Mark Balaguer

This chapter discusses deflationist and anti-metaphysicalist views of the temporal-ontology question—i.e., the question of whether past and future objects exist (i.e., roughly, the question of whether presentism or eternalism is true). In addition to surveying the possible deflationist and anti-metaphysicalist views that one might hold, this chapter provides an argument against the most popular versions of deflationism—versions that can be thought of as Carnapian—and it develops some non-Carnapian versions of deflationism and anti-metaphysicalism.

This chapter develops a general strategy for constructing error-theoretic fictionalist (ETF) views of controversial objects (e.g., abstract objects, composite objects, etc.). According to ETF-ist views, (1) ordinary sentences about objects of the relevant controversial kind are not literally true (despite the fact that they seem true to us) because objects of the relevant kind don’t really exist; but (2) these sentences are still “correct” in a certain objective sense; and (3) we can use the “correctness” of these sentences to explain why they seem so obvious to us, why they’re so useful to us in science and everyday life, and why it’s not harmful to our purposes that these sentences aren’t literally true. Second, having laid out the general recipe for constructing ETF-ist views, the author goes on to develop and motivate an ETF-ist view of our discourse about coincident objects and material constitution.

This paper provides a response to a wide class of arguments for the existence of either coincident objects or 4-dimensional objects. These arguments proceed by pointing to certain intuitions we have—about things like statues and lumps of clay—and arguing that in order to account for the truth of these intuitions, we need to endorse the existence of either coincident objects or 4-dimensional objects. This paper undermines these arguments by developing a novel (and intuitively pleasing) theory of reference that explains how our intuitions here could be true—or, more precisely, how the sentences that express these intuitions could be true—even if (a) there are no such things as coincident objects or 4-dimensional objects, and (b) ordinary objects like statues and rocks and cats are numerically identical to the hunks of matter that constitute them.

This paper provides a response to a wide class of arguments for the existence of either coincident objects or 4-dimensional objects. These arguments proceed by pointing to certain intuitions we have—about things like statues and lumps of clay—and arguing that in order to account for the truth of these intuitions, we need to endorse the existence of either coincident objects or 4-dimensional objects. This paper undermines these arguments by developing a novel (and intuitively pleasing) theory of reference that explains how our intuitions here could be true—or, more precisely, how the sentences that express these intuitions could be true—even if (a) there are no such things as coincident objects or 4-dimensional objects, and (b) ordinary objects like statues and rocks and cats are numerically identical to the hunks of matter that constitute them.

We argue that libertarianism (roughly, the thesis that we have indeterministic, libertarian free will) is compatible with God's infallible foreknowledge. We use eternalism (roughly, the thesis that reality is a 4-dimensional block and that past, present, and future objects exist) as an explanatory stepping stone between libertarianism and God's foreknowledge: eternalism entails that (and comes close to explaining how) an omniscient God would know what we decide in the future even if we have libertarian free will. This account also explains what is wrong with standard fatalist arguments for the incompatibility of free will and God's foreknowledge.

This paper develops and defends an anti-platonist view of mathematics -in particular, an error-theoretic view of mathematics. In addition, it is argued that the error theory developed here is superior to Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics because it avoids a mistake that Wittgenstein made about the interpretation of mathematical discourse, while at the same time preserving some of Wittgenstein’s insights about mathematics. Finally, it is also argued here that a certain sort of mathematical relativism is true, regardless of whether platonism is true, and that, perhaps surprisingly, the best versions of platonism entail mathematical relativism.

In Ted Chiang’s story “What’s Expected of Us,” a machine is invented that predicts with 100% accuracy what people are about to do. When this happens, people become convinced that they don’t have free will, and as a result, a third of the population descends into akinetic mutism—a kind of “walking coma.” Maybe that would happen if we discovered that we don’t have free will. But I’ll argue in this chapter that if it did happen, it would involve a wild over-valuing of free will. Descending into akinetic mutism because you discovered that you didn’t have free will would be like descending into akinetic mutism because you lost $100. Or so I’ll argue.

We argue that libertarianism (roughly, the thesis that we have indeterministic, libertarian free will) is compatible with God’s infallible foreknowledge. We use eternalism (roughly, the thesis that reality is a 4-dimensional block and that past, present, and future objects exist) as an explanatory stepping stone between libertarianism and God’s foreknowledge: eternalism entails that (and comes close to explaining how) an omniscient God would know what we decide in the future even if we have libertarian free will. This account also explains what is wrong with standard fatalist arguments for the incompatibility of free will and God’s foreknowledge.

It is often held that P. F. Strawson endorsed a radical and groundbreaking priority thesis according to which holding someone morally responsible is prior to (or more fundamental than) being morally responsible. I do three things in this paper. First, I argue for a novel interpretation of Strawson according to which he did not endorse a priority thesis that is radical or groundbreaking or original; instead, Strawson’s “priority thesis” is just a consequence of his view that the meanings of our words are determined by our usage and intentions and practices concerning those words. Second, I argue against the radical priority thesis that is often (erroneously) attributed to Strawson. Third, I argue that while Strawson’s view does not involve a radical priority thesis, it does imply that debates about the nature of moral responsibility (and many other debates about normative ethics, metaethics, and conceptual analysis) are trivial in a certain sense.

This paper argues for a certain kind of anti‐metaphysicalism about the temporal ontology debate, i.e., the debate between presentists and eternalists over the existence of past and future objects. Three different kinds of anti‐metaphysicalism are defined—namely, non‐factualism, physical‐empiricism, and trivialism. The paper argues for the disjunction of these three views. It is then argued that trivialism is false, so that either non‐factualism or physical‐empiricism is true. Finally, the paper ends with a discussion of whether we should endorse non‐factualism or physical‐empiricism. An initial reason is provided for thinking that non‐factualism might be true, but in the end, the paper leaves this question open. The paper also argues against a certain kind of necessitarianism about the temporal ontology debate; but this isn't an extra job—the falsity of this necessitarian view falls out of the other arguments as a sort of corollary.

This paper reviews the development of socially responsible investment (SRI) in the Spanish financial market. The year, 1997 saw the appearance in Spain of the first SRI mutual fund, but it was not until late 1999, that major Spanish fund managers offered SRI mutual funds on the retail market. The development of SRI in the Spanish financial market has not experienced the high levels of development seen in other European countries, such as France or Italy, where interest in SRI began during the same period. This paper presents an analysis of the impact of SRI mutual funds managed by Spanish fund managers comparing the evolution of managed assets and number of investors. We also analyse the investment strategies adopted by these funds, which mainly use negative screening criteria and the participation of non-governmental organisations as institutional investors. An analysis of the take up of socially responsible investment in the Spanish financial market shows majors deficits in this process. This is due to Spanish investors having limited sensitivity to social issues and knowledge of SRI, and a lack of development of SRI investment strategies, such as engagement or shareholder activism by fund managers. Furthermore, the take-up of SRI mutual funds in the Spanish financial market coincided with a fall in the stock market at the beginning of the 21st Century. We conclude with an analysis of the relationship between SRI and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).

The aim of this study is to analyze investor behavior towards socially responsible mutual funds. The analysis is based on an experimental study where a sample of individuals takes investment decisions under different parameters of information about the investment alternatives and expected returns. In the experiment, each participant decides how to distribute an investment budget between two funds, returns on which are uncertain and change over time. Two treatments are conducted, each providing a different degree of information on the socially responsible (SR) character of one of the two investment alternatives. The results obtained suggest that although individuals’ criteria for investment are essentially guided by returns and diversification, participants invest significantly more in a fund when they are explicitly informed about its SR nature. In particular, participants who declare being concerned about SR actually invest significantly more in the SR alternative. Furthermore, the level of SR faithfulness among a small group of investors is such that they invest the main share of their budget in the SR fund, even when the return differential is highly unfavorable. Providing clear information about the SR characteristics of an investment is crucial to help investors express their preferences.

A response is given here to Benacerraf's (1965) non-uniqueness (or multiple-reductions) objection to mathematical platonism. It is argued that non-uniqueness is simply not a problem for platonism; more specifically, it is argued that platonists can simply embrace non-uniqueness—i.e., that one can endorse the thesis that our mathematical theories truly describe collections of abstract mathematical objects while rejecting the thesis that such theories truly describe unique collections of such objects. I also argue that part of the motivation for this stance is that it dovetails with the correct response to Benacerraf's other objection to platonism, i.e., his (1973) epistemological objection.

A response is given here to Benacerraf's 1973 argument that mathematical platonism is incompatible with a naturalistic epistemology. Unlike almost all previous platonist responses to Benacerraf, the response given here is positive rather than negative; that is, rather than trying to find a problem with Benacerraf's argument, I accept his challenge and meet it head on by constructing an epistemology of abstract (i.e., aspatial and atemporal) mathematical objects. Thus, I show that spatio-temporal creatures like ourselves can attain knowledge about mathematical objects by simply explaininghow they can do this. My argument is based upon the adoption of a particular version of platonism — full-blooded platonism — which asserts that any mathematical object which possiblycould exist actuallydoes exist.

This book does two things. First, it introduces a novel kind of non-factualist view, and it argues that we should endorse views of this kind in connection with a wide class of metaphysical questions, most notably, the abstract-object question and the composite-object question (more specifically, the book argues that there’s no fact of the matter whether there are any such things as abstract objects or composite objects—or material objects of any other kind). Second, the book explains how these non-factualist views fit into a general anti-metaphysical view called neo-positivism, and it explains how we could argue that neo-positivism is true. Neo-positivism is (roughly) the view that every metaphysical question decomposes into some subquestions—call them Q1, Q2, Q3, etc.—such that, for each of these subquestions, one of the following three anti-metaphysical views is true of it: non-factualism, or scientism, or metaphysically innocent modal-truth-ism. These three views can be defined (very roughly) as follows. Non-factualism about a question Q is the view that there’s no fact of the matter about the answer to Q. Scientism about Q is the view that Q is an ordinary empirical-scientific question about some contingent aspect of physical reality, and Q can’t be settled with an a priori philosophical argument. And metaphysically innocent modal-truth-ism about Q is the view that Q asks about the truth value of a modal sentence that’s metaphysically innocent in the sense that it doesn’t say anything about reality and, if it’s true, isn’t made true by reality.