The Surprise Exam Paradox is well-known: a teacher announces that there will be a surprise exam the following week; the students argue by an intuitively sound reasoning that this is impossible; and yet they can be surprised by the teacher. We suggest that a solution can be found scattered in the literature, in part anticipated by Wright and Sudbury, informally developed by Sorensen, and more recently discussed, and dismissed, by Williamson. In a nutshell, the solution consists in realising that the teacher's announcement is a blindspot that can only be known if the week is at least 2 days long. Along the way, we criticise Williamson's own treatment of the paradox. In Williamson's view, the Surprise is similar to the Paradox of the Glimpse and, because of their similarities, both these paradoxes ought to receive a uniform treatment-one that involves locating an illicit application of the KK Principle. We argue that there's no deep analogy between the Surprise and the Glimpse and that, even if there were, the Surprise reasoning reaches a paradoxical conclusion before the KK Principle is used. Rather, in both the Surprise and the Glimpse, the blame should be put on other epistemic principles-respectively, a knowledge retention and a margin for error principle.
This paper provides an account of anonymous speech treated as anonymized speech. It is argued that anonymous speech acts are best defined by reference to intentional acts of blocking a speaker's identification as opposed to the various epistemic effects that imperfectly correlate with these actions. The account is used to examine two important subclasses of anonymized speech: speech using pseudonyms, and speech anonymized in a specifically communicative manner. Several pragmatic and ethical issues with anonymized speech are considered.
In this paper, I formulate a norm of intention consistency that is immune to the kind of cases that have been put forth to argue either that rationality does not require consistency between an agent's intentions, or that, if it does, then rationality is not normative. The norm I formulate mimics refinements that have been made to the norm of means-end coherence in response to cases where, intuitively, you need not be irrational when you intend an end e, despite not intending the means m you believe to be necessary for e, because you do not believe that intending m is necessary for e. Similarly, according to the norm I put forth, if you intend e, and believe that e is inconsistent with e*, you need not be irrational if you also intend e*, as long as you do not believe that intending e* is inconsistent with e.
This paper addresses a recent debate as to whether logical anti-exceptionalists should understand logical theories in syntactic or semantic terms. In Wigglesworth (2017), I propose a purely semantic approach, while Woods (2018) has argued in favor of a purely syntactic approach. Here, I argue that neither of these approaches is satisfactory, as both treat arguably distinct logics as equivalent logical theories. I argue instead for an approach that combines syntactic and semantic components. The specific approach to a combined account of logical theories is based on the category-theoretic notion of an institution.
Fine, Lowe and Hale accept the view that necessity is to be explained by essences: Necessarily p iff, and because, there is some x whose essence ensures that p. Hale, however, believes that this strategy is not universally applicable; he argues that the necessity of essentialist truths cannot itself be explained by once again appealing to essentialist truths. As a consequence, Hale holds that there are basic necessities that cannot be explained.Thus,Hale style essentialism falls short of what Wilsch calls the explanation-challenge (EC) for the metaphysics of necessity. Without endorsing the EC, I argue that Hale’s argument for basic, unexplained necessities fails due to a misunderstanding of the structure of essentialist explanations. Getting clear about the structure of essentialist explanations of necessity leads to a re-evaluation of crucial circularity- and regress-arguments that have been discussed in the debate about essentialism.
