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Closure on knowabilityAnalysis 70 (4): 648-659. 2010.
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Modelling communicating agents in timed reasoning logicsIn U. Endriss & M. Baldoni (eds.), Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies 4, Springer. 2006.Practical reasoners are resource-bounded—in particular they require time to derive consequences of their knowledge. Building on the Timed Reasoning Logics (TRL) framework introduced in [1], we show how to represent the time required by an agent to reach a given conclusion. TRL allows us to model the kinds of rule application and conflict resolution strategies commonly found in rule-based agents, and we show how the choice of strategy can influence the information an agent can take into account w…Read more
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Against Yagisawa's modal realismAnalysis 73 (1): 10-17. 2013.In his book Worlds and Individuals, Possible and Otherwise (2010), Takashi Yagisawa presents and argues for a novel and imaginative version of modal realism. It differs both from Lewis’s modal realism (Lewis 1986) and from actualists’ ersatz accounts (Adams 1974; Sider 2002). In this paper, I’ll present two arguments, each of which shows that Yagisawa’s metaphysics is incoherent. The first argument shows that the combination of Yagisawa’s metaphysics with impossibilia leads to triviality: every …Read more
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Resource-bounded belief revision and contractionIn P. Torroni, U. Endriss, M. Baldoni & A. Omicini (eds.), Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies III, Springer. pp. 141--154. 2006.Agents need to be able to change their beliefs; in particular, they should be able to contract or remove a certain belief in order to restore consistency to their set of beliefs, and revise their beliefs by incorporating a new belief which may be inconsistent with their previous beliefs. An influential theory of belief change proposed by Alchourron, G¨ardenfors and Makinson (AGM) [1] describes postulates which a rational belief revision and contraction operations should satisfy. The AGM postulat…Read more
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Impossible WorldsNoûs 47 (3): 713-728. 2013.Impossible worlds are representations of impossible things and impossible happenings. They earn their keep in a semantic or metaphysical theory if they do the right theoretical work for us. As it happens, a worlds-based account provides the best philosophical story about semantic content, knowledge and belief states, cognitive significance and cognitive information, and informative deductive reasoning. A worlds-based story may also provide the best semantics for counterfactuals. But to function …Read more
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2. Imagine The PossibilitiesLogique Et Analyse 49. 2006.
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Setting the Facts StraightJournal of Philosophical Logic 40 (1): 33-54. 2011.Substantial facts are not well-understood entities. Many philosophers object to their existence on this basis. Yet facts, if they can be understood, promise to do a lot of philosophical work: they can be used to construct theories of property possession and truthmaking, for example. Here, I give a formal theory of facts, including negative and logically complex facts. I provide a theory of reduction similar to that of the typed λ -calculus and use it to provide identity conditions for facts. Thi…Read more
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Monism and Material ConstitutionPacific Philosophical Quarterly 95 (1): 189-204. 2014.Are the sculpture and the mass of gold which permanently makes it up one object or two? In this article, we argue that the monist, who answers ‘one object’, cannot accommodate the asymmetry of material constitution. To say ‘the mass of gold materially constitutes the sculpture, whereas the sculpture does not materially constitute the mass of gold’, the monist must treat ‘materially constitutes’ as an Abelardian predicate, whose denotation is sensitive to the linguistic context in which it appear…Read more
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Propositions and same-saying: introductionSynthese 189 (1): 1-10. 2012.Philosophers often talk about the things we say, or believe, or think, or mean. The things are often called ‘propositions’. A proposition is what one believes, or thinks, or means when one believes, thinks, or means something. Talk about propositions is ubiquitous when philosophers turn their gaze to language, meaning and thought. But what are propositions? Is there a single class of things that serve as the objects of belief, the bearers of truth, and the meanings of utterances? How do our utte…Read more
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The Accidental Properties of Numbers and PropertiesThought: A Journal of Philosophy 1 (2): 134-140. 2012.According to genuine modal realism, some things (including numbers and properties) lack distinct counterparts in different worlds. So how can they possess any of their properties contingently? Egan (2004) argues that to explain such accidental property possession, the genuine modal realist must depart from Lewis and identify properties with functions, rather than with sets of possibilia. We disagree. The genuine modal realist already has the resources to handle Egan's proposed counterexamples. A…Read more
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The Problem with Truthmaker-Gap EpistemicismThought: A Journal of Philosophy 1 (4): 320-329. 2012.Epistemicism about vagueness is the view that vagueness, or indeterminacy, is an epistemic matter. Truthmaker-gap epistemicism is the view that indeterminate truths are indeterminate because their truth is not grounded by any worldly fact. Both epistemicism in general and truthmaker-gap epistemicism originated in Roy Sorensen's work on vagueness. My aim in this paper is to give a characterization of truthmaker-gap epistemicism and argue that the view is incompatible with higher-order vagueness: …Read more
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The Content of DeductionJournal of Philosophical Logic 42 (2): 317-334. 2013.For deductive reasoning to be justified, it must be guaranteed to preserve truth from premises to conclusion; and for it to be useful to us, it must be capable of informing us of something. How can we capture this notion of information content, whilst respecting the fact that the content of the premises, if true, already secures the truth of the conclusion? This is the problem I address here. I begin by considering and rejecting several accounts of informational content. I then develop an accoun…Read more
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Recent Work in Relevant LogicAnalysis 73 (3): 526-541. 2013.
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The Problem of Rational KnowledgeErkenntnis (S6): 1-18. 2013.Real-world agents do not know all consequences of what they know. But we are reluctant to say that a rational agent can fail to know some trivial consequence of what she knows. Since every consequence of what she knows can be reached via chains of trivial cot be dismissed easily, as some have attempted to do. Rather, a solution must give adequate weight to the normative requirements on rational agents’ epistemic states, without treating those agents as mathematically ideal reasoners. I’ll argue …Read more
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Are Impossible Worlds Trivial?In Vit Puncochar & Petr Svarny (eds.), The Logica Yearbook 2012, College Publications. 2013.Theories of content are at the centre of philosophical semantics. The most successful general theory of content takes contents to be sets of possible worlds. But such contents are very coarse-grained, for they cannot distinguish between logically equivalent contents. They draw intensional but not hyperintensional distinctions. This is often remedied by including impossible as well as possible worlds in the theory of content. Yet it is often claimed that impossible worlds are metaphysically obscu…Read more
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Properties, by Douglas Edwards: Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014, pp. xiii + 181, £15.99Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (3): 626-626. 2015.
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Essence and the Grounding ProblemIn Reality Making, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 99-120. 2016.Pluralists about coincident entities say that distinct entities may be spatially coincident throughout their entire existence. The most pressing issue they face is the grounding problem. They say that coincident entities may differ in their persistence conditions and in the sortals they fall under. But how can they differ in these ways, given that they share all their microphysical properties? What grounds those differences, if not their microphysical properties? Do those differences depend only…Read more
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Modal Realism, Still At Your ConvenienceAnalysis. 2016.
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The cost of truthmaker maximalismCanadian Journal of Philosophy 43 (4): 460-474. 2013.According to truthmaker theory, particular truths are true in virtue of the existence of particular entities. Truthmaker maximalism holds that this is so for all truths. Negative existential and other ‘negative’ truths threaten the position. Despite this, maximalism is an appealing thesis for truthmaker theorists. This motivates interest in parsimonious maximalist theories, which do not posit extra entities for truthmaker duty. Such theories have been offered by David Lewis and Gideon Rosen, Ros…Read more
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The Problem of Rational KnowledgeErkenntnis 79 (Suppl 6): 1151-1168. 2014.Real-world agents do not know all consequences of what they know. But we are reluctant to say that a rational agent can fail to know some trivial consequence of what she knows. Since every consequence of what she knows can be reached via chains of trivial cot be dismissed easily, as some have attempted to do. Rather, a solution must give adequate weight to the normative requirements on rational agents’ epistemic states, without treating those agents as mathematically ideal reasoners. I’ll argue …Read more
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Disjunctive PartsIn Federico L. G. Faroldi & Frederik Van De Putte (eds.), Outstanding Contributions to Logic: Kit Fine, Springer. forthcoming.Fine (2017a) sets out a theory of content based on truthmaker semantics which distinguishes two kinds of consequence between contents. There is entailment, corresponding to the relationship between disjunct and disjunction, and there is containment, corresponding to the relationship between conjunctions and their conjuncts. Fine associates these with two notions of parthood: disjunctive and conjunctive. Conjunctive parthood is a very useful notion, allowing us to analyse partial content and part…Read more
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Truthmaker Semantics for Relevant LogicJournal of Philosophical Logic 49 (4): 681-702. 2020.I develop and defend a truthmaker semantics for the relevant logic R. The approach begins with a simple philosophical idea and develops it in various directions, so as to build a technically adequate relevant semantics. The central philosophical idea is that truths are true in virtue of specific states. Developing the idea formally results in a semantics on which truthmakers are relevant to what they make true. A very natural notion of conditionality is added, giving us relevant implication. I t…Read more
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Advanced Modalizing ProblemsMind 125 (499): 627-642. 2016.
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Essential bundle theory and modalitySynthese 198 (S6): 1439-1454. 2018.Bundle theories identify material objects with bundles of properties. On the traditional approach, these are the properties possessed by that material object. That view faces a deep problem: it seems to say that all of an object’s properties are essential to it.Essential bundle theoryattempts to overcome this objection, by taking the bundle as a specification of the object’s essential properties only. In this paper, I show that essential bundle theory faces a variant of the objection. To avoid t…Read more
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Alethic undecidability doesn’t solve the LiarAnalysis 76 (3): 278-283. 2016.Stephen Barker presents a novel approach to solving semantic paradoxes, including the Liar and its variants and Curry’s paradox. His approach is based around the concept of alethic undecidability. His approach, if successful, renders futile all attempts to assign semantic properties to the paradoxical sentences, whilst leaving classical logic fully intact. And, according to Barker, even the T-scheme remains valid, for validity is not undermined by undecidable instances. Barker’s approach is inno…Read more
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Propositions as Truthmaker ConditionsArgumenta 2 (2): 293-308. 2017.Propositions are often aligned with truth-conditions. The view is mistaken, since propositions discriminate where truth conditions do not. Propositions are hyperintensional: they are sensitive to necessarily equivalent differences. I investigate an alternative view on which propositions are truthmaker conditions, understood as sets of possible truthmakers. This requires making metaphysical sense of merely possible states of affairs. The theory that emerges illuminates the semantic phenomena of s…Read more
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Truthmaker account of propositionsIn Chris Tillman & Adam Murray (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Propositions, Routledge. 2022.
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Modal realism, still at your convenienceAnalysis 77 (2): 299-303. 2017.
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Review: Jonathan A. Waskan: Models and Cognition (review)Mind 118 (469): 220-225. 2009.
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Mumford on Absence & NothingAnalysis 83 (1): 186-197. 2022.
Athens, Greece
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
History of Western Philosophy |