Dan López de Sa

I enjoyed reading Max Kölbel's deep and interesting paper. I have learned a lot about points and arguments I am not entirely familiar with, and it has helped me to articulate better my own intuitions about the subject. In particular I share with him the intuition I would now articulate as follows: there are contents p of utterances of declarative sentences like, for instance, 'Licorice is tasty', such that it is not an objective matter whether p. This is the claim that there are non-objective truths and falsehoods, and it is a plain consequence of global truth-evaluability, i.e. the view according to which the content of utterances of all declarative sentences are truth-evaluable. For in this case one, unless radical objectivist, has to accept that for some such contents it is not an objective matter if they are true nor it is an objective matter if they are false. And Kölbel has presented some reasons for such global truth-evaluability: philosophical and linguistic semantics presupposes it, classical logical validity presupposes it, and we do in fact attribute truth to contents of utterances of declarative sentences of any sort.

According to Jackson, Pettit & Smith , “restricted particularism” is not affected by their supervenience-based consideration against particularism but, they claim, suffer from a different difficulty, roughly that it would violate the platitude about moral argument that, in debating controversial moral issues, a central role is played by various similarity claims. I present a defense of “restricted particularism” from this objection, which accommodates the platitudinous character of the claim that ordinary participants in conversations concerning the evaluative are committed to descriptive similarities and differences being relevant in the way described by Jackson, Pettit and Smith, to moral similarities and differences. My defense exploits a presuppositional component congenial to response-dependent proposals such as Lewis’s

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (2006) argues against attempts to preserve the entailment principle (or a restriction of it) while avoiding the explosion of truthmakers for necessities and truthmaker triviality. In doing so, he both defends the disjunction thesis--if something makes true a disjunctive truth, then it makes true one of its disjuncts--, and rejects the conjunction thesis--if something makes tue a conjunctive truth, then it makes true each of its conjuncts. In my discussion, I provide plausible counterexamples to the disjunction thesis, and contend that Rodriguez-Pereyra's general defence of it fails. Then I defend the conjunction thesis from Rodriguez-Pereyra's case against it.

According to the view that Peacocke elaborates in A Study of Concepts (1992), a concept can be individuated by providing the conditions a thinker must satisfy in order to possess that concept. Hence possessions conditions for concepts should be specifiable in a way that respects a non-circularity constraint. In a more recent paper “Implicit Conceptions, Understanding and Rationality” (1998a) Peacocke argues against his former view, in the light of the phenomenon of rationally accepting principles which do not follow from what the thinker antecedently accepts. In this paper I defend the view of the book from his more recent criticisms, claiming that the noncircularity constraint should be respected, and that Peacocke's more recent insights could be accommodated in the framework of his former theory of concepts.

What are things like the Supreme Court? Gabriel Uzquiano has defended that they are groups, entities which are somehow composed of members (at certain times) but which, unlike sets (or pluralities), allow for fluctuation in membership. The main alternative holds that 'the Supreme Court' refers (at any time) to the set (or plurality) of their members (at the time). Uzquiano motivates his view by posing a metaphysical puzzle for this reductive alternative. I argue that a parallel reasoning would also find a corresponding 'puzzle' in the case of singular terms like 'The Chief Supreme Court Justice'.

There are certain metaphysically interesting arguments ‘from vagueness’, for unrestricted mereological composition and for four-dimensionalism, which involve a claim to the effect that idioms for unrestricted quantification are precise. An elaboration of Lewis’ argument for this claim, which assumes the view of vagueness as semantic indecision, is presented. It is argued that the argument also works according to other views on the nature of vagueness, which also require for an expression to be vague that there are different admissible alternatives of the relevant sort, such as epistemicism, as defended by Williamson. Recent attempts to resist the argument are discussed and rejected.