Chaoan He

According to the principle of grounding Internality, if X fully grounds Y, then necessarily, if X and Y obtain, then X fully grounds Y. Though intuitively appealing and widely assumed, the principle is under attack from various concerns. The common arguments against Internality are usually accommodatable by the Completer Strategy. A more recent and improved variety of arguments, involving trumping grounding, squarely escape the Completer Strategy. We will first critically examine cases of trumping grounding and argue that they do not really give rise to serious troubles for Internality. Then, appealing to the distinction between token facts and type facts, we present a novel argument against Internality by invoking a hitherto unexplored grounding relation holding between ordinary facts like [Billy killed Suzy] and what we will call @-facts like [Billy actually killed Suzy]. Substantial defenses for our new case will be provided.

An influential approach to Fitch’s Paradox of knowability is the Domain Variation Analysis. This article presents a novel argument against this approach. Fitch’s Paradox comes in different varieties. There is the common version of the paradox involving the principle that every truth is knowable, and there is also a slightly different version of the paradox involving the principle that every truth is knowable by us. There are good reasons to suppose that if the Domain Variation Analysis qualifies as a successful solution to Fitch’s Paradox, it should be able to solve both versions of the paradox. However, it will be argued in this paper that, though the Domain Variation Analysis solves the common version of the paradox, it fails to solve this slightly different version of the paradox. Thus, the credibility of the Domain Variation Analysis would be very significantly undermined.

The modal theory of luck, according to one influential version of it, holds that an event is lucky if and only if it actually obtains but fails to obtain in some close possible worlds, holding fixed certain initial conditions for the event. There have been some notable critiques of the theory. But they are not fully satisfactory, for they succumb to two typical and compelling strategies of defending the modal theory. By invoking a special fair lottery case, adapted from the well-known Frankfurt cases on free will, this article presents a novel attack on the modal theory. As to be shown, there are cases where someone wins a fair lottery as a matter of good luck, yet there are no close possible worlds where he fails to win it. I also argue that the two typical and compelling strategies of defending the modal theory do not meet our challenge.

The Consequence Argument for incompatibilism is beset by two rival interpretations: the counterfactual sufficiency interpretation and the counterfactual might interpretation. In a 2023 paper Waldrop argued that the counterfactual sufficiency interpretation conflicts with certain principles governing the logic of counterfactuals. In this paper, I show that Waldrop’s argument can be adapted to prove that the counterfactual might interpretation also conflicts with the same principles. So the problem Waldrop pointed out is not peculiar to the counterfactual sufficiency interpretation.

In a 2019 paper, Hausmann raised a new and interesting problem for Kripke’s account of negative existentials. He argued that Kripke’s account leads to the absurd consequence that anybody who has good reasons to believe that there are no propositions also has good reasons to believe that he or she does not exist. In this paper I propose a modified Kripkean theory, which is invulnerable to a Hausmann-like argument. As will be seen, the modified theory can be squarely justified in light of the key observations behind Kripke’s original proposal.

The standard Lewis–Stalnaker semantics of counterfactuals, given the Strong Centering Thesis, implies that all true–true counterfactuals are trivially true. McGlynn developed a theory, based on Penczek, to rehabilitate the non-triviality of true–true counterfactuals. I show here that counterfactuals with true but irrelevant components are counterexamples to McGlynn’s account. I argue that an extended version of the connection hypothesis is sustainable, and grounds a full theory of counterfactuals explicable in a broadly standard way, if an indispensable asymmetry between semifacuals and other counterfactuals is acknowledged.