The only X and Y principle

In this paper, I consider the validity and proper formulation of the only‐x‐and‐y principle, which states, roughly, that whether a later individual, y, is numerically identical to an earlier individual, x, can depend only on facts about x and y and the relationships between them. In the course of my investigation, I distinguish between two classes of physical entities?–?those that exist in a ‘real’ sense, and those that exist in a mere Cambridge sense. This distinction is grounded in Peter Geach's distinction between ‘real’ and mere Cambridge change. I argue in favor of a modified version of the only‐x‐and‐y principle?–?the qualified only‐x‐and‐y principle?–?which applies to entities that exist in a ‘real’ sense, but not to mere Cambridge entities. It is also argued that the plausibility of the qualified only‐x‐and‐y principle has more to do with facts about the nature of causality than with intuitions we have about existence or numerical identity. I finish by considering some traditional objections to the only‐x‐and‐y principle, and conclude that they do not succeed in refuting the qualified only‐x‐and‐y principle.     

Fission,Fusion and Intrinsic Facts1

Closest‐continuer or best‐candidate accounts of persistence seem deeply unsatisfactory, but it is hard to say why. the standard criticism is that such accounts violate the ‘only a and b’ rule, but this criticism merely highlights a feature of the accounts without explaining why the feature is unacceptable. Another concern is that such accounts violate some principle about the supervenience of persistence facts upon local or intrinsic facts. But, again, we do not seem to have an independent justification for this supervenience claim. Instead, I argue that closest continuer accounts are committed to unexplained correlations between distinct existences, and that this is their fundamental flaw. We can have independent justification for rejecting such correlations, but what the justification is depends upon much broader issues in ontology. There is no one‐size‐fits all objection to closest‐continuer accounts of persistence.     

Branching and (In)determinism

Abstract

It might seem, and it has been argued, that if time is linear the threat of determinism is more severe than if time is branching, since in the latter case the future is open in a way it is not in the former one where, so to speak, there exists only one branch—one future. In this paper, I want to resist this claim. I shall first concentrate on what ‘branching’ is or could be, and I shall discuss various versions and interpretations of this view. I shall then (more quickly) turn my attention to what determinism is or could be, and I will distinguish three (well-known) kinds of it—focusing mainly on ‘metaphysical determinism’. I will then ask (and answer) the question whether branching time helps with avoiding determinism or not. As we shall see, it is incorrect to think that under the branching hypothesis the threat of determinism is any smaller.     

A Puzzle About Reasons and Rationality

According to a guiding idea in metaethics, there is a necessary link between the concept of normative reasons and the concept of practical rationality. This notion brings up two issues: The exact nature of this link, and the nature of rationality. With regard to the first issue, the debate is dominated by a certain standard claim. With regard to the second issue, the debate is dominated by what I will refer to as ‘subjectivism’ and ‘objectivism’ about rationality, where the latter is assumed to be a necessary condition for the existence of categorical reasons. In this paper, it is argued that subjectivism is able capture an ordinary, non-technical, sense of ‘rational’ whereas objectivism is not. The basic reason is that objectivism fails to account for the essential connection between rationality, malfunctioning, and rational criticism. This means that we face a puzzle: While objectivism appears to be a necessary condition for the existence of categorical reasons, it fails to capture a central sense of ‘rational’. It is finally argued that this puzzle can be solved by abandoning the standard claim about the link between reasons and rationality.     

On the Lack of Direction in Rayo’s The Construction of Logical Space

Abstract

I argue that Agustín Rayo’s symmetric ‘just is’ statements cannot be defined in terms of notions like essence, grounding or metaphysical truth-conditions. I go on to argue that one of these latter notions, which allow us to express an asymmetric relationship between facts, is needed to do some of the work that Rayo intends ‘just is’ statements to do, such as stating reductionist claims.     

Commentary on ‘The arms of the chimeras’ by Béatrice Ithier

In this Commentary I will first of all summarise my understanding of the proposal set out by Béatrice Ithier concerning her concept of the ‘chimera’. The main part of my essay will focus on Ithier's claim that her concept of the chimera could be described as a ‘mental squiggle’ because it corresponds to Winnicott's work illustrated in his book ‘Therapeutic Consultations’ (1971). At the core of Ithier's chimera is the notion of a traumatic link between analyst and patient, which is the reason she enlists the work of Winnicott. I will argue, however, that Ithier's claim is based on a misperception of the theory that underpins Winnicott's therapeutic consultations because, different from Ithier's clinical examples of work with traumatised patients, Winnicott is careful to select cases who are from an ‘average expectable environment’ i.e. a good enough family. Moreover, Winnicott does not refer to any traumatic affinity with his patients, or to experiencing a quasi‐hallucinatory state of mind during the course of the consultations. These aspects are not incorporated into his theory. In contrast (to the concept Ithier attempts to advance), Winnicott's squiggle game constitutes an application of psychoanalysis intended as a diagnostic consultation. In that sense Winnicott's therapeutic consultations are comparable with the ordinary everyday work between analyst and analysand in a psychoanalytic treatment. My Commentary concludes with a question concerning the distinction between the ordinary countertransference in working with patients who are thinking symbolically in contrast to an extraordinary countertransference that I suggest is more likely to arise with patients who are traumatised and thus functioning at a borderline or psychotic level.     

Default reasonableness and the mathoids

In this paper I will argue that (principled) attempts to ground a priori knowledge in default reasonable beliefs cannot capture certain common intuitions about what is required for a priori knowledge. I will describe hypothetical creatures who derive complex mathematical truths like Fermat’s last theorem via short and intuitively unconvincing arguments. Many philosophers with foundationalist inclinations will feel that these creatures must lack knowledge because they are unable to justify their mathematical assumptions in terms of the kind of basic facts which can be known without further argument. Yet, I will argue that nothing in the current literature lets us draw a principled distinction between what these creatures are doing and paradigmatic cases of good a priori reasoning (assuming that the latter are to be grounded in default reasonable beliefs). I will consider, in turn, appeals to reliability, coherence, conceptual truth and indispensability and argue that none of these can do the job.     

One strand in the rule-following considerations

I argue that a target of the rule-following considerations is the thought that there are mental episodes in which a consciously accessible item guides me in my decision to respond in a certain way when I follow a rule. I contend that Wittgenstein’s position on this issue invokes a distinction between a literal and a symbolic reading of the claim that these processes of guidance take place. In the literal sense he rejects the claim, but in the symbolic sense he sees nothing wrong with it. I consider some arguments that Wittgenstein deploys against the literal sense of the claim.     

Hacking on the Looping Effects of Psychiatric Classifications: What Is an Interactive and Indifferent Kind?

This paper examines Ian Hacking’s analysis of the looping effects of psychiatric classifications, focusing on his recent account of interactive and indifferent kinds. After explicating Hacking’s distinction between ‘interactive kinds’ (human kinds) and ‘indifferent kinds’ (natural kinds), I argue that Hacking cannot claim that there are ‘interactive and indifferent kinds,’ given the way that he introduces the interactive‐indifferent distinction. Hacking is also ambiguous on whether his notion of interactive and indifferent kinds is supposed to offer an account of classifications or objects of classification. I argue that these conceptual difficulties show that Hacking’s account of interactive and indifferent kinds cannot be based on—and should be clearly separated from—his distinction between interactive kinds and indifferent kinds. In clarifying Hacking’s account, I argue that interactive and indifferent kinds should be regarded as objects of classification (i.e., kinds of people) that can be identified with reference to a law‐like biological regularity and are aware of how they are classified. Schizophrenia and depression are discussed as examples. I subsequently offer reasons for resisting Hacking’s claim that the objects of classification in the human sciences—as a result of looping effects—are ‘moving targets’.     

The Conflation of Moral and Epistemic Virtue

Abstract: Accounts of virtue suffer a conflation problem when they appear unable to preserve intuitive distinctions between types of virtue. In this essay I argue that a number of influential attempts to preserve the distinction between moral and epistemic virtues fail, on the grounds that they characterize virtuous traits in terms of ‘characteristic motivation’. I claim that this does not distinguish virtuous traits at the level of value‐conferring quality, and I propose that the best alternative is to distinguish them at the level of good produced. It follows from this that a consequentialist account is best placed to avoid a conflation of moral and epistemic virtue.     

Wittgenstein’s Picture Theory and the Distinction between Representing and Depicting

In this paper, I draw attention to the often-overlooked Tractarian distinction between representing (darstellen) and depicting (abbilden), provide a clear account of it and examine how it affects our understanding of the notions of ‘being a picture’, meaningfulness, truth, and falsity in the Tractatus. I also look at the recent debate in the literature on the notion of truth and show that Glock’s claim that the official theory of the Tractatus is to be accounted in terms of obtainment only and deflationary accounts such as Hacker’s derive from a failure to notice the distinction between representing and depicting (in the case of Glock) or a misconception of depicting (in the case of Hacker). Finally, I argue against the idea that either representing or depicting should be dispensed with. Both are necessary for Wittgenstein to account for every case of a proposition being a picture of reality.     

Dismantling Desert

Abstract

In this paper I argue that we are never morally responsible for our actions in the sense that we justly deserve to be rewarded or punished for them. I examine two distinctions: (1) the distinction set out by Gary Watson between two distinct types of responsibility: accountability and attributability and (2) the distinction set out by Ted Honderich between origination and voluntariness. I argue that Watson’s distinction maps onto Honderich’s distinction in the sense that we can only properly be held accountable if we are the originators of our actions, and actions can be seen as attributable to us as their authors if they flow voluntarily from our endorsed beliefs, intentions and character. It seems to me that attributability and accountability can be held apart so that an action can be attributable to me without this necessarily entailing that I can properly be held accountable for it in the sense of deserving the type of praise and blame that entails retributive-style reward and punishment. I argue further that compatibilists can only properly defend the weaker attributability. If my argument is correct then the classic determinist divide collapses - since compatibilism can only properly defend voluntariness and attributability and both concepts are prima facie compatible with hard determinism. Given this (and given the standard failures of libertarianism) I argue that it is most plausible for us to be committed to a new position in the free will debate which combines the important insights of compatibilism with the intuitive force of hard determinism.     

The Relevance of Fink’s Notion of Operative Concepts for Derrida’s Deconstruction

In the literature on Derrida’s philosophical formation, the name of Eugen Fink is usually forgotten. When it is recalled, it is most often because of his 1930s articles on phenomenology. In this paper, I claim on the contrary that Fink’s writings exerted a lasting influence on Derrida’s thought, well beyond his early phenomenological works. More specifically, I focus on a 1957 paper presented at a conference on Husserl’s thought where Fink formulates an important distinction between operative and thematic concepts. By adopting both historical and theoretical perspectives, I show how this couple of notions can help to understand Derrida’s singular way of reading philosophical texts. In particular, I present the Derridean concept of supplement as a reworking of Fink’s notion of operative concept. I conclude by suggesting that deconstruction can be understood in part as a radicalization of Fink’s theses.     

Frege: two theses,two senses

One particular topic in the literature on Frege's conception of sense relates to two apparently contradictory theses held by Frege: the isomorphism of thought and language on one hand and the expressibility of a thought by different sentences on the other. I will divide the paper into five sections. In (1) I introduce the problem of the tension in Frege's thought. In (2) I discuss the main attempts to resolve the conflict between Frege's two contradictory claims, showing what is wrong with some of them. In (3), I analyse where, in Frege'ps writings and discussions on sense identity, one can find grounds for two different conceptions of sense. In (4) I show how the two contradictory theses held by Frege are connected with different concerns, compelling Frege to a constant oscillation in terminology. In (5) I summarize two further reasons that prevented Frege from making the distinction between two conceptions of sense clear: (i) the antipsychologism problem and (ii) the overlap of traditions in German literature contemporary to Frege about the concept of value. I conclude with a hint for a reconstruction of the Fregean notion of ‘thought’ which resolves the contradiction between his two theses.     

Do Expectations Have Time Span?

If it is possible to think that human life is temporal as a whole, and we can make sense of Wittgenstein’s claim that the psychological phenomena called ‘dispositions’ do not have genuine temporal duration on the basis of a distinction between dispositions and other mental processes, we need a compelling account of how time applies to these dispositions. I undertake this here by examining the concept of expectation, a disposition with a clear nexus to time by the temporal point at which the expectation is satisfied. However, it seems that we cannot always identify the beginning of an expectation, and in a few cases, its end. If so, the reduction of expectations to neural events or accompanying feelings which spread over time in the usual way seems a hard enterprise, because these processes, much as other physical processes, have a definite and largely measurable time span. Only at a higher level, that is, as part of human life, expectation can be said to be temporal.     

No Work for a Theory of Grounding

It has recently been suggested that a distinctive metaphysical relation— ‘Grounding’—is ultimately at issue in contexts in which some goings-on are said to hold ‘in virtue of’’, be (constitutively) ‘metaphysically dependent on’, or be ‘nothing over and above’ some others. Grounding is supposed to do good work (better than merely modal notions, in particular) in illuminating metaphysical dependence. I argue that Grounding is also unsuited to do this work. To start, Grounding alone cannot do this work, for bare claims of Grounding leave open such basic questions as whether Grounded goings-on exist, whether they are reducible to or rather distinct from Grounding goings-on, whether they are efficacious, and so on; but in the absence of answers to such basic questions, we are not in position to assess the associated claim or theses concerning metaphysical dependence. There is no avoiding appeal to the specific metaphysical relations typically at issue in investigations into dependence—for example, type or token identity, functional realization, classical mereological parthood, the set membership relation, the proper subset relation, the determinable/determinate relation, and so on—which are capable of answering these questions. But, I argue, once the specific relations are on the scene, there is no need for Grounding.     

Counterfactuals and the fixity of the past

I argue that David Lewis’s attempt, in his ‘Counterfactual Dependence and Time’s Arrow’, to explain the fixity of the past in terms of counterfactual independence is unsuccessful. I point out that there is an ambiguity in the claim that the past is counterfactually independent of the present (or, more generally, that the earlier is counterfactually independent of the later), corresponding to two distinct theses about the relation between time and counterfactuals, both officially endorsed by Lewis. I argue that Lewis’s attempt is flawed for a variety of reasons, including the fact that his own theory about the evaluation of counterfactuals requires too many exceptions to the general rule that the past is counterfactually independent of the present. At the end of the paper, I consider a variant of Lewis’s strategy that attempts to explain the fixity of the past in terms of causal, rather than counterfactual, independence. I conclude that, although this variant avoids some of the objections that afflict Lewis’s account, it nevertheless seems to be incapable of giving a satisfactory explanation of the notion of the fixity of the past.