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Anscombe famously said that there are some act types that can only be done intentionally. We defend this claim: some act types are essentially intentional. We argue that Ving intentionally is itself essentially intentional: it is not possible to be non-intentionally Ving intentionally. And we show how this explains why various other act types—such as trying, lying, and thanking—are essentially intentional. Finally, building on Piñeros Glassock (2020) and Beddor & Pavese (2022), we explain how th…Read more
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This paper is about four inferences patterns governing conditionals: Transitivity, Simplification, Contraposition, and Antecedent Strengthening. Transitivity, Simplification, and Contraposition are intuitively compelling. Although Antecedent Strengthening may seem less attractive at first, close attention to the full range of data reveals that it too has considerable appeal. An adequate theory of conditionals should account for these facts. The strict theory does so by validating them. But th…Read more
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'Might' CounterfactualsLinguistics and Philosophy. forthcoming.
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Accurate UpdatingPhilosophy of Science. forthcoming.Accuracy-first epistemology says that the rational update rule is the rule that maximizes expected accuracy. Externalism says, roughly, that we do not always know what our total evidence is. It’s been argued in recent years that the externalist faces a dilemma: Either deny that Bayesian Conditionalization is the rational update rule, thereby rejecting traditional Bayesian epistemology, or else deny that the rational update rule is the rule that maximizes expected accuracy, thereby rejecting the …Read more
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The Qualitative ThesisJournal of Philosophy 119 (4): 196-229. 2022.The Qualitative Thesis says that if you leave open P, then you are sure of if P, then Q just in case you are sure of the corresponding material conditional. We argue the Qualitative Thesis provides compelling reasons to accept a thesis that we call Conditional Locality, which says, roughly, the interpretation of an indicative conditional depends, in part, on the conditional’s local embedding environment. In the first part of the paper, we present an argument—due to Ben Holguín—showing that, with…Read more
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Counterfactual ProbabilityJournal of Philosophy 120 (11): 581-614. 2023.Stalnaker's Thesis about indicative conditionals is, roughly, that the probability one ought to assign to an indicative conditional equals the probability that one ought to assign to its consequent conditional on its antecedent. The thesis seems right. If you draw a card from a standard 52-card deck, how confident are you that the card is a diamond if it's a red card? To answer this, you calculate the proportion of red cards that are diamonds -- that is, you calculate the probability of drawing…Read more
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How Strong Is a Counterfactual?Journal of Philosophy 118 (7): 373-404. 2021.The literature on counterfactuals is dominated by strict accounts and variably strict accounts. Counterexamples to the principle of Antecedent Strengthening were thought to be fatal to SA; but it has been shown that by adding dynamic resources to the view, such examples can be accounted for. We broaden the debate between VSA and SA by focusing on a new strengthening principle, Strengthening with a Possibility. We show dynamic SA classically validates this principle. We give a counterexample to i…Read more
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Agentive ModalsPhilosophical Review 126 (3): 301-343. 2017.This essay proposes a new theory of agentive modals: ability modals and their duals, compulsion modals. After criticizing existing approaches—the existential quantificational analysis, the universal quantificational analysis, and the conditional analysis—it presents a new account that builds on both the existential and conditional analyses. On this account, the act conditional analysis, a sentence like ‘John can swim across the river’ says that there is some practically available action that is …Read more
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Strengthening Principles and Counterfactual SemanticsProceedings of the 21st Amsterdam Colloquium. 2017.
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Living on the Edge: Against Epistemic PermissivismMind 127 (507): 863-879. 2018.Epistemic Permissivists face a special problem about the relationship between our first- and higher-order attitudes. They claim that rationality often permits a range of doxastic responses to the evidence. Given plausible assumptions about the relationship between your first- and higher-order attitudes, it can't be rational to adopt a credence on the edge of that range. But Permissivism says that, for some such range, any credence in that range is rational. Permissivism, in its traditional f…Read more
Chicago, Illinois, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language, Miscellaneous |
Philosophy of Language, Misc |