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138Defending "Restricted Particularism" from Jackson, Pettit & SmithTheoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 23 (2). 2008.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 tha…Read more
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5Review of Crispin Wright, Saving the Differences: Essays on Themes from Truth and Objectivity (review)Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 24 (2): 125-129. 2005.Review of *Saving the Differences* by Crispin Wright
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119Is 'everything' precise?Dialectica 60 (4). 2006.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 v…Read more
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90The Non-circularity Constraint: Peacocke vs. PeacockeTeorema: International Journal of Philosophy 22 (1-2): 85-93. 2003.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 principle…Read more
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157Presuppositions of commonality: An indexical relativist account of disagreementIn G. García-Carpintero & M. Koelbel (eds.), Relative Truth, Oxford University Press. pp. 297-310. 2008.This chapter defends a version of the indexical contextualist form of moderate relativism: the attempt to endorse appearances of faultless disagreement within the framework in which a sentence at a context at the index of the context determines its appropriate truth-value. Many object that any such an indexical proposal would fail to account for intuitions of (genuine) disagreement as revealed in ordinary disputes in the domain. The defence from this objection exploits presuppositions of commona…Read more
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80Audience in ContextErkenntnis 79 (1): 241-253. 2014.In recent discussions on contextualism and relativism, some have suggested that audience-sensitivity motivates a content relativist version of radical relativism, according to which a sentence as said at a context can have different contents with respect to the different perspectives from where it is assessed. The first aim of this note is to illustrate how this is not so. According to Egan himself, the phenomenon motivates at least refinement of the characteristic moderate contention that featu…Read more
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125Does this sentence have no truthmaker?Analysis 66 (2). 2006.Reponse to Peter Milne (2005)'s argument agaist maximalism about truthmaking.
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75The Chief Supreme Court Justice: a metaphysical puzzle?Critica 39 (115): 61-68. 2007.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 a…Read more
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215Lewis vs Lewis on the problem of the manySynthese 191 (6): 1105-1117. 2014.Consider a cat on a mat. On the one hand, there seems to be just one cat, but on the other there seem to be many things with as good a claim as anything in the vicinity to being a cat. Hence, the problem of the many. In his ‘Many, but Almost One,’ David Lewis offered two solutions. According to the first, only one of the many is indeed a cat, although it is indeterminate exactly which one. According to the second, the many are all cats, but they are almost identical to each other, and hence they…Read more
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Non-objective truths: Comments on Kölbel's criterion for objectivity: Philosophy of languageTheoria 15 (38): 229-234. 2000.Response to Max Kölbel: "A Criterion for Objectivity", Theoria. Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia: Volume > 15 > Issue: 2
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103Vagueness as Semantic Indecision: Metaphysical Vagueness vs Indeterminate ReferenceMetaphysica 14 (2): 197-209. 2013.After presenting a negative characterization of metaphysical vagueness and the main tenets of the view of vagueness as semantic indecision, the paper critically discusses the objection that such a view requires that at least some vagueness not be just constituted by semantic indecision—but rather by the metaphysical vagueness of some semantic relations themselves submitted by Trenton Merricks and, more recently, Nathan Salmon.
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61Relativizing utterance-truth?Synthese 170 (1): 1-5. 2009.In recent years, some people have held that a radical relativist position is defensible in some philosophically interesting cases, including future contingents, predicates of personal taste, evaluative predicates in general, epistemic modals, and knowledge attributions. The position is frequently characterized as denying that utterance-truth is absolute. I argue that this characterization is inappropriate, as it requires a metaphysical substantive contention with which moderate views as such nee…Read more
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141Disjunctions, Conjunctions, and their TruthmakersMind 118 (470): 417-425. 2009.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 pla…Read more
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77Flexible property designatorsGrazer Philosophische Studien 73 (1): 221-230. 2006.Th e simple proposal about rigidity for predicates can be stated thus: a predicate is rigid if its canonical nominalization signifi es the same property across the different possible worlds. I have tried elsewhere to defend such a proposal from the trivialization problem, according to which any predicate whatsoever would turn out to be rigid. Benjamin Schnieder (2005) aims fi rst to rebut my argument that some canonical nominalizations can be fl exible, then to provide fi ve arguments to the eff ect …Read more
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3Non-objective Truths: Comments on Kölbel's Criterion for ObjectivityTheoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 15 (2): 209-228. 2000.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 tr…Read more
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61Rigidity for predicates and the trivialization problemPhilosophers' Imprint 8 1-13. 2008.According to the simple proposal about rigidity for predicates, a predicate is rigid (roughly) if it signifies the same property across the relevant worlds. Recent critics claim that this suffers from a trivialization problem: any predicate whatsoever would turn out to be trivially rigid, according to the proposal. In this paper a corresponding "problem" for ordinary singular terms is considered. A natural solution is provided by intuitions concerning the actual truth-value of identity statement…Read more
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91Response-Dependencies: Colors and ValuesDissertation, Barcelona. 2003.Tesis doctoral presentada en el departament de Lògica Història i Filosofia de la Ciencia de la Universitat de Barcelona per optar al títol de Doctor en Filosofia.
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6Relativismo y operadoresTeorema: International Journal of Philosophy 29 (1): 81-94. 2010.Critical notica (in Spanish) of *Relativism and Monadic Truth* (OUP 2009), by Cappelen and Hawthorne.
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63How to Respond to Borderline CasesIn Sebastiano Moruzzi & Richard Dietz (eds.), Cuts and Clouds, Oxford University Press. 2010.Some philosophers seem to think that borderline cases provide further cases of apparent faultless disagreement. My aim here is to argue against such a suggestion. I claim that with respect to borderline cases, people typically do not respond by taking a view—unlike what is the case in genuine cases of apparent faultless disagreement. I argue that my claim is indeed respected and actually accounted for by paradigm cases of semantic and epistemic views on the nature of vagueness. And I also argue …Read more
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90The makings of truth : realism, response-dependence, and relativismIn Cory D. Wright & Nikolaj Pedersen (eds.), New Waves in Truth, Palgrave-macmillan. 2010.This paper is in five sections. In the first one, I summarize some views on truthmaking I will be presupposing, emphasizing however the various controversies on which I will remain neutral. In section two and three, I present the characterization of a response-dependent property. In section four, I present two ways in which a property can be response-dependent, in the characterized sense. In final section five, I present how these correspond to different versions of moderate relativism, namely i…Read more
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68On the semantic indecision of vague singular termsSorites 19 88-91. 2007.Donald Smith (2006) argues that if ‘I’ is indeed vague, and the view of vagueness as semantic indecision correct after all, then ‘I’ cannot refer to a composite material object. But his considerations would, if sound, also establish that ‘Tibbles,’ ‘Everest,’ or ‘Toronto,’ do not refer to composite material objects either—nor hence, presumably, to cats, mountains, or cities. And they can be resisted, anyway. Or so I argue.
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65The Aposteriori Response-Dependence of the ColorsCroatian Journal of Philosophy 13 (1): 65-79. 2013.The paper proposes and defends the following characterization of response dependent property: a property is response-dependent iff there is a response-dependence biconditional for a concept signifying it which holds in virtue of the nature of the property. Finding out whether a property is such is to a large extent a posteriori matter. Finally, colors are response dependent: they are essentially tied to issuing the relevant experiences, so that having those experiences does give access to their,…Read more
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ICREAProfessor
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Barcelona, CT, Spain
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |