Brian Haas

ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue that cases involving expressive language prompt us to reconsider the need of three key features figuring in recent definitions of lying: assertion, belief and truth-evaluability. I assume that sentences including expressive language should be given an expressivist treatment, and I argue that such sentences can plausibly be used to lie. The main aim of this paper is to propose a revised definition of lying. Based on the resources available to two different expressivist views, I propose two ways to revise recent definitions of lying. While the first proposal results in a minimally revised definition that merely expands the notion of content but otherwise largely preserves all three key features of recent definitions of lying, the second proposal diverges more radically from recent definitions of lying. This second proposal that I call ‘the attitude expression analysis’ shows us something unexpected about lying, namely that the crucial feature of lying is a mismatch between attitudes held by the speaker and how the speaker presents herself in speech rather than the assertion of a propositional content the speaker believes to be false.

A motivating reason is a reason an agent acts for. There are two pre-theoretical intuitions about motivating reasons that seem irreconcilable. One intuition suggests that motivating reasons are factive, and the other says the opposite. As a result, a divide exists between philosophers, each side prioritizing one intuition to the detriment of the other. In this essay, I present the deliberative theory of motivating reasons and defend the second intuition that motivating reasons are non-factive. To do this, we must understand motivating reasons’ role in our deliberation. I show that non-factive motivating reasons are compatible with the underlying role which gives rise to the intuition of reasons’ factivity.

This paper presents a new system of logic, LF, that is intended to be used as the foundation of the formalization of science. That is, deductive validity according to LF is to be used as the criterion for assessing what follows from the verdicts, hypotheses, or conjectures of any science. In work currently in progress, we argue for the unique suitability of LF for the formalization of logic, mathematics, syntax, and semantics. The present document specifies the language and rules of LF, lays out some notational conventions, and states some basic technical facts about the system.

We often use the term “attachment” to describe our emotional connectedness to objects in the world. We become attached to our careers, to our homes, to certain ideas, and perhaps most importantly, to other people. Interestingly, despite its import and ubiquity in our everyday lives, the topic of attachment per se has been largely ignored in the philosophy literature. I address this lacuna by identifying attachment as a rich “mode of mattering” that can help to inform certain aspects of agency and emotion. First, drawing on insights from Ancient stoicism and developmental and clinical psychology, I suggest that the relevant form of attachment involves a felt need for its object and a particular relationship between the object and the attached agent’s sense of security. I then argue that these features serve to distinguish the attitude from the more philosophically familiar notion of caring. Finally, I show that recognizing this form of attachment as a distinct mode of mattering has important implications for understanding grief