Thought: A Journal of Philosophy

The trivalent, truth-functional theory of conditionals proposed by de Finetti in 1936 and developed in a scattered literature since has enjoyed a recent revival in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. However, several theorists have argued that this approach is fatally flawed in that it cannot correctly account for nested conditionals and compounds of conditionals. Focusing on nested conditionals, we observe that the problem cases uniformly involve generic predicates, and that the inference patterns claimed to be problematic are very plausible when we ensure that only non-generic (episodic and stative) predicates are used. In addition, the trivalent theory makes correct predictions about the original, generic counter-examples when combined with an off-the-shelf theory of genericity. The ability of the trivalent semantics to account for this complex interaction with genericity thus appears as a strong argument in its favor.

The core doctrine of supersubstantivalism is that material objects are identical to their spacetime locations. One powerful consideration for the view is the argument from harmony—supersubstantivalism, it is claimed, is in a position to offer an elegant explanation of a number of platitudes concerning objects and their locations. However, I will argue that identifying material objects with their locations does not provide a satisfying explanation of harmony. What the supersubstantivalist needs is not a theory about the identity of objects, but another theory about the identity of some relations. This paper proposes such a theory and shows that with it in place, the argument from harmony can be repaired.

Some philosophers contend that concomitant ignorance preserves moral responsibility for wrongdoing. An agent is concomitantly ignorant with respect to wrongdoing if and only if her ignorance is non-culpable, but she would freely have performed the same action if she were not ignorant. I, however, argue that concomitant ignorance excuses. I show that leading accounts of moral responsibility imply that concomitant ignorance excuses, and I debunk the view that concomitant ignorance preserves moral responsibility.

Definite group nouns, such as “the deck of cards,” raise two important kinds of problems. Philosophically, they raise the ancient Problem of the Many: How can one deck be many cards? Linguistically, they threaten paradox: If such expressions singularly refer to groups as set-like entities, then analyses employing such entities threaten to be incoherent, due to Russell's paradox. On the other hand, no paradox is threatened if, per the suggestion of Alex Oliver and Timothy Smiley, “the deck of cards” is a pseudo-singular term, that is, a term which is syntactically singular but semantically plural, exploiting the primitive relation of plural reference. Against this, we argue that pseudo-singularity is linguistically and logically untenable. As such, it will not plausibly solve either kind of problem raised by definite group nouns.

Non-reflectivist real self views claim that people are morally responsible for all and only those bits of conduct that express their true values and cares, regardless of whether they have endorsed them or not. A phenomenon that is widely cited in support of these views is inverse akrasia, that is, cases in which a person is praiseworthy for having done the right thing for the right reasons despite her considered judgment that what she did was wrong. In this paper I show that non-reflectivist real self views are problematic by focusing on the related but neglected phenomenon of inverse enkrasia, which occurs when an agent commits wrongdoing by following a mistaken evaluative judgment that, unbeknownst to her, runs contrary to her true values and cares. Intuitively, inverse enkratics are blameworthy for their actions although the latter don't express their real selves; therefore, non-reflectivist real self views are false. I assess the implications of this result for the viability of the quality of will paradigm and conclude that the latter survives unscathed to the problems besetting real self views. The lesson is that defenders of the quality of will paradigm should stop talking about real selves altogether.

The chief motivation for epiphenomenalist dualism is its promise to solve dualism's causal exclusion problem without inducing causal overdetermination or violations of the causal closure of the physical. This paper argues that epiphenomenalist dualism is itself susceptible to an exclusion problem. The problem exploits symmetries of determination and influence generated by a wide class of physical theories. Further, I argue that there is an interference effect between solving epiphenomenalist dualism's exclusion problem and using epiphenomenalist dualism as a solution to the causal exclusion problem. What emerges is an overlooked, empirically motivated challenge to epiphenomenalist dualism.

Some have claimed that identity crowding is a case where we consciously see an object to which we are unable to pay attention. Opponents of this view offer alternative explanations, which emphasise the importance of prior knowledge, amongst other factors. We review new empirical evidence showing that prior knowledge has a profound effect on identity crowding. We argue that this is problematic for the “conscious seeing without attention” view, and supports an opposing view.

Instances of natural beauty are widely regarded as counterexamples to practice-based theories of aesthetic value. They are not. To see that they are not, we require the correct account of natural beauty and the correct account of social practices.

Evaluativism by Carruthers and reflexive imperativism by Barlassina and Hayward agree that valence—the (un)pleasantness of experiences—is a natural kind shared across all affective states. But they disagree about what valence is. For evaluativism, an experience is pleasant/unpleasant in virtue of representing its worldly object as good/bad; for reflexive imperativism, an experience is pleasant/unpleasant in virtue of commanding its subject to get more/less of itself. I argue that reflexive imperativism is superior to evaluativism according to Carruthers's own standards. He maintains that a theory of valence should account for its phenomenology and role in imagination-based decision-making. I show that it is reflexive imperativism, rather than evaluativism, that fits this explanatory bill.

Definite articles and demonstratives share many features in common including a related etymology and a number of parallel communicative functions. The following paper is concerned with developing a novel proposal on how to distinguish the two types of expression. First, crosslinguistic evidence is presented to argue that demonstratives contain locational markers that are employed in deictic uses to force contrastive focus and accentuate an intended referent against a contextual background. Conversely, definite articles lack such markers. Demonstratives are thus more likely to force referential interpretations, whereas definite descriptions are more open to attributive ones. Second, an analysis of determiner phrases is provided to illustrate that certain syntactic projections capture deictic differences between the two expressions. Semantic correlates of the proposal are then considered before it is situated with respect to contemporary work distinguishing the two categories on the basis of a non-redundancy condition (that the overt noun phrase complement of a demonstrativemay not denote a singleton set), which I suggest is derivative on the presence of contrastive deictic markers in demonstratives.

According to perceptual accounts of mindreading, we can see, rather than cognize, other people's mental states. On one version of this approach, certain mental properties figure in the contents of our perceptual experiences. In a recent paper, Varga has appealed to empirical research to argue that intentions and emotions can indeed be seen, rather than cognized. In this paper, I argue that none of the evidence adduced to support the perceptual account of mindreading shows that we see mental properties, as opposed to non-mental properties.

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.

It has been argued recently that perception is indeterminate. But there are more than one ways of spelling out what this means. The standard line is that perceptual states attribute different probabilities to different propositions. I provide an alternative to this view, where it is not the attitude, but the content of perceptual states that is indeterminate, inasmuch as it consists of the representation of determinable properties. This view does justice to the more general claim that perception is indeterminate without appealing to probability either in the attitude or in the content.

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.

List (2014, 2019) has recently argued for a particular view of free will as a higher-level phenomenon compatible with determinism. According to List, one could refute his account by showing that determinism at the physical level implies the impossibility of doing otherwise at the agential level. This paper takes up that challenge. Based on assumptions to which List's approach is committed, I provide a simple probabilistic model that establishes the connection between physical determinism and the impossibility of doing otherwise at the agential level that is needed to refute free will as a higher-level phenomenon.

This paper presents a new semantics for the weak relevant logic DW that makes the role of the infamous Routley star more explicable. Central to this rewriting is combining aspects of both the American and Australian plan for understanding negations in relevance logics.

Some have argued that no analysis of counterfactual conditionals can succeed without appealing to causal notions. Such authors claim that, in determining what would transpire had some events gone differently, we hold fixed everything that is causally independent from those events. Call this view Causal Independence. Some have argued that we need Causal Independence to accommodate intuitive judgments about certain kinds of counterfactuals in indeterministic worlds. The aim of this paper is to show that, contra these authors, Causal Independence systematically delivers counterintuitive results for a certain subset of such counterfactuals-namely, those involving causation by double prevention. I conclude that intuitions about such counterfactuals do not motivate Causal Independence, at least in any form in which it has thus far been articulated. However, I suggest that a refined Causal Independence thesis that presupposes a kind of causal pluralism might be able to accommodate these intuitions, though such a refined version of Causal Independence may not conflict with reductive analyses of causal notions that appeal to counterfactuals after all.