Roy Sorensen

Imagine a child playing in the afternoon sun, suddenly jerking her arm one way then the other, trying to catch her shadow out. The game, the child soon learns, is one that she can never win. Her shadow moves the moment she does. Such childish games father common sense wisdom; when things move, so do their shadows. Or do they? A spinning sphere casts a shadow. But does its shadow also spin? The question takes you by surprise. Surely not? you think. But then again, why not? This is the trope of Sorensen’s work. A seemingly simple phenomenon is probed in just the right way and, without warning, you are unsure what to say.

This is a reply to Casey O'Callaghan and Jonathan Westphal’s comments on Seeing Dark Things: The Philosophy of Shadows. Both attempt to soften the blow to intuition that comes from the most controversial thesis of the book: we see the backs of back-lit objects. Each characterizes the viewing of silhouettes as a kind of marginal seeing that only discloses shapes, sizes and location. In response, photographs are presented to show that silhouettes are typically three-dimensional and they often have internal structure. Consider the silhouette of a bird fluttering inside a cage; we see more than the outline of the cage. Orbiting this main point are subsidiary points about the distinction between shade and shadows, the nature of occlusion, the color black, and peculiarities of absent absences.

Rorty goes on to connect the sorites paradox to analytic philosophy’s long standing concern with the correspondence theory of truth. How do our words hook up with reality? Do our categories map pre-existing contours? The nominalist answers that “facts” are just projections of our forms of speech. Rorty characterizes epistemicism as a hyper-realist backlash. In addition to thinking that our scientific terminology cuts nature at the joint, the epistemicist asserts that even the vague vocabulary of common sense has sharp thresholds.

"Logic and ethics are fundamentally the same, they are not more than duty to oneself"(Otto Weininger). So goes the head quotation of Ray Monk's biography Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. Monk thereby introduces Wittgenstein's peculiar admiration for the crackpot author of Sex and Character along with Wittgenstein's moralistic dedication to logic. Monk elaborates with anecdotes. For instance, Wittgenstein would pace Bertrand Russell's room mixing logic with selfcriticism. Russell asked Wittgenstein whether he was thinking about logic or his sins. "Both!" barked Wittgenstein.

This enjoyable book presents a potpourri of paradoxes with the purpose of showing how they connect to serious philosophical issues. The main paradoxes are Zeno's, the sorites, Newcomb's problem, the paradoxes of confirmation, the surprise examination, and the paradoxes of self-reference. A final chapter defends the assumption that contradictions are unacceptable and an appendix throws in sixteen minor paradoxes. Along the way, R. M. Sainsbury peppers the reader with helpful queries and provocative asides.

A para‐reflection is a privational phenomenon that is often mistaken for a reflection. You have seen them as the ‘reflection’ of your pupil in the mirror. Your iris reflects light in the standard way but your pupil absorbs all but a negligible amount of light (as do other dark things such as coal and black velvet). Para‐reflections work by contrast. Since they are parasitic on their host reflections, para‐reflections are relational and dependent in a way that reflections are not. Nevertheless, para‐reflections obey nearly all the laws of reflection with exquisite fidelity. Para‐refractions display parallel obedience to the laws governing refraction. Physicists and psychologists who study optics have neglected these everyday phenomena. Happily, physicists have been attentive and insightful about other privational phenomena such as vacuums and cold spots. I conclude that this kind of subtle treatment of negative things needs to be extended to optics.1 The invisible red herring2 Mind‐independent privations3 Para‐reflections are mind‐independent4 Parasitical entities5 Para‐refractions and shadows6 How science has coped with privations.

Ockham's razor is popularly phrased as a prohibition against multiplying entities beyond necessity. This prohibition should extend to the receptacle for these entities. To state my thesis more positively and precisely, both qualitative and quantitative parsimony apply to space, time, and possibility. All other things equal, we ought to prefer a hypothesis that postulates less space. Smaller is better. Admittedly, scientists are ambivalent about economizing on the void. They praise simplicity. Yet astronomers have a history of helping themselves to as much empty space as they wish—staggering common sense with the vastness of the universe. This largesse is abetted by an aesthetic bias for sublime hypotheses. Whereas abductions based on beauty converge with parsimony, abductions based on the sublime diverge from parsimony. Awe stifles our inner accountant. Both types of abduction are popular. Both are dubious because we lack independent assurance that the universe is beautiful or sublime. The analogy between space and time supports an extension of parsimony to time. Uniformitarian geologists regarded time as a free resource. However, geologists and cosmologists must justify their postulation of an immense past. Possibility follows suit. Contrary to David Lewis, possible worlds should be minimized. Parsimony about possibilities provides a rationale for parsimony about absences. Absences are possibilities that are not actual. So proliferation of absences entails proliferation of possibilities. We should admit only those absences which do explanatory work.

A para-reflection is a privational phenomenon that is often mistaken for a reflection. You have seen them as the ‘reflection’ of your pupil in the mirror. Your iris reflects light in the standard way but your pupil absorbs all but a negligible amount of light (as do other dark things such as coal and black velvet). Para-reflections work by contrast. Since they are parasitic on their host reflections, para-reflections are relational and dependent in a way that reflections are not. Nevertheless, para-reflections obey nearly all the laws of reflection with exquisite fidelity. Para-refractions display parallel obedience to the laws governing refraction. Physicists and psychologists who study optics have neglected these everyday phenomena. Happily, physicists have been attentive and insightful about other privational phenomena such as vacuums and cold spots. I conclude that this kind of subtle treatment of negative things needs to be extended to optics. 1 The invisible red herring 2 Mind-independent privations 3 Para-reflections are mind-independent 4 Parasitical entities 5 Para-refractions and shadows 6 How science has coped with privations.

If you read this abstract, then you will understand what my essay is about. Under what conditions would the preceding assertion be a lie? Traditional definitions of lying are always applied to straight declaratives such as ‘The dog ate my homework’. This one sided diet of examples leaves us unprepared for sentences in which conditional probability governs assertibility. The truth-value of conditionals does not play a significant role in the sincere assertion of conditionals. Lying is insincere assertion. So the connection between lying and falsehood is broken when lying with conditionals. Drawing on Frank Jackson's account of indicative conditionals. I argue that it is possible to lie with true conditionals by virtue of their false conventional implicatures. False conversational implicatures only guarantee misleading assertions, not lies. Lying remains a semantic rather than a pragmatic affair.

In ‘Epistemic Modals’ (2007), Seth Yalcin proposes Stalnaker-style semantics for epistemic possibility. He is inspired by John MacFarlane’s ingenious defence of relativism, in which claims of epistemic possibility are made rigidly from the perspective of the assessor’s actual stock of information (rather than from the speaker’s knowledge base or that of his audience or community). The innovations of MacFarlane and Yalcin independently reinforce the modal collapse espoused by Jaakko Hintikka in his 1962 epistemic logic (which relied on the implausible KK principle and heavy idealizations). I respond to this new challenge with fresh objections to the underlying S4 equivalence: p p . I also propose counter-analyses of the intriguing data which Yalcin cites in support of his new semantics. A key collateral motivation for this defence of irredundant iterations is to ward off a threat to higher order vagueness

My thesis is that you can lie with ‘ P therefore Q ’ without P or Q being lies. For you can lie by virtue of not believing that P supports Q. My thesis is reconciled with the principle that all lies are assertions through H. P. Grice’s account of conventional implicatures. These semantic cousins of conversational implicatures are secondary assertions that clarify the speaker’s attitude toward his primary assertions. The meaning of ‘therefore’ commits the speaker to an entailment thesis even though the speaker does not enter that commitment into the text. Insincere conventional implicatures are akin to insincerely asserted footnotes. An absence of lies in the text is compatible with the presence of lies in the meta-text.

Creationists believe that C. K. Chesterton created Father Brown in his detective stories. Since creating implies a creation, Father Brown exists. Atheists object that the same reasoning could prove the existence of God. But creationists such as Jonathan Schaffer insist atheists do believe that God exists. Serious metaphysics rarely concerns existence. The disagreement between the theist and the atheist is about the nature of God, not His existence. Schaffer underestimates the religious imagination. There could be a religion that explicitly regarded God as a fictional character. The tenets of this, presently hypothetical, religion are developed in a dialogue.

In “The Reappearing Act” István Aranyosi postulates a new way of seeing to solve a puzzle posed in “The Disappearing Act;” an object that is exactly shaded can be seen simply by virtue of its contrast with its environment – just like a shadow. This object need not reflect, refract, absorb or block light. To undermine the motive for this heretical innovation, I generalize the puzzle to situations involving inexact shading. Aranyosi cannot extend his solution to these variations because he needs to conserve principles of camouflage. On the bright side, the solution to the puzzle that I propose in my book Seeing Dark Things does extend to these variations.

In ”Formal Problems about Knowledge,” Roy Sorensen examines epistemological issues that have logical aspects. He uses Fitch's proof for unknowables and the surprise test paradox to illustrate the hopes of the modal logicians who developed epistemic logic, and he considers the epistemology of proof with the help of the knower paradox. One solution to this paradox is that knowledge is not closed under deduction. Sorensen reviews the broader history of this maneuver along with the relevant alternatives model of knowledge which assumes that ”know” is an absolute term like ”flat.” Sorensen argues that the difference between epistemic absolute terms and extensional absolute terms gives rise to an asymmetry that undermines recent claims that there is a structural parallel between the supervaluational and epistemicist theories of vagueness, and he suggests that we have overestimated the ability of logical demonstration to produce knowledge.

The poster boy for my paper is the King's Messenger in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. Recall that since the White Queen lives backwards, her memory works forwards. She pities Alice who can only remember things after they happen. Alice asks which things the Queen remembers best: `Oh, things that happened the week after next,' the Queen replied in a careless tone. `For instance, . . . there's the King's Messenger. He's in prison now, being punished: and the trial doesn't even begin till next Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all.' (Chapter V) Is the King's Messenger being treated unjustly? Why not prepunish people for their future crimes? True, it is generally easier to have knowledge about past crimes than future crimes. But is unpredictability the only problem with prepunishment?