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427Hale and Wright on the Metaontology of Neo-FregeanismIn Philip A. Ebert & Marcus Rossberg (eds.), Abstractionism: Essays in Philosophy of Mathematics, Oxford University Press Uk. 2016.
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485Variance Theses in Ontology and MetaethicsIn Alexis Burgess, Herman Cappelen & David Plunkett (eds.), Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics, Oxford University Press. 2019.
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467Thickness and EvaluationJournal of Moral Philosophy 14 (1): 89-104. 2017.This is a review essay devoted to Pekka Väyrynen’s The Lewd, the Rude and the Nasty. Väyrynen’s book, concerned with thick terms and thick concepts, argues for a pragmatic view on the evaluativeness associated with these terms and concepts. The essay raises a number of critical questions regarding what Väyrynen’s arguments for his view actually show. It deals with, for example, thick properties, the fact-value distinction, what it is for terms and concepts to be (semantically) evaluative, and wh…Read more
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559Incoherentism and the Sorites ParadoxIn Sergi Oms & Elia Zardini (eds.), The Sorites Paradox, Cambridge University Press. 2019.
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746Intuitions, Conceptual Engineering, and Conceptual Fixed PointsIn Christopher Daly (ed.), Palgrave Handbook on Philosophical Methods, Palgrave Macmillan. 2015.
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445Carnap's Legacy for the Contemporary Metaontological DebateIn Stephan Blatti & Sandra Lapointe (eds.), Ontology After Carnap. 2016.
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506Being Metaphysically Unsettled: Barnes and Williams on Metaphysical Indeterminacy and VaguenessOxford Studies in Metaphysics 6 6. 2011.This chapter discusses the defence of metaphysical indeterminacy by Elizabeth Barnes and Robert Williams and discusses a classical and bivalent theory of such indeterminacy. Even if metaphysical indeterminacy arguably is intelligible, Barnes and Williams argue in favour of it being so and this faces important problems. As for classical logic and bivalence, the chapter problematizes what exactly is at issue in this debate. Can reality not be adequately described using different languages, some cl…Read more
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364Modesty, Esotericism and Ineffability: Remarks on HofweberAnalysis 78 (2): 291-303. 2018.In his Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics, Thomas Hofweber among other things presents a radical perspective on ontology and metaphysics. In this note, I critically discuss some of the points Hofweber makes.
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320Reply to criticsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (5): 535-561. 2020.Reply to Stephanie Leary’s, Kris McDaniel’s, Tristram McPherson’s and David Plunkett’s articles on Choosing Normative Concepts (OUP, 2017) in book symposium in Inquiry.
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216Reply to Bykvist and OlsonUtilitas 31 (3): 347-349. 2019.Reply to Krister Bykvist and Jonas Olson's review of Choosing Normative Concepts (OUP, 2017) in Utilitas.
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218The existence of personitesPhilosophical Studies 177 (7): 2051-2071. 2020.Mark Johnston and Eric Olson have both pressed what Johnston has dubbed the personite problem. Personites, if they exist, are person-like entities whose lives extend over a continuous proper part of a person’s life. They are so person-like that they seem to have moral status if persons do. But this threatens to wreak havoc with ordinary moral thinking. For example, simple decisions to suffer some short-term hardship for long-term benefits become problematic. And ordinary punishment is always als…Read more
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637Inconsistency and replacementInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (4): 387-402. 2019.The article is an extended critical discussion of Kevin Scharp’s Replacing Truth. Scharp’s case for the claim that the concept of truth is inconsistent is criticized, and so is his case for the claim that the concept of truth must be replaced because of its inconsistency.
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328Rayo’s MetametaphysicsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 57 (4): 483-497. 2014.In his important book The Construction of Logical Space, Agustín Rayo lays out a distinctive metametaphysical view and applies it fruitfully to disputes concerning ontology and concerning modality. In this article, I present a number of criticisms of the view developed, mostly focusing on the underlying metametaphysics and Rayo’s claims on its behalf.
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237What is deflationism about truth?Synthese 198 (2): 631-645. 2017.What is deflationism about truth? There are many questions that can be raised about this, given the numerous different characterizations of deflationism in the literature. Here I attend to questions about the characterization of deflationism that arise when we carefully distinguish between issues pertaining to concepts and issues pertaining to properties.
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795Making sense of logical pluralismInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (3-4): 433-454. 2020.The article is centered on the question of how best to understand the logical pluralism/logical monism debate. A number of suggestions are brought up and rejected on the ground that they re...
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42Supervaluationism, Vagueifiers, and Semantic OverdeterminationDialectica 55 (4): 363-378. 2001.Supervaluationism, traditionally conceived, is the conjunction of three theses: Vagueness in a language gives rise to there being a multitude of acceptable assignments of semantic values to some expressions of the language, These assignments correspond to possible completions of the meanings of vague expressions, Truth is truth under all acceptable assignments, and falsity is falsity under all acceptable assignments. Supervaluationism has three chief virtues. It preserves classical logic. It pro…Read more
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129Choosing Normative ConceptsOxford University Press. 2017.The concepts we use to value and prescribe are historically contingent, and we could have found ourselves with others. But what does it mean to say that some concepts are better than others for purposes of action-guiding and deliberation? What is it to choose between different normative conceptual frameworks?
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273Fiction, indifference, and ontologyPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (3). 2005.In this paper I outline an alternative to hermeneutic fictionalism, an alternative I call indifferentism, with the same advantages as hermeneutic fictionalism with respect to ontological issues but avoiding some of the problems that face fictionalism. The difference between indifferentism and fictionalism is this. The fictionalist about ordinary utterances of a sentence S holds, with more orthodox views, that the speaker in some sense commits herself to the truth of S. It is only that for the fi…Read more
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584The Frege–Geach problem and Kalderon's moral fictionalismPhilosophical Quarterly 59 (237): 705-712. 2009.Mark Eli Kalderon has argued for a fictionalist variant of non-cognitivism. On his view, what the Frege–Geach problem shows is that standard non-cognitivism proceeds uncritically from claims about use to claims about meaning; if non-cognitivism's claims were solely about use it would be on safe ground as far as the Frege–Geach problem is concerned. I argue that Kalderon's diagnosis is mistaken: the problem concerns the non-cognitivist's account of the use of moral sentences too.
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112Book Review. Quantifier Variance and Realism: Essays in Metaontology. Eli Hirsch. (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Review. 2011.
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291Recent Work on VaguenessAnalysis 71 (2): 352-363. 2011.Vagueness, as discussed in the philosophical literature, is the phenomenon that paradigmatically rears its head in the sorites paradox, one prominent version of which is: One grain of sand does not make a heap. For any n, if n grains of sand do not make a heap, then n + 1 grains of sand do not make a heap. So, ten billion grains of sand do not make a heap. It is common ground that the different versions of the sorites paradox arise because of vagueness in a key expression, in this case ‘heap’. O…Read more
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Paradoxes and the Foundations of Semantics and MetaphysicsDissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 2000.Numerous philosophical problems, otherwise quite different in character, are of the following form. Certain claims which seem not only obviously true, but even constitutive of the meanings of the expressions employed, can be shown to lead to absurdity when taken together. All such problems can justly be called paradoxes. The paradoxes I examine are the liar paradox, the sorites paradox, and the personal identity paradox posed by the fission problem. ;I argue that in these cases, the claims that …Read more
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Paradox: Logical, Cognitive and Communicative Aspects (Proceedings of the First International Symposium of Cognition, Logic and Communication) (edited book)University of Latvia Press. 2006.
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360Meaning‐ConstitutivityInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 50 (6): 559-574. 2007.I discuss some problems faced by the meaning‐inconsistency view on the liar and sorites paradoxes which I have elsewhere defended. Most of the discussion is devoted to the question of what a defender of the meaning‐inconsistency view should say about semantic competence
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230The picture of reality as an amorphous lumpIn Theodore Sider, John Hawthorne & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics, Blackwell. pp. 382--96. 2008.(1) Abstract objects. The nominalist (as the label is used today) denies that there exist abstract objects. The platonist holds that there are abstract objects. One example is numbers. The nominalist denies that there are numbers; the platonist typically affirms it.
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187Characterizing vaguenessPhilosophy Compass 2 (6). 2007.Philosophy Compass 2: 896-909. (Link to Philosophy Compass.).
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57TruthHistory and Philosophy of Logic 33 (1). 2012.History and Philosophy of Logic, Volume 33, Issue 1, Page 106-108, February 2012
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A Vindication of Tarski's Claim About the Liar ParadoxIn Timothy Childers & Ondrej Majer (eds.), The Logica Yearbook, Filosofia. 2001.
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71Book Review. Vagueness in Context. Stewart Shapiro. (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (5). 2006.
Uppsala, Uppsala County, Sweden