Conceivability and De Re Modal Knowledge

The paper presents a dilemma for both epistemic and non‐epistemic versions of conceivability‐based accounts of modal knowledge. On the one horn, non‐epistemic accounts do not elucidate the essentialist knowledge they would be committed to. On the other, epistemic accounts do not elucidate everyday life de re modal knowledge. In neither case, therefore, do conceivability accounts elucidate de re modal knowledge.     

Grounding: Necessary or Contingent?

Recent interest in the nature of grounding is due in part to the idea that purely modal notions are too coarse‐grained to capture what we have in mind when we say that one thing is grounded in another. Grounding not being purely modal in character, however, is compatible with it having modal consequences. Is grounding a necessary relation? In this article I argue that the answer is ‘yes’ in the sense that propositions corresponding to full grounds modally entail propositions corresponding to what they ground. The argument proceeds upon two substantive principles: the first is that there is a broadly epistemic constraint on grounding, while the second links this constraint with Fine's Aristotelian notion of essence. Many think grounding is necessary in something like the sense specified above, but just why it's necessary is an issue that hasn't been carefully addressed. If my argument is successful, we now know why grounding is necessary.     

Beliefs and sentences in the head

It is argued thatde dicto andde re beliefs are attitudes towards syntactically structured entities (sentences) in the head. In order to identify the content of ade dicto orde re belief, we must be able to match causal relations of belief states to natural language inferences. Such match-ups provide sufficient empirical justification for regarding those causal relations as syntactic transformations, that is, inferences. But only syntactically structured entities are capable of enjoying such inferential relations. Hence,de dicto andde re beliefs must be syntactically structured. Given that beliefs are also brain states, it follows that they are sentences in the brain. The argument presented here is shown to be an improvement over similar arguments advanced by Harman and Fodor.Thanks to George Schlesinger, Ann MacKenzie, Vic Tennant and an anonymous referee forSynthese for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.     

The Truthmaking Argument Against Dispositionalism

According to dispositionalism, de re modality is grounded in the intrinsic natures of dispositional properties. Those properties are able to serve as the ground of de re modal truths, it is said, because they bear a special relation to counterfactual conditionals, one of truthmaking. However, because dispositionalism purports to ground de re modality only on the intrinsic natures of dispositional properties, it had better be the case that they do not play that truthmaking role merely in virtue of their being embedded in some particular, extrinsic causal context. This paper examines a recent argument against dispositionalism that purports to show that the intrinsicality of that relation cannot be maintained, due to the ceteris paribus nature of the counterfactuals that dispositions make‐true. When two prominent responses are examined, both are found wanting: at best, they require unjustified special pleading, and at worst, they amount to little more than ad hoc conceptual trickery. 1     

In Defense of Common Content

Abstract

In this essay, I critically discuss a theory of utterance content and de re communication that Anne Bezuidenhout has recently developed in a series of articles. This theory regards the significance of utterances as more pragmatic in nature than allowed by traditional accounts; further, it downplays logical considerations in explaining de re communication, choosing instead to emphasize its psychological character. Included among the implications of this approach is the rejection of what can be called ‘common content’, or utterance content that is held in common by speaker and listener. After describing this theory, I argue that Bezuidenhout does not supply a compelling reason to prefer her account of utterance content over more traditional alternatives that make room for elements of content held in common between speaker and listener. Further, I argue that her account of de re communication supplies even more reason to reject the view of content to which she subscribes. In the end, it will be clear that she has no principled reason for rejecting common content.     

Non‐Classical Knowledge

The Knower paradox purports to place surprising a priori limitations on what we can know. According to orthodoxy, it shows that we need to abandon one of three plausible and widely‐held ideas: that knowledge is factive, that we can know that knowledge is factive, and that we can use logical/mathematical reasoning to extend our knowledge via very weak single‐premise closure principles. I argue that classical logic, not any of these epistemic principles, is the culprit. I develop a consistent theory validating all these principles by combining Hartry Field's theory of truth with a modal enrichment developed for a different purpose by Michael Caie. The only casualty is classical logic: the theory avoids paradox by using a weaker‐than‐classical K₃ logic. I then assess the philosophical merits of this approach. I argue that, unlike the traditional semantic paradoxes involving extensional notions like truth, its plausibility depends on the way in which sentences are referred to—whether in natural languages via direct sentential reference, or in mathematical theories via indirect sentential reference by Gödel coding. In particular, I argue that from the perspective of natural language, my non‐classical treatment of knowledge as a predicate is plausible, while from the perspective of mathematical theories, its plausibility depends on unresolved questions about the limits of our idealized deductive capacities.     

Thought and the social community

The anti‐Cartesian idea that a person's thoughts are not entirely fixed by what goes on inside that person's head is suggested by Hegel, and echoed in Wittgenstein and Frege. An argument for the view has recently been given by Tyler Burge. This paper claims that Burge's data can be explained better by an individualistic theory. The basic idea is that an individual's thoughts are specified analogically, in ordinary discourse, through the model of a language. Though the modelling‐sentences are public, the thoughts of the individual are inner states whose identity does not depend upon those sentences. They have content naturally, whether or not content happens to be ascribed to them.     

Individual Concepts in Modal Predicate Logic

The article deals with the interpretation of propositional attitudes in the framework of modal predicate logic. The first part discusses the classical puzzles arising from the interplay between propositional attitudes, quantifiers and the notion of identity. After comparing different reactions to these puzzles it argues in favor of an analysis in which evaluations of de re attitudes may vary relative to the ways of identifying objects used in the context of use. The second part of the article gives this analysis a precise formalization from a model- and proof-theoretic perspective. This material has grown out of Chapters 2 and 4 of my PhD thesis Quantification under Conceptual Covers.     

The Logic of Necessity in Aristotle--an Outline of Approaches to the Modal Syllogistic,Together with a General Account of de dicto - and de re -Necessity

This article investigates the prospect of giving de dicto- and de re-necessity a uniform treatment. The historical starting point is a puzzle raised by Aristotle's claim, advanced in one of the modal chapters of his Prior Analytics, that universally privative apodeictic premises simply convert. As regards the Prior and the Posterior Analytics, the data suggest a representation of propositions of the type in question by doubly modally qualified formulae of modal predicate logic that display a necessity operator in two distinct positions. Can the N-operator occurring in these positions be given a unified semantical treatment (which would justify dispensing with a notational differentiation)? A positive answer, based on a suitably shaped truth condition for N-formulae, is given, and is supported in the final section with an alternative proof theoretically based conception of a property's essential belonging to an individual.     

De re modality,generic essences,and science

Conclusion I have taken the traditional problem of the seeming interdependence of identity concepts and essentialistic concepts and the attendant difficulties with circularity as a starting point in my consideration of recent attempts to provide accounts ofde re essences. Having distinguished between theories of individual and generic essences, I have shown how a linguistic device based upon a new approach to referring expressions has, perhaps, provided some advance in the understanding of individualde re essences. I have argued that, however efficacious these linguistic devices may be in dealing with individual essences, they are of no help in dealing with generic essences. I considered, therefore, one of the recent attempts to use science as the arbiter ofde re essences and concluded that such attempts will not, ultimately, solve the traditional problem of circularity. That problem remains, arising in different forms to thwart different attempts to account forde re generic essences.     

Associative Substitutional Semantics and Quantified Modal Logic

The paper presents an alternative substitutional semantics for first-order modal logic which, in contrast to traditional substitutional (or truth-value) semantics, allows for a fine-grained explanation of the semantical behavior of the terms from which atomic formulae are composed. In contrast to denotational semantics, which is inherently reference-guided, this semantics supports a non-referential conception of modal truth and does not give rise to the problems which pertain to the philosophical interpretation of objectual domains (concerning, e.g., possibilia or trans-world identity). The paper also proposes the notion of modality de nomine as an alternative to the denotational notion of modality de re.     

COHERENTISM AND THE EPISTEMIC JUSTIFICATION OF MORAL BELIEFS: A CASE STUDY IN HOW TO DO PRACTICAL ETHICS WITHOUT APPEAL TO A MORAL THEORY

This paper defends a coherentist approach to moral epistemology. In “The Immorality of Eating Meat” (2000), I offer a coherentist consistency argument to show that our own beliefs rationally commit us to the immorality of eating meat. Elsewhere, I use our own beliefs as premises to argue that we have positive duties to assist the poor (2004) and to argue that biomedical animal experimentation is wrong (2012). The present paper explores whether this consistency‐based coherentist approach of grounding particular moral judgments on beliefs we already hold, with no appeal to moral theory, is a legitimate way of doing practical ethics. I argue (i) that grounding particular moral judgments on our core moral convictions and other core nonmoral beliefs is a legitimate way to justify moral judgments, (ii) that these moral judgments possess as much epistemic justification and have as much claim to objectivity as moral judgments grounded on particular ethical theories, and (iii) that this internalistic coherentist method of grounding moral judgments is more likely to result in behavioral guidance than traditional theory‐based approaches to practical ethics. By way of illustrating the approach, I briefly recapitulate my consistency‐based argument for ethical vegetarianism. I then defend the coherentist approach implicit in the argument against a number of potentially fatal metatheoretical attacks.     

One's Modus Ponens: Modality,Coherence and Logic

Recently, there has been a shift away from traditional truth‐conditional accounts of meaning towards non‐truth‐conditional ones, e.g., expressivism, relativism and certain forms of dynamic semantics. Fueling this trend is some puzzling behavior of modal discourse. One particularly surprising manifestation of such behavior is the alleged failure of some of the most entrenched classical rules of inference; viz., modus ponens and modus tollens. These revisionary, non‐truth‐conditional accounts tout these failures, and the alleged tension between the behavior of modal vocabulary and classical logic, as data in support of their departure from tradition, since the revisionary semantics invalidate some of these patterns. I, instead, offer a semantics for modality with the resources to accommodate the puzzling data while preserving classical logic, thus affirming the tradition that modals express ordinary truth‐conditional content. My account shows that the real lesson of the apparent counterexamples is not the one the critics draw, but rather one they missed: namely, that there are linguistic mechanisms, reflected in the logical form, that affect the interpretation of modal language in a context in a systematic and precise way, which have to be captured by any adequate semantic account of the interaction between discourse context and modal vocabulary. The semantic theory I develop specifies these mechanisms and captures precisely how they affect the interpretation of modals in a context, and do so in a way that both explains the appearance of the putative counterexamples and preserves classical logic.     

Essence and Possibility in the Leibniz‐Arnauld Correspondence

In the 1680s, Gottfried Leibniz and Antoine Arnauld engaged in a philosophically rich correspondence. One issue they discuss is modal metaphysics – questions concerning necessity, possibility, and essence. While Arnauld's contributions to the correspondence are considered generally astute, his contributions on this issue have not always received a warm treatment. I argue that Arnauld's criticisms of Leibniz are sophisticated and that Arnauld offers his own Cartesian account in its place. In particular, I argue that Arnauld offers an account of possibility that is actualist (only actual things exist), modal actualist (modality is irreducible) and essence‐based (essences ground de re counterfactuals).     

Our epistemic goal

David Lewis's modal realism claims that nothing can exist in more than one world or time, and that statements about how something would have been are to be analysed in terms of its counterpart. I first explain why the counterpart relation depends on de re modal statements in an intensional language, so that intuitive properties of similarity relations cannot be used to show that the counterpart relation is not an equivalence relation. I then look at test sentences in (the intensional) natural language, and show that none of them provide compelling evidence that a counterpart semantics is needed.     

Models for Counterparts

Lewis proposed to test the validity of a modal thesis by checking whether its possible-world translation is a theorem of counterpart theory. However, that criterion fails to validate many standard modal laws, thus raising doubts about the logical adequacy of the Lewisian framework. The present paper considers systems of counterpart theory of increasing strength and shows how each can be motivated by exhibiting a suitable intended model. In particular, perfect counterpart theory validates all the desired modal laws and therefore provides a way out of the logical objection. Finally, a weakening of perfect counterpart theory is put forward as a response to some metaphysical objections.     

Interpreting conjunctions

The interpretation generated from a sentence of the form P and Q can often be different to that generated by Q and P, despite the fact that and has a symmetric truth-conditional meaning. We experimentally investigated to what extent this difference in meaning is due to the connective and and to what extent it is due to order of mention of the events in the sentence. In three experiments, we collected interpretations of sentences in which we varied the presence of the conjunction, the order of mention of the events, and the type of relation holding between the events (temporally vs. causally related events). The results indicated that the effect of using a conjunction was dependent on the discourse relation between the events. Our findings contradict a narrative marker theory of and, but provide partial support for a single-unit theory derived from Carston (2002). The results are discussed in terms of conjunction processing and implicatures of temporal order.