Weisberg (2009) has argued that if a prior p is updated to q by Jeffrey conditioning, based on a certain non-doxastic experience E, and new evidence F undercuts the support that E offers for some feature of q, then q cannot be repaired by subsequent conditioning on F. Wagner (2013), McGrew (2014) and most recently, Lange (2024), have each contested Weisberg’s claim, though from entirely different perspectives. The present paper responds to various critiques of Wagner’s proposal, especially Weisberg (2015), and establishes results that elaborate and strengthen the credentials that proposal, while also showing that the proposals of McGrew and Lange fail to respond to Weisberg’s challenge.
Contemporary philosophy of spacetime has thus far focused predominantly on the metrical properties of spacetime, with substantially less attention paid to its topological aspects. In this article, we go some way to rectifying this situation, by introducing philosophers to a class of ‘(almost) asymmetric’ manifolds which possess flat geodesically complete Riemannian metrics yet admit only finite (or trivial) isometry groups. The resulting spacetimes exhibit a unique dual nature: they are locally homogeneous (indistinguishable from standard flat space) but globally inhomogeneous, such that every spatial point is individuated from its neighbours. We argue that this topology-induced structure has at least two significant philosophical upshots. First, we show that there are surprising upshots for existing popular notions of theoretical equivalence when one considers theories set on these manifolds: many theories which might appear prima facie inequivalent in fact become categorically equivalent on such topological settings. Second, we demonstrate that theories set on these manifolds satisfy what Manchak et al. (2026) dub “de re* determinism” and “rigidity”, thereby avoiding (e.g.) the indeterminism which some associate with Leibnizian spacetimes.
The debate over permissivism concerns whether a single body of evidence can rationally permit incompatible responses. A central issue in this debate is the so-called “truth problem,” which asks whether permissivism can accommodate the idea that rationality is truth- or accuracy-conducive. This paper offers a new response to this problem: we can either have an explanation of the accuracy-conduciveness of rationality that assumes the normativity of rationality, or an explanation that doesn’t rely on this assumption; both permissivism and impermissivism are compatible with either approach. The conclusion is that neither permissivism nor impermissivism enjoys an advantage over the other in accommodating the accuracy-conduciveness of rationality.
In our daily lives, we often make claims about what is possible or necessary, prompting the question of how we come to acquire these modal claims. In this paper we examine what Vaidya and Wallner have called the “problem of modal epistemic friction.” According to this problem, some accounts of modal knowledge presuppose essentialist theses, thereby making the epistemology of modality a special case of the epistemology of essences. Vaidya advances an essence-based account centered on the method of “variation in imagination” (VIM), wherein the essential properties of an object are those that remain constant across imaginative variations over time. However, since this method is closed under logical consequence, it identifies what—in Finean terms—constitutes consequential rather than constitutive essences. In this paper, we aim to refine Vaidya's proposal by offering a way to capture constitutive essences, starting from a consequential perspective. To do so, we will draw on the notion of web consequence (WC), as developed by Schnieder, which helps distinguish constitutive essences from those which are merely consequential.
In my (2024), I argued that there are principled reasons for thinking that AI cannot be an authority about one’s own mind. The idea is that it is only rational to treat another as an epistemic authority under certain conditions, and AI does not meet one of those conditions. Fan (2025) rejects the account of epistemic authority I favor and sketches an alternative. In this response, I explain why I am not convinced by the objection to the account and why the account fares better than the proposed alternative. I conclude by considering the bearing of the disagreement on issues in the philosophy of AI.
This paper explores a new account of ontological dependence based on exact truthmaker semantics, which I call the truthmaking account. The account holds that states verifying existential propositions and the parthood relation between states can characterize the relation of ontological dependence. After presenting the truthmaking account, I compare it with the modal and grounding accounts. In particular, I show that the truthmaking account is better than the modal one, and I explore its advantages and disadvantages with respect to the grounding account.
Logical anti-exceptionalism (AEL) is the view that logic is not exceptional. It has been framed either as a thesis that logic is continuous with science, or, more recently, as a thesis according to which logic is unexceptional because it rejects some of the traditional features of logic (generality, a priority, necessity, analiticity…). The latter view has been argued to be a superior characterization of the general view over the former; it is said that it not only avoids difficulties of AEL as continuity, but also has benefits of its own that forcefully recommend its adoption. In this paper, we defend the plausibility of AEL as continuity by (1) arguing that the criticism addressed to the view fails its target and that (2) the alternative characterization of AEL as tradition rejection does not deliver the promised goods. As a result, one is justified in looking for formulations of AEL in terms of continuity, which is less problematic than tradition rejection.
In this paper, I argue that the distinction between concreteness and abstractness is not metaphysically fundamental and that the debate between actualism and possibilism is difference-minimising. After providing a brief overview of these positions, I pursue the strategy of trading off ontological and ideological commitments to the distinction at issue. I conclude that under one interpretation, the choice between concreteness and abstractness is an ad hoc decision.
Nominalists face classic Quine-Putnam indispensability worries about how to logically regiment physical magnitude statements. Measurement-theoretic uniqueness theorems offer a popular tool for answering this challenge, by showing that the application of finitely many atomic relations between non-mathematical objects can pin down unique intended values for Platonist physical magnitude functions. However, recent discussions of Baker’s rocketship argument for absolutism about physical magnitudes raise a prima facie worry—that such nominalist paraphrases can only express comparativist friendly content, and therefore cannot capture the intuitive determinism of Newtonian mechanics. In this paper, I’ll develop that worry and argue that even nominalists who accept Baker’s premises and argument can address it by adjusting traditional nominalist paraphrases to employ absolutist physical magnitude predicates taken to be rigid designators that fix absolute scale without reference to mathematical objects.
The Grounding Objection alleges that Molinist counterfactuals of creaturely freedom (CCFs) lack prevolitional truthmakers, while a related Alternative Possibilities Objection maintains that any determinate prevolitional basis for such ‘would’-facts threatens the alternative possibilities required for libertarian freedom. I propose Fragmentalist Molinism, which combines a Finean truthmaker-semantic account of CCFs with a fragmentalist metaphysics of providential and agential facts. Each true CCF is grounded by a contingent, content-structured exact verifier whose corresponding fact belongs to a Divine Providential Fragment, while the facts concerning the creature’s intrinsic powers and alternative possibilities belong to a distinct Creaturely Freedom Fragment. Truth remains absolute, since the fragment indices record the membership of facts rather than relativising truth itself. I formalise this structure through a partial semantics and a labelled proof theory that preserves classical reasoning within each fragment, prohibits unrestricted conjunction across incompatible fragments, and admits only independently warranted bridge principles. The resulting framework answers the Grounding Objection through exact verifiers, while answering the Alternative Possibilities Objection by showing that the providential ground of what an agent would freely do does not thereby ground the agent’s inability to do otherwise.
It is now widely agreed that, unlike belief contents, desire contents are not simply propositions. H. Ben-Yami and T. Brewer defend “objectualism,” the claim that a desire can be simply for an object or a thing, without predication. M. Thompson and M. Alvarez maintain that the normal content of a desire is not a proposition but an action or other event. This paper first rebuts the case for objectualism, showing that in each of Ben-Yami’s and Brewer’s examples the desire content is propositional after all. It then argues that despite appearances, the “action” view and the facts about desire satisfaction are compatible with propositionalism. (The action view is probably well be true of intending, as is argued by A. Baier, J. Hornsby and L. Campbell, but the paper shows that desire precisely lacks the features that are cited in support of the action view of intending.)
It is a central task for theories of representation to give a principled account of the distinction between representational and non-representational systems. In this paper, I begin by arguing that this plausibly involves giving an account that accurately reflects differences in the explanatory practice of the sciences. I then show that one of the most sophisticated and empirically well-informed attempts to give such an account faces a fundamental problem, the problem of adjacent cases, and I suggest that we have reason to suspect that this problem generalizes to other traditional accounts. Finally, I sketch a radically gradualist alternative that solves the problem in a simple and elegant way and provides a plausible view of the transition from mere sensitivity to genuine representation.
Semantic relationism is the view that there is a semantic relation between representations that is not determined by sameness or difference in their local or intrinsic content. Following Fine (Semantic relationism, Blackwell, Oxford, 2007), let us call this semantic relation coordination. One apparent challenge for semantic relationism is that, in cases in which there is only a single occurrence of a name, it seems unclear what representation the name is coordinated with. Fine (Philos Phenomenol Res 81(2):475–484, 2010) suggests a solution to this problem by introducing the notion of a “token individual.” Pinillos (in: Bianchi (ed) On reference, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 322–334, 2015) argues against Fine’s suggestion based on a case in which coordination is not transitive across speakers. In this paper, I argue that an example of the sort that Pinillos uses does not undermine Fine’s proposal. In particular, I argue for the following claims. First, I argue that Pinillos’s conclusion is too hasty, since alternative readings, on which inter-personal coordination is transitive, are available to semantic relationists. I present two such alternative readings. Second, and more importantly, I argue that there are reasons in favor of one of the two alternative readings. In doing so, I present an important difference between intra- and inter-personal coordination, which is often overlooked by semantic relationists.
It has been suggested that causal set theory is particularly accommodating to a structuralist interpretation. In this paper, we will evaluate this claim, focusing on a recent version of structuralism proposed by Wüthrich (2012, 2024). We show that structuralism of this variety conflicts with the standard dynamics of causal set theory, and that removing this conflict may require reworking the dynamics. We also show that a structuralist interpretation along these lines requires metaphysically privileging the dynamical aspect of the theory. We consider three potential ways forward for a structuralist, but suggest that matters are difficult: two of these likely require reworking CST and one invokes controversial metaphysical assumptions.
In this paper, I propose a pragmatic modification of Carnap’s method of explication, extending it to the social sciences. While Carnap’s original criteria—similarity, exactness, fruitfulness, and simplicity—were developed with the exact sciences in view, their application to interdisciplinary contexts characterized by heterogeneous explanatory aims and methodological standards requires pragmatic reinterpretation. The proposed model of pragmatic explication (PE) retains Carnap’s core operation of conceptual replacement while reinterpreting its epistemic function in context-sensitive and problem-oriented terms: PE provides a more adequate conceptual framework for explanation, generalization, and problem-solving in a given field of inquiry. The conceptual transition from sex as a default explanatory category to gender illustrates how PE enhances conceptual refinement and explanatory power in the social sciences.
Philosophers typically classify causation, grounding, and other determination relations as distinct kinds. These relations are often modeled in set-theoretic terms, but this treatment ends up flattening the rich conceptual structure that makes determination metaphysically significant. As a result, accounts of mixed chains of determination often appear fragmented and unconvincing, especially in cases drawn from fundamental physics. This paper develops a novel approach for modeling determination that avoids the information loss of purely extensional treatments and captures hybrid cases within a unified representation. The framework uses the geometrical structure of conceptual spaces to expand the metaphysician’s toolkit for analyzing the multi-faceted nature of determination. Finally, the paper argues that the explanatory success of this framework supports an underlying metaphysical thesis: That there is a single, primordial form of determination.
What makes some intuitions more skilful than others? To answer this question, I first argue that prominent phenomenalist views of intuition—which define intuitions as mental states with a unique phenomenology—cannot capture the distinction between skilful and unskilful intuitions. I then propose a desideratum for an account of skilful intuition: they must address the problem of intuitive presence. Lastly, I draw on extensive empirical work on metacognition and action control to argue that an enactivist view of intuition—which emphasises the role of mental actions in producing intuitions—both satisfies the proposed desideratum and offers a clear and plausible account of the nature of skilful intuition.
We argue that adopting the Self-Indication Assumption (SIA)—a thesis about self-locating evidence, according to which your existence favours theories on which there are more observers who you yourself might be over theories on which there are fewer—strongly confirms the disjunction of theism, modal realism, or axiarchism. We say that if SIA is correct, your existence becomes highly surprising on garden-variety atheism. For almost certainly, if each of these views are false, only a proper subset of possible observers who you might be would exist, if any. In contrast, on some forms of theism—forms of theism on which God must create an unsurpassably good world—it’s not so unlikely God would create every possible observer, to love and/or benefit each one. Something similar is true of axiarchism, and modal realism entails that every possible observer exists. As a result, we argue, your existence strongly confirms the disjunction of maximizing theism, modal realism, or axiarchism over garden-variety atheism, conditional on SIA.
Often, two logical systems differ in what seems a merely superficial way; for example, in the symbols they choose for a given operation. When this happens, we say that the systems are notational variants of each other and that, as a consequence, they are presentations of the same logical theory. In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to certain logical systems that are radically substructural, in the sense that they abandon the reflexivity and/or transitivity of consequence. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, I argue that such systems pose serious challenges to our extant criteria for deciding when two systems are notational variants. Second, I give some steps towards a new, improved criterion. Intuitively, I suggest that two logical systems are notational variants just in case, once we translate them properly, they give rise to the same non-logical theories—where, crucially, a non-logical theory can contain not only statements, but also inferences.
I shall present and defend in this paper a new version of actual intentionalism, i.e., Fundamental Actual Intentionalism. According to it, all legitimate interpretations of literary works irreducibly depend, at least in part, on the actual intentions of their actual authors. In Sect. 1 I shall provide a brief introduction to philosophical theories of literary interpretation. Moreover, I shall also clarify the notions of grounding/dependence to be invoked in the rest of the paper. In Sect. 2 I shall present Fundamental Actual Intentionalism, whereas in Sects. 3 and 4 I shall provide a defence of it by comparing it with other philosophical theories of literary interpretation. In a nutshell, I shall argue that these other theories still turn out to imply irreducible dependencies of legitimate interpretations upon the actual intentions of actual authors. Finally, in Sect. 5, I shall anticipate some objections and provide some replies.
