Jeff Watson

Epistemicism about vagueness is the position that bivalence holds for every instance of a vague predicate, even if truth or falsity is unknowable in borderline cases. Epistemicism is accused of rejecting the tolerance intuition, and committing itself to sharp borderlines. Mainstream Epistemicists, like Williamson and Sorensen, accept these accusations as costs of their view. I argue instead that both are myths. First, I argue our intuitions support only generic, dense tolerance principles, which are non-paradoxical. Epistemicists can affirm these principles, without inferring any paradoxical principle, and so can embrace the tolerance intuition. Second, bivalence is perfectly compatible with the denial of sharp borderlines, provided that we model the extension of vague predicates as scattered stochastically and non-monotonically across a gradient, just as we should expect if meaning depends on use. My revisionary form of epistemicism better balances our intuitions about vagueness with the conservation of bivalence.

This article offers a novel argument for vicarious metaphysical idealism, according to which all perceptions are about the mental states of other minds. Unlike conventional arguments for idealism, nothing in the argument hinges on the problem of skepticism, the intractability of the mind–body problem, the mysteriousness of the intrinsic nature of physical things, or verificationist semantics. Instead, the argument relies only on assumptions modern materialists generally accept: that qualitative states of experience are equally compatible with all possible nonqualitative states, that physical states are essentially nonqualitative, and that our experiences are generally informative about a world independent of our own minds. Vicarious metaphysical idealism resists the standard objections to conventional idealism given by analytic philosophers. Nonetheless, I conclude that it is easily refuted by the phenomenology of action, which is overlooked in the conventional debate.

A popular strategy for denying that moral responsibility is subject to luck is committed to truths about what a subject would have freely done in certain nearby but non-actual circumstances, or “counterfactuals of freedom.” Both libertarian and contemporary compatibilist accounts of freedom and moral responsibility, however, insist that an act’s being free is always grounded in features which include an agent’s actual choices. This “Grounding Objection” to counterfactuals of freedom argues that we can only be responsible in virtue of what we do, not what we nearly did or would have done. Nonetheless, I propose that some counterfactuals of freedom are true, and are grounded in actual choices a psychologically continuous subject makes to perform a similar action in similar circumstances. This resolves the Grounding Objection, while avoiding the problem of rendering us morally responsible in virtue of too many of our counterfactual misdeeds.

I argue that a minimal condition of free action, the capacity of an agent to act for a reason, is incompatible with conventional atomic constitutive panpsychism. If fundamental particulars are physical and mental simples, then fundamental particulars cannot possess complex mental representations, including representing an action as for a reason. Options for the panpsychist include Leibnizian Pan-agentialism, Spinozist Cosmopsychism, Cavendishian Infinitism, and a kind of strong emergentist panpsychism on which acting for a reason is strongly emergent with increased complexity even while phenomenal consciousness is only weakly emergent.