Jonathan Cohen

When interpreting a sentence such as Every time the company fires an employee who comes in late, a union complaint is lodged, an addressee is likely to infer that the union will only complain when an employee is fired because he came in late. One is thus led to ask why a purely pragmatic enrichment of this sort -- one drawn despite no risk of interpretative failure nor other linguistic mandate -- would intrude upon truth conditions. We argue that this effect results from the interaction among three pragmatic phenomena: presupposition, the associative mechanisms that underlie the establishment of coherence in discourse, and the calculation of domain restriction for quantificational operators. Because the analysis does not consider the operative enrichments to be species of implicature, we claim that such cases do not represent an intrusion of implicature into truth-conditional content. Instead, they merely involve the context-dependent determination of quantificational domains.

Decision theory requires agents to assign probabilities to states of the world and utilities to the possible outcomes of different actions. When agents commit to having the probabilities and/or utilities in a decision problem defined by objective features of the world, they may find themselves unable to decide which actions maximize expected utility. Decision theory has long recognized that work-around strategies are available in special cases; this is where dominance reasoning, minimax, and maximin play a role. Here we describe a different work around, wherein a rational decision about one decision problem can be reached by ‘interpolating’ information from another problem that the agent believes has already been rationally solved.

The sentence "The boss fired the employee who is always late" invites the defeasible inference that the speaker is attempting to convey that the lateness caused the firing. We argue that such inferences cannot be understood in terms of familiar approaches to extrasemantic enrichment such as implicature, impliciture, explicature, or species of local enrichment already in the literature. Rather, we propose that they arise from more basic cognitive strategies, grounded in processes of coherence establishment, that thinkers use to make sense of the world. Attention to such cases provides a richer and more varied landscape of extrasemantic enrichment than has been appreciated to date.

Significant variations in the way objects appear across different viewing conditions pose a challenge to the view that they have some true, determinate color. This view would seem to require that we break the symmetry between multiple appearances in favor of a single variant. A wide range of philosophical and non-philosophical writers have held that the symmetry can be broken by appealing to daylight viewing conditions—that the appearances of objects in daylight have a stronger, and perhaps unique, claim to reveal their true colors. In this note we argue that, whatever else its merits, this appeal to daylight is not a satisfactory answer to the problem posed by perceptual variation.

Molyneux asked whether a newly sighted person could distinguish a sphere from a cube by sight alone, given that she was antecedently able to do so by touch. This, we contend, is a question about general ideas. To answer it, we must ask (a) whether spatial locations identified by touch can be identified also by sight, and (b) whether the integration of spatial locations into an idea of shape persists through changes of modality. Posed this way, Molyneux’s Question goes substantially beyond question (a), about spatial locations, alone; for a positive answer to (a) leaves open whether a perceiver might cross-identify locations, but not be able to identify the shapes that collections of locations comprise. We further emphasize that MQ targets general ideas so as to distinguish it from corresponding questions about experiences of shape and about the property of tangible (vs. visual) shape. After proposing a generalized formulation of MQ, we extend earlier work (“Many Molyneux Questions,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 2020) by showing that MQ does not admit a single answer across the board. Some integrative data-processes transfer across modalities; others do not. Seeing where and how such transfer succeeds and fails in individual cases has much to offer to our understanding of perception and its modalities.

An adequate ontology of color must face the empirical facts about perceptual variation. In this paper I begin by reviewing a range of data about perceptual variation, and showing how they tell against color physicalism and motivate color relationalism. Next I consider a series of objections to the argument from perceptual variation, and argue that they are unpersuasive. My conclusion will be that the argument remains a powerful obstacle for color physicalism, and a powerful reason to believe in color relationalism instead.

In "Analyticity, Necessity, and the Epistemology of Semantics," Jerrold Katz argues against the Fregean thesis that sense determines reference. He proposes a reconception of sense, uses this to give a non-standard understanding of analyticity, and then goes on to show how these moves block arguments for semantic externalism, evade Quine's attacks on analyticity, and ground a "rationalist/internalist" conception of semantic knowledge. For these reasons it seems that quite a lot hangs on the viability of Katz's proposal. Therefore, the question whether his program can be sustained is of considerable philosophical interest. This paper argues that Katz's program cannot succeed. Because he rejects the Fregean thesis, Katz ends up with an impoverished account of analyticity incapable of doing the work Katz requires of it. If this is right, then we have no reason to endorse Katz's idiosyncratic notions of sense and analyticity over their traditional competitors.

We propose that scientific representation is a special case of a more general notion of representation, and that the relatively well worked-out and plausible theories of the latter are directly applicable to thc scientific special case. Construing scientific representation in this way makes the so-called “problem of scientific representation” look much less interesting than it has seerned to many, and suggests that some of the (hotly contested) debates in the literature are concerned with non-issues.

In this dissertation I defend a functionalist theory of color, on which colors are the properties that dispose things to look colored. ;I begin in chapter 1 by saying what I think colors are, and why my view should count as a primary quality theory of color---one on which colors are objective and mind-independent properties of objects in the world. In addition, since my view differs substantially from the sorts of primary quality theories most discussed by philosophers, I spend some time setting out features that distinguish my functionalist view from more traditional forms of primary quality theories and arguing for the superiority of my own account. In chapter 2, I consider some of the structural relations between the colors that have led many to argue that no primary quality theory of color can succeed, and attempt to defend the functioanlist theory of color of chapter 1 from these considerations. Next, in chapter 3, I turn to arguments against various theories of color turning on the requirement that colors must be causally efficacious; I conclude that these arguments can make very little headway in ruling out any theory of color at all. In chapter 4, I begin to consider the nature of color experience; here I argue that a prominent and popular family of physicalist theories of color experience that is incompatible with my views should be rejected on the grounds that it falls victim to classic worries about inverted spectra, and that recent attempts to defang such worries fail. Finally, in chapter 5, I offer a positive theory of color experience that identifies color experiences with states of the visual system; after connecting this account with the theory of color of chapter 1, I defend it against several objections. ;By attempting to formulate a functionalist theory of color in some detail, and showing how it can meet several of the most important challenges it faces, I hope what I say will go some distance toward showing that that theory is not obviously wrong, and indeed that it might even be right!

In earlier work we proposed an account of information grounded in counterfactual conditionals rather than probabilities, and argued that it might serve philosophical needs that more familiar probabilistic alternatives do not. Demir [2008] and Scarantino [2008] criticize the counterfactual approach by contending that its alleged advantages are illusory and that it fails to secure attractive desiderata. In this paper we defend the counterfactual account from these criticisms, and suggest that it remains a useful account of information.

An important obstacle to lawhood in the special sciences is the worry that such laws would require metaphysically extravagant conspiracies among fundamental particles. How, short of conspiracy, is this possible? In this paper we'll review a number of strategies that allow for the projectibility of special science generalizations without positing outlandish conspiracies: non-Humean pluralism, classical MRL theories of laws, and Albert and Loewer's theory. After arguing that none of the above fully succeed, we consider the conspiracy problem through the lens of our preferred view of laws, an elaboration of the MRL view that we call the Better Best System (BBS) theory. BBS offers a picture on which, although all events supervene on a fundamental level, there is no one unique locus of projectibility; rather there are a large number of loci corresponding to the different areas (ecology, economics, solid-state chemistry, etc.) in which there are simple and strong generalizations to be made. While we expect that some amount of conspiracy-fear-inducing special science projectibility is inevitable given BBS, we'll argue that this is unobjectionable. It follows from BBS that the laws of any particular special or fundamental science amount to a proper subset of the laws. From this vantage point, the existence of projectible special science generalizations not guaranteed by the fundamental laws is not an occasion for conspiracy fantasies, but a predictable fact of life in a complex world

Perhaps the most significant contemporary theory of lawhood is the Best System (/MRL) view on which laws are true generalizations that best systematize knowledge. Our question in this paper will be how best to formulate a theory of this kind. We’ll argue that an acceptable MRL should (i) avoid inter-system comparisons of simplicity, strength, and balance, (ii) make lawhood epistemically accessible, and (iii) allow for laws in the special sciences. Attention to these problems will bring into focus a useful menu of novel MRL theories, some of which solve problems the original MRL theory could not. Hence we conceive of the paper as moving toward a better Best System theory of laws.