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10Permissive UpdatesIn Federico L. G. Faroldi & Frederik Van De Putte (eds.), Kit Fine on Truthmakers, Relevance, and Non-classical Logic, Springer Verlag. pp. 615-662. 2023.David Lewis asked in “A problem about permission” about the effects on context, specifically on the “sphere of permissibility,” of allowing behavior that had previously been forbidden. The framework of truthmaker semantics sheds useful light on this problem. Update procedures are definable in the truthmaker framework that capture more than Lewis was able to just with worlds. Connections are drawn with epistemic modals, belief revision and the semantics of exceptives. We consider how a truthmaker…Read more
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498We offer two arguments against the halving repose to Sleeping Beauty. First, we show that halving violates the Epistemological Sure-Thing Principle, which we argue is a necessary constraint on any reasonable probability assignment. The constraint is that if hypothetically on C you assign to A the same probability you assign to A hypothetical on not-C, you must assign that probability to A simpliciter. Epistemically, it's a sure thing for you that A has this probability. Second, we show that halv…Read more
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A note on conditionals and restrictorsIn Lee Walters & John Hawthorne (eds.), Conditionals, Paradox, and Probability: Themes from the Philosophy of Dorothy Edgington., Oxford University Press. 2021.
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130Barristers in England are obliged to follow the ‘cab rank rule’, according to which they must take any case offered to them, as long as they have time in their
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41Lockean Beliefs, Dutch Books, and Scoring SystemsErkenntnis 88 (5): 1979-1995. 2021.On the Lockean thesis one ought to believe a proposition if and only if one assigns it a credence at or above a threshold (Foley in Am Philos Q 29(2):111–124, 1992). The Lockean thesis, thus, provides a way of characterizing sets of all-or-nothing beliefs. Here we give two independent characterizations of the sets of beliefs satisfying the Lockean thesis. One is in terms of betting dispositions associated with full beliefs and one is in terms of an accuracy scoring system for full beliefs. These…Read more
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493Definiteness ProjectionNatural Language Semantics 1-33. 2019.We argue that definite noun phrases give rise to uniqueness inferences characterized by a pattern we call definiteness projection. Definiteness projection says that the uniqueness inference of a definite projects out unless there is an indefinite antecedent in a position that filters presuppositions. We argue that definiteness projection poses a serious puzzle for e-type theories of (in)definites; on such theories, indefinites should filter existence presuppositions but not uniqueness presupposi…Read more
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372Roads to NecessitarianismJournal of Philosophical Logic 50 (1): 89-96. 2021.We show that each of three natural sets of assumptions about the conditional entails necessitarianism: that anything possible is necessary.
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201What it takes to believePhilosophical Studies 177 (5): 1345-1362. 2020.Much linguistic evidence supports the view believing something only requires thinking it likely. I assess and reject a rival view, based on recent work on homogeneity in natural language, according to which belief is a strong, demanding attitude. I discuss the implications of the linguistic considerations about ‘believe’ for our philosophical accounts of belief.
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310Independence Day?Journal of Semantics 36 (2): 193-210. 2019.Two recent and influential papers, van Rooij 2007 and Lassiter 2012, propose solutions to the proviso problem that make central use of related notions of independence—qualitative in the first case, probabilistic in the second. We argue here that, if these solutions are to work, they must incorporate an implicit assumption about presupposition accommodation, namely that accommodation does not interfere with existing qualitative or probabilistic independencies. We show, however, that this assumpti…Read more
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377At the threshold of knowledgePhilosophical Studies 175 (2): 449-460. 2018.We explore consequences of the view that to know a proposition your rational credence in the proposition must exceed a certain threshold. In other words, to know something you must have evidence that makes rational a high credence in it. We relate such a threshold view to Dorr et al.’s :277–287, 2014) argument against the principle they call fair coins: “If you know a coin won’t land tails, then you know it won’t be flipped.” They argue for rejecting fair coins because it leads to a pervasive sk…Read more
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102Conditionals and Propositions in SemanticsJournal of Philosophical Logic 44 (6): 781-791. 2015.IntroductionThe project of giving an account of meaning in natural languages goes largely by assigning truth-conditional content to sentences. I will call the view that sentences have truth-conditional content propositionalism as it is common to identify the truth-conditional content of a sentence with the proposition it expresses. This content plays an important role in our explanations of the speech-acts, attitude ascriptions, and the meaning of sentences when they appear as parts of longer se…Read more
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109This note relates the Lewis/Kratzer view of conditionals as restrictors to the philosophical debate over the meaning of conditionals.
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61The argument is directed at the view that scientific knowledge is just knowledge of the structure of the natural world and not knowledge of its intrinsic nature. The origin of the view is the post-Galilean conception of modern science, which views science as yielding a picture of nature stripped of all color, explaining all physical processes purely in terms of space-time, particles, fields, forces and the like, the intrinsic natures of which are never themselves analyzed. It is safe to say that t…Read more
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263Presuppositions and scopeJournal of Philosophy 104 (2): 71-106. 2007.This paper discusses the apparent scope ambiguities between definite descriptions and modal operators. I argue that we need the theory of presupposition to explain why these ambiguities are not always present, and that once that theory is in hand, Kripke’s modal argument loses much of its force.
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85Explaining Presupposition Projection with Dynamic SemanticsSemantics and Pragmatics 4 (3): 1-43. 2011.Presents a version of dynamic semantics for a language with presuppositions that predicts basic facts about presupposition projection in a non-stipulative way.
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1Proceedings of Workshop on New Directions in the Theory of Presuppositions (edited book)Essli 2009. 2009.
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111Three notions of dynamicness in languageLinguistics and Philosophy 39 (4): 333-355. 2016.We distinguish three ways that a theory of linguistic meaning and communication might be considered dynamic in character. We provide some examples of systems which are dynamic in some of these senses but not others. We suggest that separating these notions can help to clarify what is at issue in particular debates about dynamic versus static approaches within natural language semantics and pragmatics.
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49A downward-entailing context has the property that the replacement of the predicate in the context by a stronger predicate preserves truth. So, for instance, presuppositions aside, the context after “every” in (1) where the NPI “ever” appears is downward entailing.
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184Capturing the relationship between conditionals and conditional probability with a trivalent semanticsJournal of Applied Non-Classical Logics 24 (1-2): 144-152. 2014.(2014). Capturing the relationship between conditionals and conditional probability with a trivalent semantics. Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics: Vol. 24, Three-Valued Logics and their Applications, pp. 144-152. doi: 10.1080/11663081.2014.911535
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This paper is about pragmatic explanations of certain linguistic phenomenon based on Grice’s theory of conversational implicature. According to Grice’s theory, audiences draw inferences about what the speaker is trying to convey based on the idea that the speaker is following certain maxims governing conversation. Such explanations of the inferences audiences make about the speaker play a central role in many parts of philosophy of language and linguistics.
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830A Puzzle about Knowing ConditionalsNoûs 52 (2): 473-478. 2018.We present a puzzle about knowledge, probability and conditionals. We show that in certain cases some basic and plausible principles governing our reasoning come into conflict. In particular, we show that there is a simple argument that a person may be in a position to know a conditional the consequent of which has a low probability conditional on its antecedent, contra Adams’ Thesis. We suggest that the puzzle motivates a very strong restriction on the inference of a conditional from a disjunct…Read more
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840Belief is weakPhilosophical Studies 173 (5): 1393-1404. 2016.It is tempting to posit an intimate relationship between belief and assertion. The speech act of assertion seems like a way of transferring the speaker’s belief to his or her audience. If this is right, then you might think that the evidential warrant required for asserting a proposition is just the same as the warrant for believing it. We call this thesis entitlement equality. We argue here that entitlement equality is false, because our everyday notion of belief is unambiguously a weak one. Be…Read more
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38“Be Articulate: A Pragmatic Theory of Presupposition Projection” is a remarkable paper in at least two respects: First, it is the only broadly Gricean treatment of presuppositions that generates precise and accurate predictions about the pattern of presupposition projection. Schlenker proposes that presuppositions arise as a result of a pragmatic prohibition against using one short construction to express two independent meanings. This basic idea is quite an old one.1 But no one has ever elabora…Read more
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59The argument here comes from consideration of a certain sort of linguistic expression called negative polarity items (NPIs). These are expressions such as “any,” “at all” and “ever.” NPIs are of particular interest for semantics because they can only be used in contexts with a certain rather abstract semantic feature. However, the precise characterization of the feature is itself a matter of some controversy. For those interested in the semantics of natural language it is worthwhile to figure out…Read more
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493Do Indicative Conditionals Express Propositions?Noûs 47 (1): 49-68. 2011.Discusses how to capture the link between the probability of indicative conditionals and conditional probability using a classical semantics for conditionals.
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157Modularity and intuitions in formal semantics: the case of polarity itemsLinguistics and Philosophy 34 (6): 537-570. 2011.Linguists often sharply distinguish the different modules that support linguistics competence, e.g., syntax, semantics, pragmatics. However, recent work has identified phenomena in syntax (polarity sensitivity) and pragmatics (implicatures), which seem to rely on semantic properties (monotonicity). We propose to investigate these phenomena and their connections as a window into the modularity of our linguistic knowledge. We conducted a series of experiments to gather the relevant syntactic, sema…Read more
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29Presupposition projection and logical equivalencePhilosophical Perspectives 22 (1): 473-497. 2008.
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University College LondonRegular Faculty
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |