what, specifically, does this inadequacy claim amount? I argue that, if this assumption is to have any bearing on the metaphor debate, it must be construed as the comparative claim that paraphrases of metaphors are inadequate compared to paraphrases of literal utterances. But the evidence philosophers have offered does not support the comparative inadequacy of paraphrases of metaphors. I offer my own empirical evidence against the inadequacy assumption.     

Incompatibilism and the Past*

There is a new objection to the Consequence Argument for incompatibilism. I argue that the objection is more wide‐ranging than originally thought. In particular: if it tells against the Consequence Argument, it tells against other arguments for incompatibilism too. I survey a few ways of dealing with this objection and show the costs of each. I then present an argument for incompatibilism that is immune to the objection and that enjoys other advantages.     

Dispositional Essentialism and the Possibility of a Law-Abiding Miracle

An objection to dispositional essentialism has been that it yields an implausible semantics for counterfactuals if determinism happens to be true. I claim that an adequate remedy to this objection would be to endorse the metaphysical possibility of 'law-abiding miracles', i.e., uncaused spontaneous events. This proposal entails that determinism de jure is meta-physically impossible; I argue that this is not a serious disadvantage. I discuss consequences of the proposal for the logical form of laws, and consider a possible objection to the proposal on epistemic grounds.     

Character-Principlism and the Particularity Objection

This paper is a response to particularist critics of the normative force of moral principles. The particularist critique, as I understand it, is a rejection not only of principle-based accounts of moral deliberation and justification, but also of accounts of character in which principles play a central role. I focus on the latter challenge and counter it with a view I call character-principlism .
I begin by discussing in a general way what motivates the particularity objection to principles and then contrast two views – both of which insist on the importance of attentiveness to particularity – about the relative normative status of principles and particular cases. I present some reasons for believing that we need a more normatively robust conception of the role of moral principles than the particularists provide. In the main portion of the paper, I discuss how character-principlism sees principles functioning in our lives and the lives we lead with others. I contrast this with some other accounts of desirable character that particularists can embrace, and argue that these are seriously flawed because, unlike character-principlism, they cannot satisfactorily explain how a person could possess the constancy of character that moral integrity requires.     

Defending Particularism

In this brief response I argue that Sinnott-Armstrong has underestimated the complexities that moral principles will have to circumvent if they are to survive particularist criticism. I also argue that we cannot yet accept Gert's accounts of moral relevance and of how a sound moral rule can survive exceptions.     

Melia and Saatsi on structural realism

Newman’s objection is sometimes taken to be a fatal objection to structural realism (SR). However, ambiguity in the definition of “structure” allows for versions that do not succumb to Newman’s objection. In this paper, I consider some versions of SR that maintain an abstract notion of structure yet avoid Newman’s objection. In particular, I consider versions suggested by Melia and Saatsi. They reject a solution that restricts the domain of the second-order quantifiers, and argue in favor of buttressing the language with intensional operators such as “it is physically necessary that...”. I argue that their favored solution effectively requires the former suggestion that they reject. This argument suggests that a notion of natural properties may be indispensable to SR.     

Do Consequentialists Have One Thought Too Many?

In this paper I defend consequentialism against the objection that consequentialists are alienated from their personal relationships through having inappropriate motivational states. This objection is one interpretation of Williams' claim that consequentialists will have "one thought too many". Consequentialists should cultivate dispositions to act from their concern for others. I argue that having such a disposition is consistent with a belief in consequentialism and constitutes an appropriate attitude to personal relationships. If the consequentialist has stable beliefs that friendship is justifiable in consequentialist terms, that friendship requires acting from concern for others, and furthermore if the consequentialist finds that she is concerned for others, then she will be able to form a disposition which involves acting from her concern for others without having one thought too many.     

Lewisian Realism: Methodology,Epistemology, and Circularity

In this paper I argue that warrant for Lewis’ Modal Realism is unobtainable. I consider two familiar objections to Lewisian realism – the modal irrelevance objection and the epistemological objection – and argue that Lewis’ response to each is unsatisfactory because they presuppose claims that only the Lewisian realist will accept. Since, I argue, warrant for Lewisian realism can only be obtained if we have a response to each objection that does not presuppose the truth of Lewisian realism, this circularity is vicious. I end by contrasting Lewis’ methodology with Forrest’s in order to illustrate a rival method that does not fall victim to the objection I lay against Lewis.     

Reasoning and normative beliefs: not too sophisticated

Does reasoning to a certain conclusion necessarily involve a normative belief in support of that conclusion? In many recent discussions of the nature of reasoning, such a normative belief condition is rejected. One main objection is that it requires too much conceptual sophistication and thereby excludes certain reasoners, such as small children. I argue that this objection is mistaken. Its advocates overestimate what is necessary for grasping the normative concepts required by the condition, while seriously underestimating the importance of such concepts for our most fundamental agential capacities. Underlying the objection is the observation that normative thoughts do not necessarily cross our minds during reasoning. I show that proponents of the normative belief condition can accommodate this observation by taking the required normative belief to guide the reasoning process and offer a novel account of what such guidance consists in.     

The Hard Road to Presentism

It is a common criticism of presentism – the view according to which only the present exists – that it errs against truthmaker theory. Recent attempts to resolve the truthmaker objection against presentism proceed by restricting truthmaker maximalism (the view that all truths have truthmakers), maintaining that propositions concerning the past are not made true by anything, but are true nonetheless. Support for this view is typically garnered from the case for negative existential propositions, which some philosophers contend are exceptions to truthmaker maximalism. In this article, we argue that a ‘no truthmakers’ approach to the truthmaker objection is critically flawed.     

Metaphor and minimalism

This paper argues first that, contrary to what one would expect, metaphorical interpretations of utterances pass two of Cappelan and Lepore’s Minimalist tests for semantic context-sensitivity. I then propose how, in light of that result, one might analyze metaphors on the model of indexicals and demonstratives, expressions that (even) Minimalists agree are semantically context-dependent. This analysis builds on David Kaplan’s semantics for demonstratives and refines an earlier proposal in (Stern, Metaphor in context, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2000). In the course of this argument, I also discuss some new examples of linguistic phenomena that motivate a semantic structure underlying metaphorical interpretation, phenomena I argue that neither Minimalists nor Contextualists can explain.     

Indirect Realism with a Human Face

Epistemic Indirect Realism (EIR) is the position that justification for contingent propositions about the extra‐mental world requires an inference based on a subjective, experiential mental state. One objection against EIR is that it runs contrary to common sense and practice; in essence, ordinary people do not form beliefs about things in the external world on the basis of experiential mental states. This objection implies EIR is contrary to ordinary experience, impractical, and leads to scepticism. In this paper, I will defend EIR against this objection by distinguishing EIR based on conceptual awareness and non‐conceptual awareness. In particular, I will argue that direct acquaintance provides sufficient (non‐conceptual) awareness that can explain how ordinary folks are capable of forming justified beliefs about the external world in a way consistent with EIR. Overall, I present a framework for showing that EIR can satisfy ordinary epistemic practices without betraying human nature or over‐intellectualizing the required epistemic standards for possessing a justified belief.     

Generalizations,Cultural Essentialism,and Metaphorical Gulfs

An ongoing debate in comparative research is about whether we should see cultural diversities as manifestations of essential differences or as superficial variations on a universal blueprint. Edward Slingerland has pointed to cognitive science and the use of embodied metaphors to emphasize the universality of concept formation and cognition across cultures. He suggests that this should quiet the “cultural essentialists” who take fundamental differences in Eastern and Western thinking as their starting points. Michael Puett has also leveled a critique of cultural essentialism in support of a presuppositionless approach, and Slingerland’s conclusions seem to offer him support. However, I will argue that even if all modern humans are broadly similar in metaphor use and cognitive processes, research in the humanities must continue to account for the differences implied by the particular metaphors employed and emphasized in diverse traditions. I contend that responsible hermeneutic practice does this through provisional, yet indispensable, generalizations.     

PRIMITIVE CAUSAL RELATIONS AND THE PAIRING PROBLEM

There is no doubt that spatial relations aid us in pairing up causes and effects. But when we consider the possibility of qualitatively indiscernible things, it might seem that spatial relations are more than a mere aid – they might seem positively required. The belief that spatial relations are required for causal relations is behind an important objection to Cartesian Dualism, the pairing problem. I argue that the Cartesian can answer this objection by appeal to the possibility of primitive causal relations, a possibility I defend. This topic is of importance beyond the philosophy of mind; the possibility that causal relations might sometimes hold brutely is of general metaphysical importance. I close with a discussion of what Cartesians should say about embodiment, and how that bears on issues of mental causation.     

PRESENTISM,TRUTH AND SUPERVENIENCE

Truthmaker theory is commonly thought to pose a challenge for presentism. Presentism seems to lack the ontological and ideological resources required to adequately underwrite the truth of propositions concerning the past. That is because if presentism is true, then the past does not exist. According to the standard response to this challenge, the truth of propositions concerning the past supervenes on surrogate entities that ‘stand proxy’ for past things. I argue that in order for the standard response to the truthmaker challenge to succeed these surrogate entities must stand in necessary connections to the past. I go on to argue that because the standard response is already committed to denying the existence of cross‐temporal modal connections of this kind, by its own lights that response is in error. 1     

Boolean considerations on John Buridan's octagons of opposition

This paper studies John Buridan's octagons of opposition for the de re modal propositions and the propositions of unusual construction. Both Buridan himself and the secondary literature have emphasized the strong similarities between these two octagons (as well as a third one, for propositions with oblique terms). In this paper, I argue that the interconnection between both octagons is more subtle than has previously been thought: if we move beyond the Aristotelian relations, and also take Boolean considerations into account, then the strong analogy between Buridan's octagons starts to break down. These differences in Boolean structure can already be discerned within the octagons themselves; on a more abstract level, they lead to these two octagons having different degrees of Boolean complexity (i.e. Boolean closures of different sizes). These results are obtained by means of bitstring analysis, which is one of the key tools from contemporary logical geometry. Finally, I argue that this historical investigation is directly relevant for the theoretical framework of logical geometry, and discuss how it helps us to address certain open questions in this framework.     

Intentions and instability: a defence of causal decision theory

Andy Egan has recently presented a prominent objection to causal decision theory (CDT). However, in this paper, I argue that this objection fails if CDT’s proponent accepts the plausible view that decision-theoretic options are intentions. This result both provides a defence of CDT against a prominent objection and highlights the importance of resolving the nature of decision-theoretic options.

     

Relativism and Assertion

Relativism entails that sentences like ‘Liquorice is tasty’ are used to assert relativistic propositions—that is, propositions whose truth-value is relative to a taste standard. I will defend this view against two objections. According to the first objection, relativism is incompatible with a Stalnakerian account of assertion. I will show that this objection fails because Stalnakerian assertions are proposals rather than attempts to update the common ground. According to the second objection, relativism problematically predicts that we can correctly assess beliefs as false but faultless. I will show that it doesn't. Such assessments come out as incorrect because correct relativistic assertion requires the absence of a presupposition of non-commonality.     

Why metaphors make good insults: perspectives,presupposition, and pragmatics

Metaphors are powerful communicative tools because they produce ‘framing effects’. These effects are especially palpable when the metaphor is an insult that denigrates the hearer or someone he cares about. In such cases, just comprehending the metaphor produces a kind of ‘complicity’ that cannot easily be undone by denying the speaker’s claim. Several theorists have taken this to show that metaphors are engaged in a different line of work from ordinary communication. Against this, I argue that metaphorical insults are rhetorically powerful because they combine perspectives, presupposition, and pragmatics in the service of speech acts with assertoric force.