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524Private Schools and Queue‐jumping: A reply to WhiteJournal of Philosophy of Education 54 (5): 1201-1205. 2020.John White (2016) defends the UK private school system from the accusation that it allows an unfair form of ‘queue jumping’ in university admissions. He offers two responses to this accusation, one based on considerations of harm, and one based on meritocratic distribution of university places. We will argue that neither response succeeds: the queue-jumping argument remains a powerful case against the private school system in the UK. We begin by briefly outlining the queue-jumping argument (§1),…Read more
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518Alethic undecidability doesn’t solve the LiarAnalysis 76 (3): 278-283. 2016.Stephen Barker presents a novel approach to solving semantic paradoxes, including the Liar and its variants and Curry’s paradox. His approach is based around the concept of alethic undecidability. His approach, if successful, renders futile all attempts to assign semantic properties to the paradoxical sentences, whilst leaving classical logic fully intact. And, according to Barker, even the T-scheme remains valid, for validity is not undermined by undecidable instances. Barker’s approach is inno…Read more
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501Predictive accounts of belief ascription, either following the principle of charity or Dennett's intentional stance, have proved popular recently. However, such accounts require us first to treat agents as perfectly rational agents and then revise this assumption as appropriate. I argue that such downwards revision is no easy task and that several proposed accounts are not satisfactory. I propose a way of characterising agent's belief states which shares Dennett's approach but avoids treating ag…Read more
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456Grounding is a powerful metaphysical concept; yet there is widespread scepticism about the intelligibility of the notion. In this paper, I propose an account of an entity’s nature or essence, which I then use to provide grounding conditions for that entity. I claim that an understanding of an entity’s nature, together with an account of how logically complex entities are grounded, provides all we need to understand how that entity is grounded. This approach not only allows us to say what grounds…Read more
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452Review of Douglas Edwards, The Metaphysics of Truth (review)Mind 128 (511). 2019.There has recently been a revival of interest in what truth is. For a long time, deflationism ruled the roost, telling us that there’s not much of metaphysical
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442Syntactic logics do not suffer from the problems of logical omniscience but are often thought to lack interesting properties relating to epistemic notions. By focusing on the case of rule-based agents, I develop a framework for modelling resource-bounded agents and show that the resulting models have a number of interesting properties.
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394Modal realism, still at your convenienceAnalysis 77 (2): 299-303. 2017.Divers presents a set of de re modal truths which, he claims, are inconvenient for Lewisean modal realism. We argue that there is no inconvenience for Lewis.
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296Logic for Exact EntailmentReview of Symbolic Logic 12 (3): 536-556. 2019.An exact truthmaker for A is a state which, as well as guaranteeing A’s truth, is wholly relevant to it. States with parts irrelevant to whether A is true do not count as exact truthmakers for A. Giving semantics in this way produces a very unusual consequence relation, on which conjunctions do not entail their conjuncts. This feature makes the resulting logic highly unusual. In this paper, we set out formal semantics for exact truthmaking and characterise the resulting notion of entailment, sho…Read more
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270The Impossible: An Essay on HyperintensionalityOxford University Press. 2014.Mark Jago presents an original philosophical account of meaningful thought: in particular, how it is meaningful to think about things that are impossible. We think about impossible things all the time. We can think about alchemists trying to turn base metal to gold, and about unfortunate mathematicians trying to square the circle. We may ponder whether God exists; and philosophers frequently debate whether properties, numbers, sets, moral and aesthetic qualities, and qualia exist. In many philo…Read more
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220Setting the Facts StraightJournal of Philosophical Logic 40 (1): 33-54. 2011.Substantial facts are not well-understood entities. Many philosophers object to their existence on this basis. Yet facts, if they can be understood, promise to do a lot of philosophical work: they can be used to construct theories of property possession and truthmaking, for example. Here, I give a formal theory of facts, including negative and logically complex facts. I provide a theory of reduction similar to that of the typed λ -calculus and use it to provide identity conditions for facts. Thi…Read more
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193What Truth IsOxford University Press. 2018.Mark Jago presents and defends a novel theory of what truth is, in terms of the metaphysical notion of truthmaking. This is the relation which holds between a truth and some entity in the world, in virtue of which that truth is true. By coming to an understanding of this relation, he argues, we gain better insight into the metaphysics of truth. The first part of the book discusses the property being true, and how we should understand it in terms of truthmaking. The second part focuses on truthma…Read more
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171Indexicals, fictions, and fictaDialectica 57 (2). 2003.We defend the view that an indexical uttered by an actor works on the model of deferred reference. If it defers to a character which does not exist, it is an empty term, just as ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Ophelia’ are. The utterance in which it appears does not express a proposition and thus lacks a truth value. We advocate an ontologically parsimonious, anti-realist, position. We show how the notion of truth in our use and understanding of indexicals (and fictional names) as they appear within a fiction is …Read more
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170Preference-based belief revision for rule-based agentsSynthese 165 (2): 159-177. 2008.Agents which perform inferences on the basis of unreliable information need an ability to revise their beliefs if they discover an inconsistency. Such a belief revision algorithm ideally should be rational, should respect any preference ordering over the agent’s beliefs (removing less preferred beliefs where possible) and should be fast. However, while standard approaches to rational belief revision for classical reasoners allow preferences to be taken into account, they typically have quite hig…Read more
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169Theodore Sider: The Tools of Metaphysics and the Metaphysics of Science (review)Journal of Philosophy 118 (1): 51-55. 2021.
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163Impossible WorldsOxford University Press. 2013.We need to understand the impossible. Francesco Berto and Mark Jago start by considering what the concepts of meaning, information, knowledge, belief, fiction, conditionality, and counterfactual supposition have in common. They are all concepts which divide the world up more finely than logic does. Logically equivalent sentences may carry different meanings and information and may differ in how they're believed. Fictions can be inconsistent yet meaningful. We can suppose impossible things withou…Read more
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161Epistemic logic for rule-based agentsJournal of Logic, Language and Information 18 (1): 131-158. 2009.The logical omniscience problem, whereby standard models of epistemic logic treat an agent as believing all consequences of its beliefs and knowing whatever follows from what else it knows, has received plenty of attention in the literature. But many attempted solutions focus on a fairly narrow specification of the problem: avoiding the closure of belief or knowledge, rather than showing how the proposed logic is of philosophical interest or of use in computer science or artificial intelligence.…Read more
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154The Accidental Properties of Numbers and PropertiesThought: A Journal of Philosophy 1 (2): 134-140. 2012.According to genuine modal realism, some things (including numbers and properties) lack distinct counterparts in different worlds. So how can they possess any of their properties contingently? Egan (2004) argues that to explain such accidental property possession, the genuine modal realist must depart from Lewis and identify properties with functions, rather than with sets of possibilia. We disagree. The genuine modal realist already has the resources to handle Egan's proposed counterexamples. A…Read more
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121Truthmaker account of propositionsIn Chris Tillman & Adam Murray (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Propositions, Routledge. 2022.
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91Impossible WorldsOxford University Press. 2019.Impossible Worlds focuses on an exciting new theory in philosophy, with applications in metaphysics, logic, and the theory of meaning. Its central topic is: how do we meaningfully talk and reason about situations which, unbeknownst to us, are impossible? This issue emerges as a central problem in contemporary philosophical accounts of meaning, information, knowledge, belief, fiction, conditionality, and counterfactual supposition. The book is written bytwo of the leading philosophers in the area…Read more
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82Properties, by Douglas Edwards: Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014, pp. xiii + 181, £15.99Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (3): 626-626. 2015.Review of Properties, by Douglas Edwards (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014)
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81Resource-bounded belief revision and contractionIn P. Torroni, U. Endriss, M. Baldoni & A. Omicini (eds.), Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies III, Springer. pp. 141--154. 2006.Agents need to be able to change their beliefs; in particular, they should be able to contract or remove a certain belief in order to restore consistency to their set of beliefs, and revise their beliefs by incorporating a new belief which may be inconsistent with their previous beliefs. An influential theory of belief change proposed by Alchourron, G¨ardenfors and Makinson (AGM) [1] describes postulates which a rational belief revision and contraction operations should satisfy. The AGM postulat…Read more
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77Joe Salerno (ed): New essays on the knowability paradox (review)Journal of Logic, Language and Information 19 (3): 383-387. 2010.
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70On ways of being trueSynthese 202 (1): 1-16. 2023.There are many ways for truths to be true. How should we understand that idea? One is that there are different kinds of truth: the _ways_ are different truth-like properties. Another understanding is that a truth can be made true in different ways, by different kinds of entities. The former understanding supports alethic pluralism. But the latter can be understood as a kind of monism: truth is the existential property of having some truthmaker or other. On this view, the differences reside in ho…Read more
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70Knowing how things might have beenSynthese 198 (S8): 1981-1999. 2018.I know that I could have been where you are right now and that you could have been where I am right now, but that neither of us could have been turnips or natural numbers. This knowledge of metaphysical modality stands in need of explanation. I will offer an account based on our knowledge of the natures, or essencess, of things. I will argue that essences need not be viewed as metaphysically bizarre entities; that we can conceptualise and refer to essences; and that we can gain knowledge of them…Read more
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69Mumford on Absence & NothingAnalysis 83 (1): 186-197. 2022.Who wouldn’t want to hear it said of their new book, ‘nothing would improve this’? Stephen Mumford wouldn’t! His Absence & Nothing: The Philosophy of What T.
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64Knowing what it isPhilosophical Studies 1-16. forthcoming.Essentialists understand modal properties in terms of the essences of things. Given this view, it is natural to think that our knowledge of modality ultimately derives from our knowledge of the essences of things. Is that view plausible? Do we genuinely have knowledge of the essences of things, in a form substantial enough to ground our modal knowledge? The more we pack into the notion of essence to allow it to underpin modal properties, the harder it is to claim genuine knowledge. I will argue …Read more
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62Essential bundle theory and modalitySynthese 198 (S6): 1439-1454. 2018.Bundle theories identify material objects with bundles of properties. On the traditional approach, these are the properties possessed by that material object. That view faces a deep problem: it seems to say that all of an object’s properties are essential to it.Essential bundle theoryattempts to overcome this objection, by taking the bundle as a specification of the object’s essential properties only. In this paper, I show that essential bundle theory faces a variant of the objection. To avoid t…Read more
Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Philosophy of Language |
Epistemology |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Metaphilosophy |
Philosophy of Language |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |