Chris Daly

This paper distinguishes revolutionary fictionalism from other forms of fictionalism and also from other philosophical views. The paper takes fictionalism about mathematical objects and fictionalism about scientific unobservables as illustrations. The paper evaluates arguments that purport to show that this form of fictionalism is incoherent on the grounds that there is no tenable distinction between believing a sentence and taking the fictionalist's distinctive attitude to that sentence. The argument that fictionalism about mathematics is ‘comically immodest’ is also evaluated. In place of those arguments, an argument against fictionalism about abstract objects of any kind is presented in the last section. This argument takes the form of a trilemma against the fictionalist.

David Lewis’s genuine modal realism is a controversial thesis in modal metaphysics. Charles Chihara and Ross Cameron have each argued that Lewis’s defence of his thesis involves his committing serious methodological errors; in particular, that his replies to two well-known and important objections are question-begging. Scott Shalkowski has further argued that Lewis’s attempt to analyse modal talk in non-modal terms is viciously circular. This paper considers the methodology which Lewis uses to argue for his thesis, and the paper tries to show that it is guilty of no methodological errors.

This paper concerns an issue in the metaphysics of properties. The issue is: what are physical properties? What distinguishes physical properties from all other properties? My conclusions will be ‘downbeat’. I will argue that some major recent approaches to this issue prove unsatisfactory, and that the issue is much more intractable than has widely been supposed. The moral I draw is that there is no principled and well‐defined distinction between physical properties and all other properties, and accordingly certain programmes in metaphysics should be abandoned because they mistakenly assume that there is such a distinction.

The basic idea of Maudlin's superb book is methodological: ‘metaphysics, insofar as it is concerned with the natural world, can do no better than to reflect on physics. Physical theories provide us with the best handle we have on what there is, and the philosopher's proper task is the interpretation and elucidation of those theories. In particular, when choosing the fundamental posits of one's ontology, one must look to scientific practice rather than to philosophical prejudice’ .The apparently diverse topics covered by the book's six chapters are united in bearing out this basic idea. They do so with considerable care and sophistication. The chapters also champion a campaign against David Lewis's thesis of Humean Supervenience. Lewis's thesis says that everything actual supervenes on the distribution of intrinsic qualities across points in space-time.Chapter 1 claims that laws of …

This paper considers two strategies for undermining indispensability arguments for mathematical Platonism. We defend one strategy (the Trivial Strategy) against a criticism by Joseph Melia. In particular, we argue that the key example Melia uses against the Trivial Strategy fails. We then criticize Melia’s chosen strategy (the Weaseling Strategy.) The Weaseling Strategy attempts to show that it is not always inconsistent or irrational knowingly to assert p and deny an implication of p . We argue that Melia’s case for this strategy fails.

An Introduction to Philosophical Methods is the first book to survey the various methods that philosophers use to support their views. Rigorous yet accessible, the book introduces and illustrates the methodological considerations that are involved in current philosophical debates. Where there is controversy, the book presents the case for each side, but highlights where the key difficulties with them lie. While eminently student-friendly, the book makes an important contribution to the debate regarding the acceptability of the various philosophical methods, and so it will also be of interest to more experienced philosophers.

What is required for you to know what a certain property is? And what is required for you to have the concept of that property? Hume held that a person who has never tasted a pineapple cannot know what the property tasting like a pineapple is. He also thought that this person cannot have the corresponding concept. A subsequent tradition in empiricism generalises these claims at least to all the so-called "secondary qualities." I will argue that this tradition is mistaken. I will argue that there is no more of a philosophically significant connection between the property tasting like a pineapple and your taste experiences of pineapples than there is between the property having a mass and your tactile experiences when lifting objects. Likewise with respect to the corresponding concepts.

Many philosophers employ an intellectual division of labour. Philosophy tells us what the truth conditions of various philosophically interesting sentences are. For example, atomic sentences containing numerals are sentences containing singular terms putatively referring to numbers; sentences about what could be are sentences quantifying over possible worlds and so on. Some discipline outside of philosophy tells us that certain of these sentences are true. The purported result is that such philosophically controversial entities as numbers and possible worlds have been shown to exist. I criticize this ‘twin-track strategy’ and try to show that the two components conflict rather than complement each other

© The Author 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected] article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...This is a clear and extremely stimulating book in which the authors present a series of innovative, even unorthodox, views on the relation between language and biology. It treats the study of language, and human cognition in general, as a matter of biology. More bluntly: linguistics is biology at a suitable level of abstraction.Given that it is a biological fact that human beings have language, we might expect there to be a Darwinian explanation of the evolution of language. The puzzle is that there seems to be no biological function of language that could not be fulfilled by a species lacking language. So why...

The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophical Methods contains twenty-six original and substantive papers examining a wide selection of philosophical methods. Drawing upon an international range of leading contributors, this Handbook will help shape future debates about how philosophy should be done. Topics explored include philosophical disagreement, thought experiments, intuitions, rational reflection, conceptual analysis, explanation, parsimony, and experimental philosophy. Written in a clear and accessible form, and drawing upon the most recent thinking in the field, the papers will be of particular interest to researchers and high-level undergraduates.