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Arithmetic is NecessaryJournal of Philosophical Logic. forthcoming.(Goodsell, Journal of Philosophical Logic, 51(1), 127-150 2022) establishes the noncontingency of sentences of first-order arithmetic, in a plausible higher-order modal logic. Here, the same result is derived using significantly weaker assumptions. Most notably, the assumption of rigid comprehension—that every property is coextensive with a modally rigid one—is weakened to the assumption that the Boolean algebra of properties under necessitation is countably complete. The results are generalized…Read more
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Higher-Order Metaphysics (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2024.
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Prefaces, Knowledge, and QuestionsErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (n/a). 2023.The Preface Paradox is often discussed for its implications for rational belief. Much less discussed is a variant of the Preface Paradox for knowledge. In this paper, I argue that the most plausible closure-friendly resolution to the Preface Paradox for Knowledge is to say that in any given context, we do not know much. I call this view “Socraticism”. I argue that Socraticism is the most plausible view on two accounts—(1) this view is compatible with the claim that most of our knowledge ascripti…Read more
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Being Somehow Without (Possibly) Being SomethingMind 132 (526): 348-371. 2023.Contingentists—who hold that it is contingent what there is—are divided on the claim that having a property or standing in a relation requires being something. This claim can be formulated as a natural schematic principle of higher-order modal logic. On this formulation, I argue that contingentists who are also higher-order contingentists—and so hold that it is contingent what propositions, properties and relations there are—should reject the claim. Moreover, I argue that given higher-order cont…Read more
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Experience and contentPhilosophical Quarterly 59 (236): 429-451. 2009.The 'content view', in slogan form, is 'Perceptual experiences have representational content'. I explain why the content view should be reformulated to remove any reference to 'experiences'. I then argue, against Bill Brewer, Charles Travis and others, that the content view is true. One corollary of the discussion is that the content of perception is relatively thin (confined, in the visual case, to roughly the output of 'mid-level' vision). Finally, I argue (briefly) that the opponents of the c…Read more
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How Fine-Grained is Reality?Filosofisk Supplement 13 (2): 52-57. 2017.
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Tossing Morgenbesser’s CoinAnalysis 82 (2): 214-221. 2022.
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The Case for ComparabilityNoûs 57 (2): 414-453. 2023.We argue that all comparative expressions in natural language obey a principle that we call Comparability: if x and y are at least as F as themselves, then either x is at least as F as y or y is at least as F as x. This principle has been widely rejected among philosophers, especially by ethicists, and its falsity has been claimed to have important normative implications. We argue that Comparability is needed to explain the goodness of several patterns of inference that seem manifestly valid, th…Read more
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The Introspective Model of Genuine Knowledge in Wang YangmingPhilosophical Review 131 (2): 169-213. 2022.This article presents a new interpretation of the great Ming dynasty philosopher Wang Yangming’s celebrated doctrine of the “unity of knowledge and action”. Wang held that action was not unified with all knowledge, but only with an elevated form of knowledge, which he sometimes called “genuine knowledge”. I argue for a new interpretation of this notion, according to which genuine knowledge requires freedom from a form of doxastic conflict. I propose that, in Wang’s view, a person is free from th…Read more
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Utilitarianism, decision theory and eternityPhilosophical Perspectives 28 (1): 31-58. 2014.
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The Externalist’s Guide to Fishing for ComplimentsMind 127 (507): 691-728. 2018.Suppose you’d like to believe that p, whether or not it’s true. What can you do to help? A natural initial thought is that you could engage in Intentionally Biased Inquiry : you could look into whether p, but do so in a way that you expect to predominantly yield evidence in favour of p. This paper hopes to do two things. The first is to argue that this initial thought is mistaken: intentionally biased inquiry is impossible. The second is to show that reflections on intentionally biased inquiry s…Read more
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Logical CombinatorialismPhilosophical Review 129 (4): 537-589. 2020.In explaining the notion of a fundamental property or relation, metaphysicians will often draw an analogy with languages. The fundamental properties and relations stand to reality as the primitive predicates and relations stand to a language: the smallest set of vocabulary God would need in order to write the “book of the world.” This paper attempts to make good on this metaphor. To that end, a modality is introduced that, put informally, stands to propositions as logical truth stands to sentenc…Read more
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ClassicismIn Peter Fritz & Nicholas K. Jones (eds.), Higher-Order Metaphysics, Oxford University Press. pp. 109-190. 2024.This three-part chapter explores a higher-order logic we call ‘Classicism’, which extends a minimal classical higher-order logic with further axioms which guarantee that provable coextensiveness is sufficient for identity. The first part presents several different ways of axiomatizing this theory and makes the case for its naturalness. The second part discusses two kinds of extensions of Classicism: some which take the view in the direction of coarseness of grain (whose endpoint is the maximal…Read more
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A Theory of NecessitiesJournal of Philosophical Logic 51 (1): 151-199. 2022.We develop a theory of necessity operators within a version of higher-order logic that is neutral about how fine-grained reality is. The theory is axiomatized in terms of the primitive of *being a necessity*, and we show how the central notions in the philosophy of modality can be recovered from it. Various questions are formulated and settled within the framework, including questions about the ordering of necessities under strength, the existence of broadest necessities satisfying various logic…Read more
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Operands and InstancesReview of Symbolic Logic 16 (1): 188-209. 2023.Can conjunctive propositions be identical without their conjuncts being identical? Can universally quantified propositions be identical without their instances being identical? On a common conception of propositions, on which they inherit the logical structure of the sentences which express them, the answer is negative both times. Here, it will be shown that such a negative answer to both questions is inconsistent, assuming a standard type-theoretic formalization of theorizing about propositions…Read more
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To Be F Is To Be GPhilosophical Perspectives 30 (1): 39-134. 2006.
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Embedded AttitudesJournal of Semantics 36 (3): 377-406. 2019.This paper presents a puzzle involving embedded attitude reports. We resolve the puzzle by arguing that attitude verbs take restricted readings: in some environments the denotation of attitude verbs can be restricted by a given proposition. For example, when these verbs are embedded in the consequent of a conditional, they can be restricted by the proposition expressed by the conditional’s antecedent. We formulate and motivate two conditions on the availability of verb restrictions: a constraint…Read more
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Knowledge by constraintPhilosophical Perspectives 35 (1): 1-28. 2021.
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Lying and knowingSynthese 198 (6): 5351-5371. 2019.
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Thinking, Guessing, and BelievingPhilosophers' Imprint 22 (1): 1-34. 2022.This paper defends the view, put roughly, that to think that p is to guess that p is the answer to the question at hand, and that to think that p rationally is for one’s guess to that question to be in a certain sense non-arbitrary. Some theses that will be argued for along the way include: that thinking is question-sensitive and, correspondingly, that ‘thinks’ is context-sensitive; that it can be rational to think that p while having arbitrarily low credence that p; that, nonetheless, rational …Read more
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Empirical Studies on Truth and the Project of Re‐engineering TruthPacific Philosophical Quarterly 2106 (3): 493-517. 2021.Most philosophers have largely downplayed any relevance of multiple meanings of the folk concept of truth in the empirical domain. However, confusions about what truth is have surged in political and everyday discourse. In order to resolve these confusions, we argue that we need a more accurate picture of how the term ‘true’ is in fact used. Our experimental studies reveal that the use of ‘true’ shows substantial variance within the empirical domain, indicating that ‘true’ is ambiguous between a…Read more
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Ground and GrainPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (2): 299-330. 2021.Current views of metaphysical ground suggest that a true conjunction is immediately grounded in its conjuncts, and only its conjuncts. Similar principles are suggested for disjunction and universal quantification. Here, it is shown that these principles are jointly inconsistent: They require that there is a distinct truth for any plurality of truths. By a variant of Cantor’s Theorem, such a fine-grained individuation of truths is inconsistent. This shows that the notion of grounding is either no…Read more
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Multiple Universes and Self-Locating EvidencePhilosophical Review 131 (3): 241-294. 2022.Is the fact that our universe contains fine-tuned life evidence that we live in a multiverse? Ian Hacking and Roger White influentially argue that it is not. We approach this question through a systematic framework for self-locating epistemology. As it turns out, leading approaches to self-locating evidence agree that the fact that our own universe contains fine-tuned life indeed confirms the existence of a multiverse. This convergence is no accident: we present two theorems showing that, in thi…Read more
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A St Petersburg Paradox for risky welfare aggregationAnalysis 81 (3): 420-426. 2021.
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Closed StructureJournal of Philosophical Logic 50 (6): 1249-1291. 2021.According to the structured theory of propositions, if two sentences express the same proposition, then they have the same syntactic structure, with corresponding syntactic constituents expressing the same entities. A number of philosophers have recently focused attention on a powerful argument against this theory, based on a result by Bertrand Russell, which shows that the theory of structured propositions is inconsistent in higher order-logic. This paper explores a response to this argument, w…Read more
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Wide Sets, ZFCU, and the Iterative ConceptionJournal of Philosophy 111 (2): 57-83. 2014.The iterative conception of set is typically considered to provide the intuitive underpinnings for ZFCU (ZFC+Urelements). It is an easy theorem of ZFCU that all sets have a definite cardinality. But the iterative conception seems to be entirely consistent with the existence of “wide” sets, sets (of, in particular, urelements) that are larger than any cardinal. This paper diagnoses the source of the apparent disconnect here and proposes modifications of the Replacement and Powerset axioms so as t…Read more
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On statistical criteria of algorithmic fairnessPhilosophy and Public Affairs 49 (2): 209-231. 2021.Predictive algorithms are playing an increasingly prominent role in society, being used to predict recidivism, loan repayment, job performance, and so on. With this increasing influence has come an increasing concern with the ways in which they might be unfair or biased against individuals in virtue of their race, gender, or, more generally, their group membership. Many purported criteria of algorithmic fairness concern statistical relationships between the algorithm’s predictions and the actual…Read more
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Fine-grained semantics for attitude reportsSemantics and Pragmatics 14 (1). 2021.I observe that the “concept-generator” theory of Percus and Sauerland (2003), Anand (2006), and Charlow and Sharvit (2014) does not predict an intuitive true interpretation of the sentence “Plato did not believe that Hesperus was Phosphorus”. In response, I present a simple theory of attitude reports which employs a fine-grained semantics for names, according to which names which intuitively name the same thing may have distinct compositional semantic values. This simple theory solves the proble…Read more
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Beliefs as inner causes: the (lack of) evidencePhilosophical Psychology 31 (6): 850-877. 2018.Many psychologists studying lay belief attribution and behavior explanation cite Donald Davidson in support of their assumption that people construe beliefs as inner causes. But Davidson’s influential argument is unsound; there are no objective grounds for the intuition that the folk construe beliefs as inner causes that produce behavior. Indeed, recent experimental work by Ian Apperly, Bertram Malle, Henry Wellman, and Tania Lombrozo provides an empirical framework that accords well with Gilber…Read more
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Being Rational and Being WrongPhilosophers' Imprint 23 (1). 2023.Do people tend to be overconfident? Many think so. They’ve run studies on whether people are calibrated: whether their average confidence in their opinions matches the proportion of those opinions that are true. Under certain conditions, people are systematically ‘over-calibrated’—for example, of the opinions they’re 80% confident in, only 60% are true. From this empirical over-calibration, it’s inferred that people are irrationally overconfident. My question: When and why is this inference warr…Read more
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Johns Hopkins UniversityRegular Faculty
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |