Arif Ahmed

The so-called pain-in-mouth argument is the step from (1) There is a pain in my finger, and (2) My finger is in my mouth, to (3) There is a pain in my mouth. According to Tye (Citation1995a, Citation1995b) and Carruthers (Citation2000), the best explanation of what is wrong or misleading with this argument appeals to the experiential theory of pain. This paper is about what a defender of the bodily theory of pain should say about (1)–(3). One alternative is the implicature approach (Reuter et al. Citation2019; Casser and Schiller Citation2021). We argue that this approach is inadequate. Instead, we propose a new approach—the mereological approach. This approach entails the bodily theory, and it does a better job of explaining what is wrong with the pain-in-mouth argument.

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-V), schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders are characterized by abnormalities in one or more of the following domains: delusions, hallucinations, disorganized thinking (speech), grossly disorganized behavior (including catatonia), and negative symptoms. This spectrum includes schizophrenia, schizophreniform disorder, schizotypal personality disorder, delusional disorder, schizoaffective disorder, and unspecified schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders, among others. Schizophrenia is a disorder that includes two or more of the following symptoms: delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior, and negative symptoms, whereas delusional disorder is characterized by at least 1month of delusions but no other psychotic symptoms. On the other hand, schizotypal personality disorder is characterized by a pervasive pattern of social and interpersonal deficits including reduced capacity for close relationships, cognitive or perceptual distortions, and eccentricities of behavior usually beginning in early adulthood but in some cases, it becomes apparent in childhood and adolescence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)

Genuinely counterfactual thought concerns situations that typically both are, and are known, not to exist. This raises a puzzle about the point of counterfactual thinking, and in particular in connection with the counterfactual conditional. It is unclear why a conditional whose truth turns on what happens in imaginary situations should occupy the central role that counterfactuals do have in our serious intellectual practices, in particular in connection with decision-making. This paper sets out the ways in which thinking about the non- actual constrain deliberation about the actual, and locates the value of these constraints in their effect on (a) risk-aversion and (b) future discounting.

Published in 1953, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations had a deeply unsettling effect upon our most basic philosophical ideas concerning thought, sensation and language. Its claim that philosophical questions of meaning necessitate a close analysis of the way we use language continues to influence Anglo-American philosophy today. However, its compressed and dialogic prose is not always easy to follow. This collection of essays deepens but also challenges our understanding of the work's major themes, such as the connection between meaning and use, the nature of concepts, thought and intentionality, and language games. Bringing together leading philosophers and Wittgenstein scholars, it offers a genuinely critical approach and demonstrating Wittgenstein's relevance for contemporary philosophy. This volume will appeal to readers interested in the later Wittgenstein, in addition to those interested in the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology.

The paper attempts a novel defense of the main claim of Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument, i.e. that 'inner' ostensive definition is impossible. Part 1 traces Wittgenstein's target to the idea that 'ostensive definition' is a mental act, an idea that makes it tempting to think that its objects might just as well be private as public. Part 2 discusses a recent interpretation and defence of Wittgenstein's position due to Stroud and McGinn. On their view, private ostensive definition establishes no pattern of use because it fails to specify the type of inner episode that is being ostended. But not explicitly specifying a type is harmless so long as the ostension in fact brings it about that the subject's usage is sensitive to it. Part 3 proposes a new argument. Private ostensive definition does sustain a pattern of use, but that use is semantically indeterminate: nothing in it (or in the subject's mind) settles which of two alternative schemes of reference applies. The conclusion discusses Wittgenstein's best-known remarks on the subject from the perspective of this new argument.

The best-known syntactic account of the logical constants is inferentialism. Following Wittgenstein’s thought that meaning is use, inferentialists argue that meanings of expressions are given by introduction and elimination rules. This is especially plausible for the logical constants, where standard presentations divide inference rules in just this way. But not just any rules will do, as we’ve learnt from Prior’s famous example of tonk, and the usual extra constraint is harmony. Where does this leave identity? It’s usually taken as a logical constant but it doesn’t seem harmonious: standardly, the introduction rule only concerns a subset of the formulas canvassed by the elimination rule. In response, Read [5, 8] and Klev [3] amend the standard approach. We argue that both attempts fail, in part because of a misconception regarding inferentialism and identity that we aim to identify and clear up.

The interesting question about modality is not about its extension, but about its point. Everyone can agree (for instance) that the past is necessary in the Ockhamist sense but not in some ‘modern’ senses, and that the present is necessary in the Ockhamist sense but not in the Scotist sense. But why should it matter? These comments on Pasnau (2020) first set out a simple-minded explication in modern terms of some of these fourteenth-century ideas. Then I take issue with (a) Pasnau’s claim that the necessity of the past has something to do with the structure of ‘narrative history’, and (b) Duns Scotus’s claim that the contingency of the present has something to do with human freedom.

The paper discusses Ian Wells’s recent argument that there is a decision problem in which followers of Evidential Decision Theory end up poorer than followers of Causal Decision Theory despite having the same opportunities for money. It defends Evidential Decision Theory against Wells’s argument, on the following grounds. Wells's has not presented a decision problem in which his main claim is true. Four possible decision problems can be generated from his central example, in each of which followers of Evidential Decision Theory do at least as well as followers of Causal Decision Theory. There is another case in which followers of Causal Decision Theory have the same opportunities for making money but end up worse than followers of Evidential Decision Theory.

This paper argues that evidential decision theory is incompatible with options having objective values. If options have objective values, then it should always be rationally permissible for an agent to choose an option if they are certain that the option uniquely maximizes objective value. But, as we show, if options have objective values and evidential decision theory is true, then it is not always rationally permissible for an agent to choose an option if they are certain that the option uniquely maximizes objective value.

A standard argument for one-boxing in Newcomb’s Problem is ‘Why Ain’cha Rich?’, which emphasizes that one-boxers typically make a million dollars compared to the thousand dollars that two-boxers can expect. A standard reply is the ‘opportunity defence’: the two-boxers who made a thousand never had an opportunity to make more. The paper argues that the opportunity defence is unavailable to anyone who grants that in another case—a Frankfurt case—the agent is deprived of opportunities in the way that advocates of Frankfurt cases typically claim.

Suppose that the word of an eyewitness makes it 80% probable that A committed a crime, and that B is drawn from a population in which the incidence rate of that crime is 80%. Many philosophers and legal theorists have held that if this is our only evidence against those parties then (i) we may be justified in finding against A but not against B; but (ii) that doing so incurs a loss in the accuracy of our findings. This paper argues against (ii). It argues that accuracy considerations can motivate taking different attitudes towards individualized and statistical evidence even across cases where they generate the same probability that the defendant is guilty.

Causal Decision Theory reckons the choice-worthiness of an option to be completely independent of its evidential bearing on its non-effects. But after one has made a choice this bearing is relevant to future decisions. Therefore it is possible to construct problems of sequential choice in which Causal Decision Theory makes a guaranteed loss. So Causal Decision Theory is wrong. The source of the problem is the idea that agents have a special perspective on their own contemplated actions, from which evidential connections that observers can see are either irrelevant or invisible.