An observation of Hume’s has received a lot of attention over the last decade and a half: Although we can standardly imagine the most implausible scenarios, we encounter resistance when imagining propositions at odds with established moral (or perhaps more generally evaluative) convictions. The literature is ripe with ‘solutions’ to this so-called ‘Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance’. Few, however, question the plausibility of the empirical assumption at the heart of the puzzle. In this paper, we explore empirically whether the difficulty we witness in imagining certain propositions is indeed due to claim type (evaluative v. non-evaluative) or whether it is much rather driven by mundane features of content. Our findings suggest that claim type plays but a marginal role, and that there might hence not be much of a ‘puzzle’ to be solved.

In the 2020 Yale Law Journal article, "Commonsense Consent," Roseanna Sommers argues that deception is compatible with the layperson's intuitive sense of consent. That is, unlike the canonical understanding of consent defended by legal scholars and philosophers, the notion of consent defended by the folk is not invalidated by deception. In this study, I find that while respondents do appear to attribute consent to victims of deception, they do so in a limited number of contexts - i.e., they attribute de re consent to victims of de dicto deception and attribute de dicto consent to victims of de re deception. When the two varieties of consent and deception are properly disambiguated and matched type for type however, we see the reverse phenomenon - i.e., participants refrain from attributing de dicto consent to de dicto deception and refrain from attributing de re consent to de re deception. If this is right, rather than saying, as Sommers does, that deception generally fails to invalidate commonsense consent, we should refine our understanding of commonsense consent to include two varieties of consent, each of which is in fact invalidated by its own variety of deception.

Responding to recent concerns about the reliability of the published literature in psychology and other disciplines, we formed the X-Phi Replicability Project (XRP) to estimate the reproducibility of experimental philosophy (osf.io/dvkpr). Drawing on a representative sample of 40 x-phi studies published between 2003 and 2015, we enlisted 20 research teams across 8 countries to conduct a high-quality replication of each study in order to compare the results to the original published findings. We found that x-phi studies – as represented in our sample – successfully replicated about 70% of the time. We discuss possible reasons for this relatively high replication rate in the field of experimental philosophy and offer suggestions for best research practices going forward.

In this article, I start with the observation that aesthetic terms resist metaphorical interpretation; that is, it makes little sense to say that something is beautiful metaphorically speaking or to say something is metaphorically elegant, harmonious, or sublime. I argue that aesthetic terms' lack of metaphorical interpretations is not explained by the fact that their applicability is not limited to a particular category of objects, at least in the standard sense of category.' In general, I challenge category-based accounts of metaphorical interpretability and instead offer an alternative explanation for aesthetic terms' lack of metaphorical interpretations, one that involves the notion of context shifts rather than category violations. I argue that what is required for metaphorical interpretability is the joint satisfaction of two conditions: (i) multidimensionality and (ii) the presence of a default dimension. Aesthetic terms lack metaphorical readings because they fail to satisfy (ii), even though they satisfy (i). I argue that the alternative account I offer is predictively adequate, more parsimonious, less subject to counterexamples, and hence preferable to the category-based one.

In his paper, “Aesthetic Terms, Metaphor and the Nature of Aesthetic Properties”, Rafael De Clercq claims to (i) offer a category-based explanation of the metaphorical uninterpretability of aesthetic terms, and (ii) establish that the concept of an aesthetic property is fully analyzable in non-aesthetic terms. Both would be interesting and noteworthy achievements if accomplished. However, I argue in this discussion piece that he fails to achieve either goal.

In this paper, I show that De Clercq's account of the metaphorical uninterpretability of aesthetic terms is flawed. What is required for metaphorical interpretability, on my view, is the joint satisfaction of two conditions: (i) multi-dimensionality and (ii) the presence of a default dimension. Aesthetic terms lack metaphori- cal readings because they fail to satisfy (ii), even though they sat- isfy (i). The account I offer is preferable to the accounts offered by individual theorists mentioned in the paper as it is a more predic- tively adequate and uniform account of the phenomenon of impos- sible metaphors in general.