Brian Weatherson

Most people who believe in temporal parts believe that the referents of our ordinary referring terms, like Bill Clinton, or that table, are fusions of temporal parts from past, present and future times. Call these fusions worms, and the theory that the referents of ordinary referring terms (ordinary objects) the worm theory. Buying the metaphysical theory of temporal parts does not immediately imply that we must buy the worm theory. Theodore Sider (1996, 2000), for example, has suggested that these ordinary referring terms just pick out a single, instantaneous, temporal part. Sider’s theory, called the stage theory, solves some pressing philosophical problems, including the problem of temporary intrinsics. But the stage theory has several difficulties of its own, especially what I will call the problem of long-term intrinsics. I argue for a rival theory, the growing individuals theory. On this theory, the referents of our ordinary referring terms have past and present temporal parts, but not future temporal parts. This theory best accounts for our intuitions about which intrinsic properties ordinary objects have.

In “Now the French are invading England” (Analysis 62, 2002, pp. 34-41), Komarine Romdenh-Romluc offers a new theory of the relationship between recorded indexicals and their content. Romdenh-Romluc’s proposes that Kaplan’s basic idea, that reference is determined by applying a rule to a context, is correct, but we have to be careful about what the context is, since it is not always the context of utterance. A few well known examples illustrate this. The “here” and “now” in “I am not here now” on an answering machine do not refer to the time and place of the original utterance, but to the time the message is played back, and the place its attached telephone is located. Any occurrence of “today” in a newspaper or magazine refers not to the day the story in which it appears was written, nor to the day the newspaper or magazine was printed, but to the cover date of that publication. Still, it is plausible that for each (token of an) indexical there is a salient context, and that “today” refers to the day of its context, “here” to the place of its context, and soon. Romdenh-Romluc takes this to be true, and then makes a proposal about what the salient context is. It is “the context that Ac would identify on the basis of cues that she would reasonably take U to be exploiting.” (39) Ac is the relevant audience, “the individual who it is reasonable to take the speaker to be addressing”, and who is assumed to be linguistically competent and attentive. (So Ac might not be the person U intends to address. This will not matter for what follows.) The proposal seems to suggest that it is impossible to trick a reasonably attentive hearer about what the referent of a particular indexical is. Since such trickery does seem possible, Romdenh-Romluc’s theory needs (at least) supplementation. I present two examples of such tricks.

Ernest Adams has claimed that a probabilistic account of validity gives the best account of our intuitive judgements about the validity of arguments. In particular, he claims, it has the best hope of accounting for our judgements about many arguments involving conditionals. Most of the examples in the literature on this topic have been arguments framed in the language of propositional logic. I show that once we consider arguments involving predicates and involving identity, Adams’s strategy is less successful

The only part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (hereafter, ‘the ACA’) struck down in National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) et al. v. Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al. was a provision expanding Medicaid. We will argue that this was a mistake; the provision should not have been struck down. We’ll do this by identifying a test that C.J. Roberts used to justify his view that this provision was unconstitutional. We’ll defend that test against some objections raised by J. Ginsburg. We’ll then go on to argue that, properly applied, that test establishes the constitutionality of the Medicaid provision

Three recent books have argued that Keynes’s philosophy, like Wittgenstein’s, underwent a radical foundational shift. It is argued that Keynes, like Wittgenstein, moved from an atomic Cartesian individualism to a more conventionalist, intersubjective philosophy. It is sometimes argued this was caused by Wittgenstein’s concurrent conversion. Further, it is argued that recognising this shift is important for understanding Keynes’s later economics. In this paper I argue that the evidence adduced for these theses is insubstantial, and other available evidence contradicts their claims.

Barrett and Artzenius posed a problem concerning infinite sequences of decisions. It appeared that the strategy of making the rational choice at each stage of the game was, in some circumstances, guaranteed to lead to lower returns than the strategy of making the irrational choice at each stage. This paper shows that there is only the appearance of paradox. The choices that Barrett and Artzenius were calling ‘rational’ cannot be economically justified, and so it is not surprising that someone who makes them ends up with sub-optimal returns. A solution to the more general problem they pose is also advanced.

Michael Strevens’s book Depth is a great achievement.1 To say anything interesting, useful and true about explanation requires taking on fundamental issues in the metaphysics and epistemology of science. So this book not only tells us a lot about scientific explanation, it has a lot to say about causation, lawhood, probability and the relation between the physical and the special sciences. It should be read by anyone interested in any of those questions, which includes presumably the vast majority of readers of this journal. One of its many virtues is that it lets us see more clearly what questions about explanation, causation, lawhood and so on need answering, and frames those questions in perspicuous ways. I’m going to focus on one of these questions, what I’ll call the Goldilocks problem. As it turns out, I’m not going to agree with all the details of Strevens’s answer to this problem, though I suspect that something like his answer is right. At least, I hope something like his answer is right; if it isn’t, I’m not sure where else we can look.

Intuitively, Gettier cases are instances of justified true beliefs that are not cases of knowledge. Should we therefore conclude that knowledge is not justified true belief? Only if we have reason to trust intuition here. But intuitions are unreliable in a wide range of cases. And it can be argued that the Gettier intuitions have a greater resemblance to unreliable intuitions than to reliable intuitions. Whats distinctive about the faulty intuitions, I argue, is that respecting them would mean abandoning a simple, systematic and largely successful theory in favour of a complicated, disjunctive and idiosyncratic theory. So maybe respecting the Gettier intuitions was the wrong reaction, we should instead have been explaining why we are all so easily misled by these kinds of cases.