Noga Gratvol

Our emotions and beliefs can affect our perceptual experiences. If you believe your friend is angry with you, you may experience their neutral expression as anger. Some philosophers argue that in such cases, the resulting perceptual experiences are rationally assessable. In particular, they argue that these experiences are the result of inferences from person-level mental states and are therefore assessable according to inferential norms. Here, I accept that some perceptual experiences are rationally assessable, but argue that their rationality should not be understood in inferential terms.

Laws of nature are sometimes said to govern their instances. Spelling out what governance is, however, is an important task that has only recently received sustained philosophical attention. In the first part of this paper, I argue against the two prominent reductive views of governance—modal views and grounding views. Ruling out the promising candidates for reduction supports the claim that governance is sui generis. In the second part of this paper, I argue that governance is subject to a contingency requirement. Laws govern their instances only if those instances are metaphysically contingent. I end by defending the resulting account of governance from two potential objections.

Let Essentialism be the view that at least some object has at least some property essentially. And let Relative Essentialism be the view that Essentialism is true, but that for any object that has any property essentially, it has it essentially only relative to the value of some parameter. Meghan Sullivan has recently put forward a promising new version of Relative Essentialism, according to which the relevant parameter is an explanatory framework. We argue that despite its promise, Sullivan's version unfortunately fails, due to the mismatch between the logic of essentiality and the logic of explanation.