Jack Casey

Charity is regularly taken to be symmetrical between speakers in an argument. However, we ask whether charity can be a reflexive and transitive relation. We argue here that charity must be reflexive, as one must be charitable with oneself, but this yields a difficulty in cases of disagreement in symmetric and transitive relations. This is what we call _the Peirce Problem_ – that errors of reasoning are most easily seen in others, not in oneself. Calls for charity and criticisms of others for being uncharitable, then, are distinctive opportunities for this particular meta-argumentative pathology, as they are occasions for errors when we argue about arguments, for instance, when we argue about arguments that criticize our own arguments. When one is charitable with one’s own views, then others who critically challenge those views must, one is tempted to reason, have uncharitably interpreted them or are uncharitably criticizing them. This, ironically, is a failure of charitably interpreting criticism. Given reflexive charity, however, this is an inevitable tension with symmetric and transitive charity. So, one’s defaults are (pathologically) set on interpreting critics as having missed own’s own deeper points in their criticisms. Thus, the norms of charity when addressing agreeing others about criticism of shared views, we hold, yield a distinct meta-argumentative pathology.

In this paper Casey argues that formalism, as an account of the nature of sport which takes sports to be constituted fully by their rules, cannot deal with some of the apparent problems that arise when considering sport through the lens of a possible worlds analysis of modality. He argues that formalism fails to get many of our intuitions regarding the identity and non-identity of games across worlds correct; this problem he calls the identification problem. He also argues that this is also a problem for two other popular accounts of the nature of sport – conventionalism and broad internalism – given the role that formalism plays in underpinning them.

Most philosophers treat ontological dependence and metaphysical dependence as distinct relations. A number of key differences between the two relations are usually cited in support of this claim: ontological dependence's unique connection to existence, differing respective connections to metaphysical necessitation, and a divergence in their formal features. Alongside reshaping some of the examples used to maintain the distinction between the two, I argue that the additional resources offered by the increased attention the notion of grounding has received in recent years potentially offer us a way to unite the two relations, promising the attendant benefits parsimony offers, as a result.