Conversational norms and the interpretation of vague quantifiers

Frequency of behaviour is often assessed by scales using relative frequencies such as ‘often’ or ‘rarely’, so‐called vague quantifiers. Previous research showed that respondents calibrate such scales according to subjective standards. Here, it is argued that respondents follow conversational norms and if possible try to figure out which calibration the researcher had in mind and adapt their responses accordingly. They may use the survey context to infer a relevant anchor for such vague quantifiers. In the present study, although respondents did not differ in absolute behaviour frequencies, their reports of relative frequencies were influenced by information about the target population and the topic of the survey. Apparently, respondents anchored the scale according to the estimated frequency in the target population and the frequency of other behaviours relevant to the topic of the survey. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Uncertainty,Indeterminacy, and Agent-Centred Constraints

Common-sense morality includes various agent-centred constraints, including ones against killing unnecessarily and breaking a promise. However, it's not always clear whether, had an agent ?-ed, she would have violated a constraint. And sometimes the reason for this is not that we lack knowledge of the relevant facts, but that there is no fact about whether her ?-ing would have constituted a constraint-violation. What, then, is a constraint-accepting theory (that is, a theory that includes such constraints) to say about whether it would have been permissible for her to have ?-ed? In this paper, I canvass various possible approaches to answering this question and I argue that teleology offers the most plausible approach—teleology being the view that every act has its deontic status in virtue of how its outcome (or prospect) ranks, relative to those of its alternatives. So although, until recently, it had been thought that only deontological theories can accommodate constraints, it turns out that teleological theories not only can accommodate constraints, but can do so more plausibly than deontological theories can.     

Future Contingents,Indeterminacy and Context

In Facing the Future, Belnap et al. reject bivalence and propose double time reference semantics to give a pragmatic response to the following assertion problem: how can we make sense of assertions about future events made at a time when the outcomes of those events are not yet determined? John MacFarlane employs the same semantics, now bolstered with a relative‐truth predicate, to accommodate the following apparently conflicting intuitions regarding the truth‐value of an uttered future contingent: at the moment of utterance, if asked to evaluate the truth‐value of the asserted future contingent one has the intuition that the assertion is neither true nor false, yet later, at the moment of the predicted event, one has the intuition that the assertion was, already, either true or false. Both MacFarlane and Belnap assume that assertions of future contingents have complete propositional content – the traditional propositional contents that, according to him ‘are the contents of assertions and beliefs’. This assumption is challenged.     

Infinite idealization and contextual realism

Synthese - The paper discusses the recent literature on abstraction/idealization in connection with the “paradox of infinite idealization.” We use the case of taking thermodynamics...     

Three-valued Logic,Indeterminacy and Quantum Mechanics

The paper consists of two parts. The first part begins with the problem of whether the original three-valued calculus, invented by J. ukasiewicz, really conforms to his philosophical and semantic intuitions. I claim that one of the basic semantic assumptions underlying ukasiewicz's three-valued logic should be that if under any possible circumstances a sentence of the form X will be the case at time t is true (resp. false) at time t, then this sentence must be already true (resp. false) at present. However, it is easy to see that this principle is violated in ukasiewicz's original calculus (as the cases of the law of excluded middle and the law of contradiction show). Nevertheless it is possible to construct (either with the help of the notion of supervaluation, or purely algebraically) a different three-valued, semi-classical sentential calculus, which would properly incorporate ukasiewicz's initial intuitions. Algebraically, this calculus has the ordinary Boolean structure, and therefore it retains all classically valid formulas. Yet because possible valuations are no longer represented by ultrafilters, but by filters (not necessarily maximal), the new calculus displays certain non-classical metalogical features (like, for example, non-extensionality and the lack of the metalogical rule enabling one to derive p is true or q is true from pqq is true).The second part analyses whether the proposed calculus could be useful in formalizing inferences in situations, when for some reason (epistemological or ontological) our knowledge of certain facts is subject to limitation. Special attention should be paid to the possibility of employing this calculus to the case of quantum mechanics. I am going to compare it with standard non-Boolean quantum logic (in the Jauch–Piron approach), and to show that certain shortcomings of the latter can be avoided in the former. For example, I will argue that in order to properly account for quantum features of microphysics, we do not need to drop the law of distributivity. Also the idea of reading off the logical structure of propositions from the structure of Hilbert space leads to some conceptual troubles, which I am going to point out. The thesis of the paper is that all we need to speak about quantum reality can be acquired by dropping the principle of bivalence and extensionality, while accepting all classically valid formulas.     

Indeterminacy,empirical evidence,and methodological pluralism

Roth (1987) effectively distinguishes Quinean indeterminacy of translation from the more general underdetermination of theories by showing how indeterminacy follows directly from holism and the role of a shared environment in language learning. However, Roth is mistaken in three further consequences he draws from his interpretation of indeterminacy. Contra Roth, natural science and social science are not differentiated as offering theories about the shared environment and theories about meanings respectively; the role of the environment in language learning does not justify an empiricist sense of objective evidence; and his advocacy of methodological pluralism does not appropriately sustain the project of social scientific methodology in response to holism and indeterminacy.This paper has benefited from comments by Paul Roth and Terry Winant on an earlier draft, and by the two anonymous referees for Synthese.     

Infinitesimal idealization,easy road nominalism,and fractional quantum statistics

Synthese - It has been recently debated whether there exists a so-called “easy road” to nominalism. In this essay, I attempt to fill a lacuna in the debate by making a connection with...     

The structure of asymptotic idealization

Synthese - Robert Batterman and others have argued that certain idealizing explanations have an asymptotic form: they account for a state of affairs or behavior by showing that it emerges “in...