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102Every Proposition is a CounterfactualActa Analytica 31 (2): 117-137. 2016.I present and discuss two logical results. The first shows that a non-trivial counterfactual analysis exists for any contingent proposition that is false in at least two possible worlds. The second result identifies a set of conditions that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for the success of a counterfactual analysis. I use these results to shed light on the question whether disposition ascribing propositions can be analyzed as Stalnaker-Lewis conditional propositions. The answe…Read more
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56Conditionals: from philosophy to computer science, edited by G. Crocco, L. Fariñas del Cerro, and A. Herzig, Studies in logic and computation, no. 5, Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York1995, viii + 368 pp (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 62 (4): 1487-1490. 1997.This is a review of CONDITIONALS: FROM PHILOSOPHY TO COMPUTER SCIENCE, edited by Crocco G., del Cerro L. Fariñas, and Herzig A., Studies in logic and computation, no. 5, Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York 1995.
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83Victor Dudman's Grammar and Semantics by Jean Curthoys and Victor H. Dudman: Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. xi + 158, £58 (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (4): 789-791. 2014.This is a review of Jean Curthoys and Victor H. Dudman, VICTOR DUDMAN'S GRAMMAR AND SEMANTICS (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
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69Review: Counterfactuals and Probability by Moritz Schulz (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (2): 414-417. 2019.This is a review of Moritz Schulz, COUNTERFACTUALS AND PROBABIITY (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
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35Time and the Russell Definition of NumberSouthwestern Journal of Philosophy 10 (2): 177-180. 1979.
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Studies in the Semantics of ModalityDissertation, University of Pittsburgh. 1985.Possible worlds talk is, in my view, a metaphor, and what makes it a good metaphor is its capacity to be extended and elaborated in fruitful ways. The essays in this dissertation all concern ways of adding structure to the basic apparatus of possible worlds semantics--the Kripke frame--so as to make it bear more fruit. ;One way of adding structure is to think of possible worlds as histories. In "A Theory of Conditionals in the Context of Branching Time" Richmond Thomason and Anil Gupta use this …Read more
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114Probability, evidence, and the coherence of the whole truthSynthese 103 (2). 1995.The coherence of the whole truth is a presupposition of any holistic coherence theory of justification that postulates a positive connection between justification and truth, for unless the whole truth is itself systemically coherent there is no reason to look for systemic coherence when deciding whether one is justified in accepting a given body of beliefs as true. This paper develops a formal model of holistic evidential coherence and uses this model to formalize and defend the claim that the w…Read more
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79From worlds to probabilities: A probabilistic semantics for modal logicJournal of Philosophical Logic 22 (2). 1993.I give a probabilistic semantics for modal logic in which modal operators function as quantifiers over Popper functions in probabilistic model sets, thereby generalizing Kripke's semantics for modal logic.
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149Coherence and truth conducive justificationAnalysis 59 (3). 1999.In a 1994 ANALYSIS article Peter Klein and Ted Warfield show that an epistemically more coherent set of beliefs often has a smaller unconditional probability of joint truth than some of its less coherent subsets. They conclude that epistemic justification, as understood in one version of a coherence theory of justification, is not truth conducive. After getting clear about what truth conduciveness requires, I show that their argument does not tell against BonJour's coherence theory.
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35A correction to “Nonmonotonic inconsistency” [Artificial Intelligence 149 (2003) 161–178]Artificial Intelligence 160 (1-2): 191-192. 2004.This note corrects an error in the statement and proof of Propositions 9 and 10 of [C. Cross, Nonmonotonic inconsistency, Artificial Intelligence 149 (2) (2003) 161–178]. Both results turn out to depend on the postulate of Consistency Preservation.
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146The Paradox of the Knower without Epistemic Closure -- CorrectedMind 121 (482): 457-466. 2012.This essay corrects an error in the presentation of the Paradox of the Knowledge-Plus Knower, which is the variant of Kaplan and Montague’s Knower Paradox presented in C. Cross 2001: ‘The Paradox of the Knower without Epistemic Closure,’ MIND, 110, pp. 319–33. The correction adds a universally quantified transitivity principle for derivability as an additional assumption leading to paradox. This correction does not affect the status of the Knowledge-Plus paradox as a rebuttal to an argument agai…Read more
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167Nonbelief and the desire-as-belief thesisActa Analytica 23 (2): 115-124. 2008.I show the incompatibility of two theses: (a) to desire the truth of p amounts to believing a certain proposition about the value of p’s truth; (b) one cannot be said to desire the truth of p if one believes that p is true. Thesis (a), the Desire-As-Belief Thesis, has received much attention since the late 1980s. Thesis (b) is an epistemic variant of Socrates’ remark in the Symposium that one cannot desire what one already has. It turns out that (a) and (b) cannot both be true if it is possible …Read more
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49Doesn't-will and didn't-didAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 80 (1). 2002.In "Against the Indicative," AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 72 (1994): 17-26, and more recently in "Classifying `Conditionals': the Traditional Way is Wrong", ANALYSIS 60 (2000): 147, V.H. Dudman argues that (a) `If Oswald didn't shoot Kennedy then someone else did' and (b) `If Oswald doesn't shoot Kennedy then someone else will' should not be classified together as "indicative conditionals." Dudman relies on the assumption that (a) is entailed by (c) `Someone shot Kennedy', whereas (…Read more
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52Belief Revision, Non-Monotonic Reasoning, and the Ramsey TestIn Kyburg Henry E., Loui Ronald P. & Carlson Greg N. (eds.), Knowledge Representation and Defeasible Reasoning, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 223--244. 1990.Peter Gärdenfors has proved (Philosophical Review, 1986) that the Ramsey rule and the methodologically conservative Preservation principle are incompatible given innocuous-looking background assumptions about belief revision. Gärdenfors gives up the Ramsey rule; I argue for preserving the Ramsey rule and interpret Gärdenfors's theorem as showing that no rational belief-reviser can avoid reasoning nonmonotonically. I argue against the Preservation principle and show that counterexamples to it alw…Read more
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122Review: Conditionals in Context (review)Mind 116 (464): 1119-1122. 2007.This is a review of Christopher Gauker, CONDITIONALS IN CONTEXT (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005).
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30Relational Coherence and Cumulative ReasoningIn Olsson Erik (ed.), The Epistemology of Keith Lehrer, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 109--127. 2003.I investigate the consequences of interpreting Lehrer's account of system-relative justification as a theory of inductive inference. I discuss which assumptions about coherence would be sufficient to make the account of inductive inference derived from Lehrer's theory conform to a series of widely discussed general principles, including those constitutive of cumulative reasoning. I then discuss the epistemological significance of the resulting theory of inductive inference.
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92Jonathan Bennett on 'even if'Linguistics and Philosophy 8 (3): 353-357. 1985.I show that given Jonathan Bennett's theory of 'even if,' the following statement is logically true iff the principle of conditional excluded is valid: (SE) If Q and if P wouldn't rule out Q, then Q even if P. Hence whatever intuitions support the validity of (SE) support the validity of Conditional Excluded Middle, too. Finally I show that Bennett's objection to John Bigelow's theory of the conditional can be turned into a (perhaps) more telling one, viz. that on Bigelow's theory 'if P then Q' …Read more
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111Conditional excluded middleErkenntnis 70 (2): 173-188. 2009.In this essay I renew the case for Conditional Excluded Middle (CXM) in light of recent developments in the semantics of the subjunctive conditional. I argue that Michael Tooley’s recent backward causation counterexample to the Stalnaker-Lewis comparative world similarity semantics undermines the strongest argument against CXM, and I offer a new, principled argument for the validity of CXM that is in no way undermined by Tooley’s counterexample. Finally, I formulate a simple semantics for the su…Read more
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101A Logical Transmission Principle for Conclusive ReasonsAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (2): 353-370. 2015.Dretske's conclusive reasons account of knowledge is designed to explain how epistemic closure can fail when the evidence for a belief does not transmit to some of that belief's logical consequences. Critics of Dretske dispute the argument against closure while joining Dretske in writing off transmission. This paper shows that, in the most widely accepted system for counterfactual logic , conclusive reasons are governed by an informative, non-trivial, logical transmission principle. If r is a co…Read more
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112The paradox of the knower without epistemic closureMind 110 (438): 319-333. 2001.In this essay I present a new version of the Paradox of the Knower and show that this new paradox vitiates a certain argument against epistemic closure. I then prove a theorem that relates the new paradox to epistemological scepticism. I conclude by assessing the use of the Knower in arguments against syntactical treatments of knowledge.
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61Nute Donald. Conditional logic. Handbook of philosophical logic, Volume II, Extensions of classical logic, edited by Gabbay D. and Guenthner F., Synthese library, vol. 165, D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Boston, and Lancaster, 1984, pp. 387–439 (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 54 (4): 1477-1479. 1989.
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176Explanation and the theory of questionsErkenntnis 34 (2). 1991.In The Scientific Image B. C. van Fraassen argues that a theory of explanation ought to take the form of a theory of why-questions, and a theory of this form is what he provides. Van Fraassen's account of explanation is good, as far as it goes. In particular, van Fraassen's theory of why-questions adds considerable illumination to the problem of alternative explanations in psychodynamics. But van Fraassen's theory is incomplete because it ignores those classes of explanations that are answers no…Read more
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71Counterfactuals and event causationAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 70 (3). 1992.I compare the failure of counterfactual dependence as a criterion of event causation to the failure of stochastic dependence as a criterion of causal law. Counterexamples to the stochastic analysis arise from cases of Simpson's Paradox, and Nancy Cartwright has suggested a way of transforming the stochastic analysis into something that avoids these counterexample. There is an analogical relationship between cases of Simpson's Paradox and cases of causal overdetermination. I exploit this analogi…Read more
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65Armstrong And The Problem Of Converse RelationsErkenntnis 56 (2): 215-227. 2002.In A World of States of Affairs(Cambridge University Press, 1997) David Armstrong offers acomprehensive metaphysics based on the thesis that the world consistsof states of affairs. Among the entities postulated by Armstrong's theory are relations, including non-symmetrical relations, and whileArmstrong does not agree with Russell that all relations have adirection or definite order among their places, he does explicitlyacknowledge that the slots of a non-symmetrical relation have adefinite order…Read more
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32The modal logic of discrepancyJournal of Philosophical Logic 26 (2): 143-168. 1997.Discrepancies between an agent's goals and beliefs play an important, if implicit, role in determining what a rational agent is motivated to do. This is most obvious in cases where an agent achieves a complex goal incrementally and must deliberate anew as each milestone is reached. In such cases the concept of goal/belief discrepancy defines an appropriate space to which a degree-of-achievement yardstick can be applied. This paper presents soundness and completeness results concerning a logic fo…Read more
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246Max Black on the identity of indiscerniblesPhilosophical Quarterly 45 (180): 350-360. 1995.I give a critique of the argument against the Identity of Indiscernibles found in Max Black's dialogue "The Identity of Indiscernibles". I begin by postulating and giving existence and individuation conditions for actually existent thought experiment characters on analogy with fictional characters as postulated in Peter van Inwagen's "Creatures of Fiction". I then show that Black's two-spheres thought experiment raises not one but two discernibility questions: 1) Is it true in the two-spheres th…Read more
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276Causal Independence, the Identity of Indiscernibles, and the Essentiality of OriginsJournal of Philosophy 106 (5): 277-291. 2009.In his well-known 1952 dialogue Max Black describes a counterexample to the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles (PII). The counterexample is a world containing nothing but two purportedly indiscernible iron spheres. Reflecting on Black's example, Robert Adams uses the possibility of a world containing two almost indiscernible spheres to argue for the possibility of the indiscernible spheres world. One of Adams's almost indiscernible spheres has a small impurity, and, Adams writes, "Surel…Read more
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52A theorem concerning syntactical treatments of nonidealized beliefSynthese 129 (3). 2001.[IMPORTANT CORRECTION - See end of abstract.] In Syntactical Treatments of Modality, with Corollaries on Reflexion Principles and Finite Axiomatizability, Acta Philosophica Fennica 16 (1963), 153–167, Richard Montague shows that the use of a single syntactic predicate (with a context-independent semantic value) to represent modalities of alethic necessity and idealized knowledge leads to inconsistency. In A Note on Syntactical Treatments of Modality, Synthese 44 (1980), 391–395, Richmond Thomaso…Read more
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63Nonmonotonic InconsistencyArtificial Intelligence 149 (2): 161-178. 2003.Nonmonotonic consequence is the subject of a vast literature, but the idea of a nonmonotonic counterpart of logical inconsistency—the idea of a defeasible property representing internal conflict of an inductive or evidential nature—has been entirely neglected. After considering and dismissing two possible analyses relating nonmonotonic consequence and a nonmonotonic counterpart of logical inconsistency, this paper offers a set of postulates for nonmonotonic inconsistency, an analysis of nonmonot…Read more
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