Brendan Murday

Infinitism is often presented as a rival to foundationalism and coherentism as available answers to the epistemic regress problem. The most prominent contemporary defense of infinitism, due to Peter Klein, rests on the notion that an agent can perpetually amplify the justification for her belief insofar as they are able to iteratively answer an interlocutor’s questions why the proffered grounds for their belief should count as providing justification for that belief. We show that this argument does not offer any basis for preferring infinitism over foundationalism and coherentism, because those views are able to accommodate the insight that justification for a belief can be continually amplified. Klein’s argument for infinitism thus falls short of its aspirations of proving that infinitism qua rival of foundationalism and coherentism is the most credible solution to the epistemic regress problem.

Libertarian theories of freedom and responsibility face a worry about luck: if an action is undetermined, the action cannot be legitimately attributed to the agent; instead the action is a matter of luck, and so the agent is not responsible for the action. Robert Kane defends libertarianism by appealing to self-forming actions. These actions are undetermined because the agent is attempting to act on two conflicting motives, but the agent is responsible for the outcome if she is responsible for having those motives. If the agent “endorsed” both motives in earlier SFAs, Kane argues that we can hold the agent responsible for both motives, and hence responsible for the later SFA. We will further develop others’ arguments that Kane’s appeal to earlier SFAs to explain responsibility for a later SFA is unsatisfactory. We then raise a second objection to Kane’s use of SFAs. On one formulation of an SFA, the agent does three things: she exerts two efforts of will to make opposing choices, and she also acts on one of them. On another formulation of an SFA, the agent does just two things: she exerts two efforts of will to make opposing choices. One of those efforts turns out to be successful, but that success doesn’t require any further intervention from the agent. We distinguish two worries involving luck, a problem of resultant luck and a problem of constitutive luck, and show that neither model of SFAs solves both problems.

We pose two arguments for the view that sentences containing definite descriptions semantically express multiple propositions: a general proposition as Russell suggested, and a singular proposition featuring the individual who uniquely satisfies the description at the world-time of utterance. One argument mirrors David Kaplan's arguments that indexicals express singular propositions through a context-sensitive character. The second argument mirrors Kent Bach's and Stephen Neale's arguments for pluralist views about terms putatively triggering conventional implicatures, appositive, and nonrestrictive relative clauses. After presenting these arguments, we show that rival explanations (appeals to implicature, referential use, presupposition, etc.) do not offer equally compelling explanations of the data, and defend the methodology employed in the arguments against some criticisms

Fictional realists hold that fictional characters are real entities. However, Anthony Everett [“Against Fictional Realism”, Journal of Philosophy (2005)] notes that some fictions leave it indeterminate whether character A is identical to character B, while other fictions depict A as simultaneously identical and distinct from B. Everett argues that these fictions commit the realist to indeterminate and impossible identity relations among actual entities, and that as such realism is untenable. This paper defends fictional realism: for fictions depicting non-classical identity between A and B, the realist should hold that there are two salient fragments, one with a single character (named both ‘A’ and ‘B’) and the other with two (named ‘A’ and ‘B’, respectively). Truth according to the fiction depicting indeterminate identity is determined by supervaluating over truth according to those salient fragments. For fictions depicting impossible identity, truth is determined by subvaluating over truth according to those two salient fragments.

Names are rigid designators, but what kind of rigidity do they exhibit? Both “obstinately” and “persistently” rigid designators pick out O at every world at which they pick out anything at all. They differ in that obstinately rigid designators also pick out O at worlds at which O fails to exist; persistently rigid designators have no extension whatsoever at worlds at which O fails to exist. The question whether names are obstinate or persistent arises in two contexts: in arguments against rigidified descriptivism (on the grounds that names and rigidified descriptions exhibit different kinds of rigidity) and in considerations about what it means for an expression to be “directly referential.” This paper contends that names are persistent, not obstinate. The position thus clarifies the relationship between Millian theories of names and rigid designation, in addition to undermining attempts to rehabilitate the modal argument against rigidified descriptivism

For those who endorse Millianism and take ‘Sherlock Holmes’ to be an empty name, the sentence ‘Sherlock Holmes is clever’ may not count as expressing a complete proposition. The sentence ‘According to the fiction, Sherlock Holmes is clever’, however, should count as expressing a true proposition. I attempt to reconcile these two intuitions by arguing that ‘According to the fiction’ is a two-dimensional operator: to evaluate a statement of the form ‘According to the fiction, S’ at world @ (where @ is also taken to be the actual world), we evaluate S at the world of the fiction (where the fiction is also taken to be the actual world).