-
77Possibility, Necessity and Probability: A Meditation on Underdetermination and Justification (review)Erkenntnis 79 (3): 639-667. 2013.After providing some historical and systematic background, I introduce the structure of a very natural and influential sceptical underdetermination argument. The argument assumes that it is metaphysically possible for a deceived subject to have the same evidence that a non-deceived subject has, and tries to draw consequences about justification from that assumption of metaphysical possibility. I first variously object to the transition from the assumption to its supposed consequences. In the cen…Read more
-
146Luminosity and determinacyPhilosophical Studies 165 (3): 765-786. 2013.The paper discusses some ways in which the phenomenon of borderline cases may be thought to bear on the traditional philosophical idea that certain domains of facts are fully open to our view. The discussion focusses on a very influential argument (due to Tim Williamson) to the effect that, roughly, no such domains of luminous facts exist. Many commentators have felt that the vagueness unavoidably inherent in the description of the facts that are best candidates for being luminous plays an illic…Read more
-
239Higher-Order Sorites ParadoxJournal of Philosophical Logic 42 (1): 25-48. 2013.The naive theory of vagueness holds that the vagueness of an expression consists in its failure to draw a sharp boundary between positive and negative cases. The naive theory is contrasted with the nowadays dominant approach to vagueness, holding that the vagueness of an expression consists in its presenting borderline cases of application. The two approaches are briefly compared in their respective explanations of a paramount phenomenon of vagueness: our ignorance of any sharp boundary between …Read more
-
196Truth and what is saidPhilosophical Perspectives 22 (1): 545-574. 2008.A notion of truth as applicable to events of assertoric use ( utterances ) of a sentence token is arguably presupposed and required by our evaluative practices of the use of language. The truth of an utterance seems clearly to depend on what the utterance says . This fundamental dependence seems in turn to be captured by the schema that, if an utterance u says that P , then u is true iff P . Such a schema may thus be thought to constitute a suitable basis for an adequate theory of utterance trut…Read more
-
133Naive Modus PonensJournal of Philosophical Logic 42 (4): 575-593. 2013.The paper is concerned with a logical difficulty which Lionel Shapiro’s deflationist theory of logical consequence (as well as the author’s favoured, non-deflationist theory) gives rise to. It is argued that Shapiro’s non-contractive approach to solving the difficulty, although correct in its broad outlines, is nevertheless extremely problematic in some of its specifics, in particular in its failure to validate certain intuitive rules and laws associated with the principle of modus ponens. An al…Read more
-
93K ⊈ EPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 (3): 540-557. 2017.In a series of very influential works, Tim Williamson has advanced and defended a much discussed theory of evidence containing, among other claims, the thesis that, if one knows P, P is part of one's evidence. I argue that K ⊆ E is false, and indeed that it is so for a reason that Williamson himself essentially provides in arguing against the thesis that, if one has a justified true belief in P, P is part of one's evidence: together with a very plausible principle governing the acquisition of kn…Read more
-
77Context and consequence. An intercontextual substructural logicSynthese 191 (15): 3473-3500. 2014.Some apparently valid arguments crucially rely on context change. To take a kind of example first discussed by Frege, ‘Tomorrow, it’ll be sunny’ taken on a day seems to entail ‘Today, it’s sunny’ taken on the next day, but the first sentence taken on a day sadly does not seem to entail the second sentence taken on the second next day. Mid-argument context change has not been accounted for by the tradition that has extensively studied the distinctive logical properties of context-dependent langua…Read more
-
496Truth without contra(di)ctionReview of Symbolic Logic 4 (4): 498-535. 2011.The concept of truth arguably plays a central role in many areas of philosophical theorizing. Yet, what seems to be one of the most fundamental principles governing that concept, i.e. the equivalence between P and , is inconsistent in full classical logic, as shown by the semantic paradoxes. I propose a new solution to those paradoxes, based on a principled revision of classical logic. Technically, the key idea consists in the rejection of the unrestricted validity of the structural principle of…Read more
-
51Restriction by NoncontractionNotre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 57 (2): 287-327. 2016.This paper investigates how naive theories of truth fare with respect to a set of extremely plausible principles of restricted quantification. It is first shown that both nonsubstructural theories as well as certain substructural theories cannot validate all those principles. Then, pursuing further an approach to the semantic paradoxes that the author has defended elsewhere, the theory of restricted quantification available in a specific naive theory that rejects the structural property of contr…Read more
-
119Luminosity and vaguenessDialectica 66 (3): 375-410. 2012.The paper discusses some ways in which vagueness and its phenomena may be thought to impose certain limits on our knowledge and, more specifically, may be thought to bear on the traditional philosophical idea that certain domains of facts are luminous, i.e., roughly, fully open to our view. The discussion focuses on a very influential argument to the effect that almost no such interesting domains exist. Many commentators have felt that the vagueness unavoidably inherent in the description of the…Read more
-
1Higher-Order Vagueness and Paradox: The Glory and Misery of S4 DefinitenessThe Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication 1. 2005.
-
154Knowing how to establish intellectualismGrazer Philosophische Studien 77 (1): 217-261. 2008.In this paper, we present a number of problems for intellectualism about knowledge-how, and in particular for the version of the view developed by Stanley & Williamson 2001. Their argument draws on the alleged uniformity of 'know how'-and 'know wh'-ascriptions. We offer a series of considerations to the effect that this assimilation is problematic. Firstly, in contrast to 'know wh'-ascriptions, 'know how'-ascriptions with known negative answers are false. Secondly, knowledge-how obeys closure pr…Read more
-
78Truth, Demonstration and KnowledgeTheoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 30 (3): 365-392. 2015.After introducing semantic anti-realism and the paradox of knowability, the paper offers a reconstruction of the anti-realist argument from understanding. The proposed reconstruction validates an unrestricted principle to the effect that truth requires the existence of a certain kind of “demonstration”. The paper shows that that principle fails to imply the problematic instances of the original unrestricted feasible-knowability principle but that the overall view underlying the new principle sti…Read more
-
183Knowledge-How, True Indexical Belief, and ActionPhilosophical Studies 164 (2): 341-355. 2013.Intellectualism is the doctrine that knowing how to do something consists in knowing that something is the case. Drawing on contemporary linguistic theories of indirect questions, Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson have recently revived intellectualism, proposing to interpret a sentence of the form ‘s knows how to F’ as ascribing to s knowledge of a certain way w of Fing that she can F in w. In order to preserve knowledgehow’s connection to action and thus avoid an overgeneration problem, they…Read more
-
121
Madrid, Spain
Areas of Specialization
Paradoxes |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Nonclassical Logics |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |