-
618Modal Realism, Still At Your ConvenienceAnalysis. 2016.Divers (2014) 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.
-
1044The Conjunction and Disjunction ThesesMind 118 (470): 411-415. 2009.Rodriguez-Pereyra (2006) argues for the disjunction thesis but against the conjunction thesis. I argue that accepting the disjunction thesis undermines his argument against the conjunction thesis.
-
619Hintikka and Cresswell on Logical OmniscienceLogic and Logical Philosophy 15 (3): 325-354. 2006.I discuss three ways of responding to the logical omniscience problems faced by traditional ‘possible worlds’ epistemic logics. Two of these responses were put forward by Hintikka and the third by Cresswell; all three have been influential in the literature on epistemic logic. I show that both of Hintikka's responses fail and present some problems for Cresswell’s. Although Cresswell's approach can be amended to avoid certain unpalatable consequences, the resulting formal framework collapses to a…Read more
-
1199Against Yagisawa's modal realismAnalysis 73 (1): 10-17. 2013.In his book Worlds and Individuals, Possible and Otherwise (2010), Takashi Yagisawa presents and argues for a novel and imaginative version of modal realism. It differs both from Lewis’s modal realism (Lewis 1986) and from actualists’ ersatz accounts (Adams 1974; Sider 2002). In this paper, I’ll present two arguments, each of which shows that Yagisawa’s metaphysics is incoherent. The first argument shows that the combination of Yagisawa’s metaphysics with impossibilia leads to triviality: every …Read more
-
1199The Problem with Truthmaker-Gap EpistemicismThought: A Journal of Philosophy 1 (4): 320-329. 2012.Epistemicism about vagueness is the view that vagueness, or indeterminacy, is an epistemic matter. Truthmaker-gap epistemicism is the view that indeterminate truths are indeterminate because their truth is not grounded by any worldly fact. Both epistemicism in general and truthmaker-gap epistemicism originated in Roy Sorensen's work on vagueness. My aim in this paper is to give a characterization of truthmaker-gap epistemicism and argue that the view is incompatible with higher-order vagueness: …Read more
-
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
-
1568Essence and the Grounding ProblemIn Reality Making, Oxford University Press. pp. 99-120. 2016.Pluralists about coincident entities say that distinct entities may be spatially coincident throughout their entire existence. The most pressing issue they face is the grounding problem. They say that coincident entities may differ in their persistence conditions and in the sortals they fall under. But how can they differ in these ways, given that they share all their microphysical properties? What grounds those differences, if not their microphysical properties? Do those differences depend only…Read more
-
77Joe Salerno (ed): New essays on the knowability paradox (review)Journal of Logic, Language and Information 19 (3): 383-387. 2010.
-
1763Propositions and same-saying: introductionSynthese 189 (1): 1-10. 2012.Philosophers often talk about the things we say, or believe, or think, or mean. The things are often called ‘propositions’. A proposition is what one believes, or thinks, or means when one believes, thinks, or means something. Talk about propositions is ubiquitous when philosophers turn their gaze to language, meaning and thought. But what are propositions? Is there a single class of things that serve as the objects of belief, the bearers of truth, and the meanings of utterances? How do our utte…Read more
-
943Propositions as Truthmaker ConditionsArgumenta 2 (2): 293-308. 2017.Propositions are often aligned with truth-conditions. The view is mistaken, since propositions discriminate where truth conditions do not. Propositions are hyperintensional: they are sensitive to necessarily equivalent differences. I investigate an alternative view on which propositions are truthmaker conditions, understood as sets of possible truthmakers. This requires making metaphysical sense of merely possible states of affairs. The theory that emerges illuminates the semantic phenomena of s…Read more
-
1296The Content of DeductionJournal of Philosophical Logic 42 (2): 317-334. 2013.For deductive reasoning to be justified, it must be guaranteed to preserve truth from premises to conclusion; and for it to be useful to us, it must be capable of informing us of something. How can we capture this notion of information content, whilst respecting the fact that the content of the premises, if true, already secures the truth of the conclusion? This is the problem I address here. I begin by considering and rejecting several accounts of informational content. I then develop an accoun…Read more
-
1118Are Impossible Worlds Trivial?In Vit Puncochar & Petr Svarny (eds.), The Logica Yearbook 2012, College Publications. 2013.Theories of content are at the centre of philosophical semantics. The most successful general theory of content takes contents to be sets of possible worlds. But such contents are very coarse-grained, for they cannot distinguish between logically equivalent contents. They draw intensional but not hyperintensional distinctions. This is often remedied by including impossible as well as possible worlds in the theory of content. Yet it is often claimed that impossible worlds are metaphysically obscu…Read more
-
1559Hyperintensional propositionsSynthese 192 (3): 585-601. 2015.Propositions play a central role in contemporary semantics. On the Russellian account, propositions are structured entities containing particulars, properties and relations. This contrasts sharply with the sets-of-possible-worlds view of propositions. I’ll discuss how to extend the sets-of-worlds view to accommodate fine-grained hyperintensional contents. When this is done in a satisfactory way, I’ll argue, it makes heavy use of entities very much like Russellian tuples. The two notions of propo…Read more
-
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
-
1389The Truthmaker Non-Maximalist's DilemmaMind 121 (484): 903-918. 2012.Amongst those who feel the pull of the truthmaker principle (that truths require for their truth a truthmaker to exist), there is disagreement as to whether it applies to all truths or merely to some distinguished subset. Those in the latter camp, the non-maximalists, argue that there are no ducks in my bath is true not because of something’s existence, but because of the lack of ducks in my bath. Maximalists, by contrast, insist that truths are made true by something’s existence, and so appear …Read more
-
1398Impossible WorldsNoûs 47 (3): 713-728. 2013.Impossible worlds are representations of impossible things and impossible happenings. They earn their keep in a semantic or metaphysical theory if they do the right theoretical work for us. As it happens, a worlds-based account provides the best philosophical story about semantic content, knowledge and belief states, cognitive significance and cognitive information, and informative deductive reasoning. A worlds-based story may also provide the best semantics for counterfactuals. But to function …Read more
-
32Reality Making (edited book)Oxford University Press UK. 2016.What makes up reality, and how? What kinds of entity are fundamental to reality, and how do dependent entities depend on the fundamental ones? How does one entity metaphysically ground another? These questions are central to contemporary metaphysics. The papers in this collection, written by a new generation of metaphysicians, address these and related questions. They investigate the metaphysical concepts of grounding and fundamentality, and the relationship between the fundamental and all the o…Read more
-
654Logical information and epistemic spaceSynthese 167 (2). 2009.Gaining information can be modelled as a narrowing of epistemic space . Intuitively, becoming informed that such-and-such is the case rules out certain scenarios or would-be possibilities. Chalmers’s account of epistemic space treats it as a space of a priori possibility and so has trouble in dealing with the information which we intuitively feel can be gained from logical inference. I propose a more inclusive notion of epistemic space, based on Priest’s notion of open worlds yet which contains …Read more
-
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
-
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
-
2261Recent Work in Relevant LogicAnalysis 73 (3): 526-541. 2013.This paper surveys important work done in relevant logic in the past 10 years.
-
949The cost of truthmaker maximalismCanadian Journal of Philosophy 43 (4): 460-474. 2013.According to truthmaker theory, particular truths are true in virtue of the existence of particular entities. Truthmaker maximalism holds that this is so for all truths. Negative existential and other ‘negative’ truths threaten the position. Despite this, maximalism is an appealing thesis for truthmaker theorists. This motivates interest in parsimonious maximalist theories, which do not posit extra entities for truthmaker duty. Such theories have been offered by David Lewis and Gideon Rosen, Ros…Read more
-
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.
-
1196Advanced Modalizing ProblemsMind 125 (499): 627-642. 2016.I present an internal problem for David Lewis’s genuine modal realism. My aim is to show that his analysis of modality is inconsistent with his metaphysics. I consider several ways of modifying the Lewisian analysis of modality, but argue that none are successful. I argue that the problem also affects theories related to genuine modal realism, including the stage theory of persistence and modal fictionalism.
-
6126Being Positive About Negative FactsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (1): 117-138. 2012.Negative facts get a bad press. One reason for this is that it is not clear what negative facts are. We provide a theory of negative facts on which they are no stranger than positive atomic facts. We show that none of the usual arguments hold water against this account. Negative facts exist in the usual sense of existence and conform to an acceptable Eleatic principle. Furthermore, there are good reasons to want them around, including their roles in causation, chance-making and truth-making, and…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 |