Philip Percival

In a Postscript, David Lewis tries to extend results obtained in his "Time's Arrow and Counterfactual Dependence" from the deterministic case to the indeterministic one. In particular, he claims that under the supposition that the actual world is indeterministic, the truth of the counterfactual 'If Nixon had pressed the button, there would have been a nuclear holocaust' is reconciled with his truth conditions for counterfactual conditionals by a certain refinement of his earlier treatment. Sections II and III explain why his claim is mistaken. Section IV remarks why his matters

[Philip Percival] I aim to illuminate foundational epistemological issues by reflecting on 'epistemic consequentialism'-the epistemic analogue of ethical consequentialism. Epistemic consequentialism employs a concept of cognitive value playing a role in epistemic norms governing belief-like states that is analogous to the role goodness plays in act-governing moral norms. A distinction between 'direct' and 'indirect' versions of epistemic consequentialism is held to be as important as the familiar ethical distinction on which it is based. These versions are illustrated, respectively, by cognitive decision-theory and reliabilism. Cognitive decision-theory is defended, and various conceptual issues concerning it explored. A simple dilemma suggests that epistemic consequentialism has radical consequences. /// [Robert Stalnaker] After reviewing the general ideas of the consequentialist framework, I take a critical look at two of the epistemic consequentialist projects that Philip Percival considers in his paper: the first assumes that there is a notion of acceptance that contrasts with belief and that can be evaluated by its expected epistemic utility. The second uses epis utility to evaluate beliefs and partial beliefs themselves, as well as actions, such as gathering information in the course of an inquiry. I express scepticism about the notion of acceptance required for the first project, and argue that the second kind of project can be fruitful only with a richer notion of epistemic utility than has yet been developed

The question as to whether some objects are possible worlds that have an initial segment in common, i.e. so that their fusion is a temporal tree whose branches are possible worlds, arises both for those who hold that our universe has the structure of a temporal tree and for those who hold that what there is includes concrete universes of every possible variety. The notion of “possible world” employed in the question is seen to be the notion of an object of a kind such that objects of that kind play a certain theoretical role. Lewis’s discussion of the question is thereby clarified but is nevertheless inadequate; his negative answer is correct but even from his combinatorialist viewpoint the rationale he provides for this answer is misguided. I explain why the combinatorialist advocate of concrete plenitude should hold that no object is a tree of possible worlds. Then I explain that for a different reason the nomic essentialist advocate of concrete plenitude should hold this much too

For various reasons several authors have enriched classical first order syntax by adding a predicate abstraction operator. “Conservatives” have done so without disturbing the syntax of the formal quantifiers but “revisionists” have argued that predicate abstraction motivates the universal quantifier’s re-classification from an expression that combines with a variable to yield a sentence from a sentence, to an expression that combines with a one-place predicate to yield a sentence. My main aim is to advance the cause of predicate abstraction while cautioning against revisionism. In so doing, however, I shall pursue a secondary aim by conveying mixed blessings to those who hold the view that in the logical sense of “existence” some existing object is such as to exist contingently. Advocates of this view must concede Williamson’s recent contention that the domain of unrestricted objectual quantification could not have been narrower than it is actually, but predicate abstraction affords them some hope of accommodating this concession

For twenty years, D. H. Mellor has promoted an influential defence of a view of time he first called the ‘tenseless’ view, but now associates with what he calls the ‘B-theory.’ It is his defence of this view, not the view itself, which is generally taken to be novel. It is organized around a forcefully presented attack on rival views which he claims to be a development of McTaggart's celebrated argument that the ‘A-series’ is contradictory. I will call this attack ‘Mellor's McTaggart.’ Although it has received much critical attention, it has not been well understood. For one thing, it has changed over the years in a way that is little appreciated. Whereas Mellor's original version amounts to a dilemma each horn of which contains a single strand of argument, later statements of the first horn contain a second strand of argument unannounced. I shall be concerned to disentangle these strands. I shall also show them to have been largely anticipated by Gareth Evans. However, my main aim is not the clarification of Mellor's McTaggart, but its refutation. I shall show that there is a rival to Mellor's view of time against which the first horn of the dilemma begs the question both as originally presented, and as supplemented. This rival is a ‘Priorean’ version of the ‘presentist’ doctrine that only what is present exists. Although Prior himself gave McTaggart's own argument short shrift, in refuting Mellor's development of it I do not merely resurrect Prior's moves. Mellor's McTaggart introduces specifically semantic considerations. It focuses not as McTaggart did on presentness and futurity etc., but on the truth-values of tokens of propositions in which presentness and futurity etc. are ascribed. Consequently, its refutation requires an answer, from the perspective of a presentist metaphysics, to a question which came to the fore only after Prior's death. The question is this: How should semantic theory be developed in the light of the need for a theory of linguistic understanding? Though Evans flirted with the issue of how this question should be answered from a presentist perspective, the answer he articulates is wrong. I shall do no more than sketch the correct answer. That is all a refutation of Mellor's McTaggart requires.

This paper is in three sections. In the first I describe and illustrate three uses of indices of truth in semantics. The way I illustrate this classification is not completely uncontroversial, but I expect that my intuitions on this matter are generally shared. In the second section I broach a question which is central to the metaphysics of time, namely: how should certain temporal indices of truth - times - be fitted within this classificatory scheme? I sketch three proposals as to how this might be done, and show how they constitute different metaphysical conceptions of the nature of time. Finally, in the third section I turn to a specific problem with the classification of times (as indices of truth) I call 'non-indexical'. Mellor (1981) thinks this problem insoluble, and argues that it shows this classification to be absurd. However, by appealing to the modal analogues of the issues involved, I first show that Mellor's argument is question- begging, and then go on to show how the non-indexical classification of times might undermine the presuppositions on which his argument rests. The paper attempts to contribute to a discussion of the question raised in section II, not to provide a definitive answer to it.

Comic moralism holds that some moral properties impact negatively on the funniness of certain items that possess them. Strong versions of the doctrine deem the impact to be devastating: the possession of such a property by one of these items ensures the item is not funny. Weak versions deem the impact merely damaging: any funniness one of the items possesses is diminished, but not destroyed, by its possession of the property. Various species of comic moralism hold, respectively, various moral properties to impact negatively on funniness. For example, one species holds as much of the property “manifests attitudes that are morally wrong,” but other species hold as much of different moral properties. Comic moralism, or a species of it, can be unrestricted, or restricted, depending on whether it pertains to all the items that possess the negatively impacting moral property or properties, or to just a subset of these items.

PaceZagzebski, there is no route from the value of knowledge to a non–reliabilist virtue–theoretic epistemology. Her discussion of the value problem is marred by an uncritical and confused employment of the notion of a “state” of knowledge, an uncritical acceptance of a “knowledge–belief” identity thesis, and an incoherent presumption that the widely held thought that knowledge is more valuable than true belief amounts to the view that knowledge is a state of true belief having an intrinsic property which a state of ‘mere” true belief lacks. Her arguments against a “machine–product” conception of knowledge are undermined by these flaws, while the alternative “agent–act” model she recommends is unattractive, at odds with the knowledge–belief identity thesis she favours, and no solution to the problem of the value of knowledge she poses. I end with the observation that her version of virtue–theoretic epistemology points in the direction of cognitive decision–theoretic norms, and I briefly discuss the bearing of this fact upon her viewpoint.

In a brief passage, David Lewis derives from quantum-theory a dilemma regarding the explanation of chance events which he tries to solve by first distinguishing plain from contrastive why-questions have answers. His brevity warrants elaboration and critique. I endorse his derivation, but I make a structural objection to his solution. Once a further distinction is drawn between different kinds of contrastive why-question, his solution can be modified and refined so as to go some way to meeting this objection. However, it cannot resist a deeper objection to the effect that chance events can be given contrastive explanations after all. The alternative solution to the dilemma that I recommend holds Lewis's conception of the 'essence of chance' to be illusory

I aim to illuminate foundational epistemological issues by reflecting on 'epistemic consequentialism'—the epistemic analogue of ethical consequentialism. Epistemic consequentialism employs a concept of cognitive value playing a role in epistemic norms governing belief-like states that is analogous to the role goodness plays in act-governing moral norms. A distinction between 'direct' and 'indirect' versions of epistemic consequentialism is held to be as important as the familiar ethical distinction on which it is based. These versions are illustrated, respectively, by cognitive decision-theory and reliabilism. Cognitive decision-theory is defended, and various conceptual issues concerning it explored. A simple dilemma suggests that epistemic consequentialism has radical consequences.

I aim to illuminate foundational epistemological issues by reflecting on ‘epistemic consequentialism’—the epistemic analogue of ethical consequentialism. Epistemic consequentialism employs a concept of cognitive value playing a role in epistemic norms governing belief-like states that is analogous to the role goodness plays in act-governing moral norms. A distinction between ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ versions of epistemic consequentialism is held to be as important as the familiar ethical distinction on which it is based. These versions are illustrated, respectively, by cognitive decision-theory and reliabilism. Cognitive decision-theory is defended, and various conceptual issues concerning it explored. A simple dilemma suggests that epistemic consequentialism has radical consequences.

Quantum mechanics gives us reason to think both that the world is indeterministic, and that there are irreducibly statistical laws governing objectively chancy processes. Lewis notes that this raises a two-horned dilemma between two options deemed unacceptable: severely curtail our explanatory practices with respect to macro events, or revise our conception of the essence of chance. He maintains, however, that we can escape this dilemma by making a distinction between ‘plain’ why-questions of the simple form ‘Why did D occur?’ and ‘contrastive’ why-questions of the more complex form ‘Why did E occur rather than E*?’ I will argue that even if a chance event receives a nontrivial explanation, there is still a sense in which it happens for no reason if there is a time prior to its occurrence at which the change of its happening when it does is fixed.

It is one thing for a scientist to speak a language in which he can conduct and communicate his investigations, another for him to possess a reflective understanding enabling him to explain the nature and workings of that language. Many who have sought such an understanding have held that the concepts of “meaning,” “reference,” and “theoretical term” play a crucial role in developing it. But others — instrumentalist skeptics about reference, Quinean skeptics about meaning, and skeptics about the theory/observation distinction — have denied this.

The mathematical study of probability originated in the seventeenth century, when mathematicians were invited to tackle problems arising in games of chance. In such games gamblers want to know which betting odds on unpredictable events are advantageous. This amounts to a concern with probability, because probability and fair betting odds appear linked by the principle that odds of m to n for a bet on a repeatable event E are fair if and only if the probability of E is n/(m + n). For example, suppose E is the occurrence of double‐six on a throw of two dice and that its probability is 1/36 = 1/(35 + 1). Because of the intuitive connection between the probability of an event and its long‐run frequency in repeated trials, we would expect E to occur on average 1 time in (35 + 1) throws. Since to set odds on E at 35 to 1 is to agree that for a stake B, the one who bets on E gains 35B/1 if E occurs and loses B to his opponent if it does not, those must be the fair odds for a bet on E. At them, we can expect 1 win of 35B to be balanced in the long run by 35 losses of the stake B, so that neither party to the bet enjoys net gain.