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68The logic of fiction has been a stand-alone research programme only since the early 1970s.1 It is a fair question as to why in the first place fictional discourse would have drawn the interest of professional logicians. It is a question admitting of different answers. One is that, since fictional names are “empty”, fiction is a primary datum for any logician seeking a suitably comprehensive logic of denotation. Another answer arises from the so-called incompleteness problem, exemplified by the f…Read more
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271Handling rejectionPhilosophical Studies 180 (1): 159-190. 2022.This paper has two related goals. First, we develop an expressivist account of negation which, in the spirit of Alan Gibbard, treats disagreement as semantically primitive. Our second goal is to make progress toward a unified expressivist treatment of modality. Metaethical expressivists must be expressivists about deontic modal claims. But then metaethical expressivists must either extend their expressivism to include epistemic and alethic modals, or else accept a semantics for modal expressions…Read more
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101A Sketchy Logical ConventionalismAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 97 (1): 29-46. 2023.Anti-realism about the foundations of logic are curiously absent from the literature. This is especially striking given natural analogies with moral anti-realis.
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8Recomendación acerca de la Lógica del ArgumentoRevista de Humanidades de Valparaíso 1 7. 2013.Desde su creación moderna a principios de la década de los 70, la lógica informal ha puesto un especial énfasis en el análisis de las falacias y los esquemas de diálogo argumentativo. Desarrollos simultáneos en los círculos que se ocupan de los actos de comunicación de habla exhiben una concentración en el carácter dialéctico de la discusión.
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19Does changing the subject from A to B really provide an enlarged understanding of A?Logic Journal of the IGPL 24 (4). 2016.There are various ways of achieving an enlarged understanding of a concept of interest. One way is by giving its proper definition. Another is by giving something else a proper definition and then using it to model or formally represent the original concept. Between the two we find varying shades of grey. We might open up a concept by a direct lexical definition of the predicate that expresses it, or by a theory whose theorems define it implicitly. At the other end of the spectrum, the modelling…Read more
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63Model theory Hume’s Dictum, and the Priority of Ethical TheoryErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 4. 2017.
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Introduction: The semantic conception of logic : problems and prospectsIn Gil Sagi & Jack Woods (eds.), The Semantic Conception of Logic : Essays on Consequence, Invariance, and Meaning, Cambridge University Press. 2021.
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50The Role of the Common in Cognitive Prosperity: Our Command of the Unspeakable and UnwriteableLogica Universalis 15 (4): 399-433. 2021.There are several features of law which rightly draw the interest of philosophers, especially those whose expertise lies in ethics and social and political philosophy. But the law also has features which haven’t stirred much in the way of philosophical investigation. I must say that I find this surprising. For the fact is that a well-run criminal trial is a master-class in logic and epistemology. Below I examine the logical and epistemological properties of greatest operational involvement in a …Read more
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76The Semantic Conception of Logic : Essays on Consequence, Invariance, and Meaning (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2021.This collection of new essays presents cutting-edge research on the semantic conception of logic, the invariance criteria of logicality, grammaticality, and logical truth. Contributors explore the history of the semantic tradition, starting with Tarski, and its historical applications, while central criticisms of the tradition, and especially the use of invariance criteria to explain logicality, are revisited by the original participants in that debate. Other essays discuss more recent criticism…Read more
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1458The Game of BeliefPhilosophical Review 129 (2): 211-249. 2020.It is plausible that there are epistemic reasons bearing on a distinctively epistemic standard of correctness for belief. It is also plausible that there are a range of practical reasons bearing on what to believe. These theses are often thought to be in tension with each other. Most significantly for our purposes, it is obscure how epistemic reasons and practical reasons might interact in the explanation of what one ought to believe. We draw an analogy with a similar distinction between types o…Read more
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733The Self-Effacement GambitRes Philosophica 96 (2): 113-139. 2019.Philosophical arguments usually are and nearly always should be abductive. Across many areas, philosophers are starting to recognize that often the best we can do in theorizing some phenomena is put forward our best overall account of it, warts and all. This is especially true in esoteric areas like logic, aesthetics, mathematics, and morality where the data to be explained is often based in our stubborn intuitions. While this methodological shift is welcome, it's not without problems. Abductive…Read more
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284Impassioned Belief, by Michael Ridge: Oxford: Routledge, 2014, pp. xii + 264, £30 (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (1): 199-202. 2016.
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21Expressivism Worth the NameJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 9 (1): 1-7. 2015.No abstract.
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117Structuralist Neologicism†Philosophia Mathematica 28 (3): 296-316. 2020.Neofregeanism and structuralism are among the most promising recent approaches to the philosophy of mathematics. Yet both have serious costs. We develop a view, structuralist neologicism, which retains the central advantages of each while avoiding their more serious costs. The key to our approach is using arbitrary reference to explicate how mathematical terms, introduced by abstraction principles, refer. Focusing on numerical terms, this allows us to treat abstraction principles as implicit def…Read more
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845Against Reflective Equilibrium for Logical TheorizingAustralasian Journal of Logic 16 (7): 319. 2019.I distinguish two ways of developing anti-exceptionalist approaches to logical revision. The first emphasizes comparing the theoretical virtuousness of developed bodies of logical theories, such as classical and intuitionistic logic. I'll call this whole theory comparison. The second attempts local repairs to problematic bits of our logical theories, such as dropping excluded middle to deal with intuitions about vagueness. I'll call this the piecemeal approach. I then briefly discuss a problem I…Read more
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546Moore’s paradox, the infamous felt bizarreness of sincerely uttering something of the form “I believe grass is green, but it ain’t”—has attracted a lot of attention since its original discovery (Moore 1942). It is often taken to be a paradox of belief—in the sense that the locus of the inconsistency is the beliefs of someone who so sincerely utters. This claim has been labeled as the priority thesis: If you have an explanation of why a putative content could not be coherently believed, you there…Read more
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558Footing the Cost (of Normative Subjectivism)In Jussi Suikkanen & Antti Kauppinen (eds.), Methodology and Moral Philosophy, Routledge. 2018.I defend normative subjectivism against the charge that believing in it undermines the functional role of normative judgment. In particular, I defend it against the claim that believing that our reasons change from context to context is problematic for our use of normative judgments. To do so, I distinguish two senses of normative universality and normative reasons---evaluative universality and reasons and ontic universality and reasons. The former captures how even subjectivists can evaluate th…Read more
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505Model Theory, Hume's Dictum, and the Priority of Ethical TheoryErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 4 419-440. 2017.It is regrettably common for theorists to attempt to characterize the Humean dictum that one can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ just in broadly logical terms. We here address an important new class of such approaches which appeal to model-theoretic machinery. Our complaint about these recent attempts is that they interfere with substantive debates about the nature of the ethical. This problem, developed in detail for Daniel Singer’s and Gillian Russell and Greg Restall’s accounts of Hume’s dictum…Read more
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594Logical PartisanhoodPhilosophical Studies 176 (5): 1203-1224. 2019.A natural suggestion and increasingly popular account of how to revise our logical beliefs treats revision of logic analogously to the revision of scientific theories. I investigate this approach and argue that simple applications of abductive methodology to logic result in revision-cycles, developing a detailed case study of an actual dispute with this property. This is problematic if we take abductive methodology to provide justification for revising our logical framework. I then generalize th…Read more
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707Intertranslatability, Theoretical Equivalence, and PerversionThought: A Journal of Philosophy 7 (1): 58-68. 2018.I investigate syntactic notions of theoretical equivalence between logical theories and a recent objection thereto. I show that this recent criticism of syntactic accounts, as extensionally inadequate, is unwarranted by developing an account which is plausibly extensionally adequate and more philosophically motivated. This is important for recent anti-exceptionalist treatments of logic since syntactic accounts require less theoretical baggage than semantic accounts.
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344Emptying a Paradox of GroundJournal of Philosophical Logic 47 (4): 631-648. 2018.Sometimes a fact can play a role in a grounding explanation, but the particular content of that fact make no difference to the explanation—any fact would do in its place. I call these facts vacuous grounds. I show that applying the distinction between-vacuous grounds allows us to give a principled solution to Kit Fine and Stephen Kramer’s paradox of ground. This paradox shows that on minimal assumptions about grounding and minimal assumptions about logic, we can show that grounding is reflexive,…Read more
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463The Authority of FormalityOxford Studies in Metaethics 13. 2018.Etiquette and other merely formal normative standards like legality, honor, and rules of games are taken less seriously than they should be. While these standards are not intrinsically reason-providing in the way morality is often taken to be, they also play an important role in our practical lives: we collectively treat them as important for assessing the behavior of ourselves and others and as licensing particular forms of sanction for violations. This chapter develops a novel account of the n…Read more
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80Characterizing InvarianceErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 3 778-807. 2016.I argue that in order to apply the most common type of criteria for logicality, invariance criteria, to natural language, we need to consider both invariance of content—modeled by functions from contexts into extensions—and invariance of character—modeled, à la Kaplan, by functions from contexts of use into contents. Logical expressionsshould be invariant in both senses. If we do not require this, then old objections due to Timothy McCarthy and William Hanson, suitably modified, demonstrate tha…Read more
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1014How Expressivists Can and Should Explain InconsistencyEthics 125 (2): 391-424. 2015.Mark Schroeder has argued that all reasonable forms of inconsistency of attitude consist of having the same attitude type towards a pair of inconsistent contents (A-type inconsistency). We suggest that he is mistaken in this, offering a number of intuitive examples of pairs of distinct attitudes types with consistent contents which are intuitively inconsistent (B-type inconsistency). We further argue that, despite the virtues of Schroeder's elegant A-type expressivist semantics, B-type inconsist…Read more
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569Logical IndefinitesLogique Et Analyse -- Special Issue Edited by Julien Murzi and Massimiliano Carrara 227. 2014.I argue that we can and should extend Tarski's model-theoretic criterion of logicality to cover indefinite expressions like Hilbert's ɛ operator, Russell's indefinite description operator η, and abstraction operators like 'the number of'. I draw on this extension to discuss the logical status of both abstraction operators and abstraction principles.
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402Assertion, denial, content, and (logical) formSynthese 193 (6): 1667-1680. 2016.I discuss Greg Restall’s attempt to generate an account of logical consequence from the incoherence of certain packages of assertions and denials. I take up his justification of the cut rule and argue that, in order to avoid counterexamples to cut, he needs, at least, to introduce a notion of logical form. I then suggest a few problems that will arise for his account if a notion of logical form is assumed. I close by sketching what I take to be the most natural minimal way of distinguishing cont…Read more
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2575Expressivism and Moore's ParadoxPhilosophers' Imprint 14 1-12. 2014.Expressivists explain the expression relation which obtains between sincere moral assertion and the conative or affective attitude thereby expressed by appeal to the relation which obtains between sincere assertion and belief. In fact, they often explicitly take the relation between moral assertion and their favored conative or affective attitude to be exactly the same as the relation between assertion and the belief thereby expressed. If this is correct, then we can use the identity of the expr…Read more
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2280The Frege-Geach ProblemIn Tristram Colin McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, Routledge. pp. 226-242. 2017.This is an opinionated overview of the Frege-Geach problem, in both its historical and contemporary guises. Covers Higher-order Attitude approaches, Tree-tying, Gibbard-style solutions, and Schroeder's recent A-type expressivist solution.
Leeds, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Meta-Ethics |
Philosophy of Language |