•  4
    Web Consequence Untangled
    Topoi 1-19. forthcoming.
    Under the standard modal explication of consequence, a conclusion is a consequence of some premises just in case necessarily, if the latter are true, so is the former. Notoriously, this explication yields some results that at first glance are counter-intuitive. In particular, a necessary truth is a consequence of arbitrary premises, and premises that cannot all be true together entail arbitrary conclusions. In his paper ‘On Ground and Consequence’ (Synthese, 2021), Benjamin Schnieder introduces …Read more
  •  2
    The Whole Truth
    In Federico L. G. Faroldi & Frederik Van De Putte (eds.), Kit Fine on Truthmakers, Relevance, and Non-classical Logic, Springer Verlag. pp. 521-550. 2023.
    We often care not just whether an account of some subject matter is correct, but also whether it is complete—the whole truth, as we might say. This chapter criticizes extant intensional explications of the notion of a whole truth by showing that they yield implausible results in an important range of cases. The difficulty is traced to the inability of an intensional framework to adequately capture constraints of relevance imposed by an intuitive understanding of the whole truth. I go on to devel…Read more
  •  26
    Grounding
    In Markus Schrenk (ed.), Handbuch Metaphysik (German), Metzler. pp. 278-284. 2017.
    No abstract available.
  •  28
    That’s It! Hyperintensional Total Logic
    Journal of Philosophical Logic 52 (4): 963-1004. 2023.
    Call a truth complete with respect to a subject matter if it entails every truth about that subject matter. One attractive way to formulate a complete truth is to state all the relevant positive truths, and then add: and that’s it. When the subject matters under consideration are non-contingent, a non-trivial conception of completeness must invoke a hyperintensional conception of entailment, and of the completion operation denoted by ‘that’s it’. This paper develops two complementary hyperintens…Read more
  •  94
    Properties and Propositions: The Metaphysics of Higher-Order Logic (review)
    Philosophical Review 131 (3): 382-386. 2022.
  •  24
    If Art is smart and Art is rich, then someone is both smart and rich – namely, Art. And if Art is smart and Bart is smart, then Art is something that Bart is, too – namely, smart. The first claim involves first-order quantification, a generalization concerning what kinds of things there are. The second involves second-order quantification, a generalization concerning what there is for things to be. Or so it appears. Following W.V.O. Quine, many philosophers have endorsed a thesis of Ontological …Read more
  •  1
    Content, according to Bolzano, is intransparent: our knowledge of certain essential features of the contents of our contentful mental acts is often severely limited. In this paper, I identify various intransparency theses Bolzano is committed to and present and evaluate the defence he offers for his view. I argue that while his intransparency theses may be correct, his defence is unsuccessful. Moreover, I argue that improving on his defence would require substantially modifying his general epist…Read more
  •  38
    Mighty Belief Revision
    Journal of Philosophical Logic 51 (5): 1175-1213. 2022.
    Belief revision theories standardly endorse a principle of intensionality to the effect that ideal doxastic agents do not discriminate between pieces of information that are equivalent within classical logic. I argue that this principle should be rejected. Its failure, on my view, does not require failures of logical omniscience on the part of the agent, but results from a view of the update as _mighty_: as encoding what the agent learns might be the case, as well as what must be. The view is mo…Read more
  •  28
    Bolzano on the intransparency of content
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 82 (1): 189-208. 2011.
    Content, according to Bolzano, is intransparent: our knowledge of certain essential features of the contents of our contentful mental acts is often severely limited. In this paper, I identify various intransparency theses Bolzano is committed to and present and evaluate the defence he offers for his view. I argue that while his intransparency theses may be correct, his defence is unsuccessful. Moreover, I argue that improving on his defence would require substantially modifying his general epist…Read more
  •  79
    Ground-theoretic equivalence
    Synthese 198 (2): 1643-1683. 2019.
    Say that two sentences are ground-theoretically equivalent iff they are interchangeable salva veritate in grounding contexts. Notoriously, ground-theoretic equivalence is a hyperintensional matter: even logically equivalent sentences may fail to be interchangeable in grounding contexts. Still, there seem to be some substantive, general principles of ground-theoretic equivalence. For example, it seems plausible that any sentences of the form A∧B\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \…Read more
  •  134
    How not to defend ontological cheats
    Analysis 70 (2): 290-296. 2010.
    (No abstract is available for this citation)
  •  210
    Everything, and then some
    Mind 126 (502): 499-528. 2017.
    On its intended interpretation, logical, mathematical and metaphysical discourse sometimes seems to involve absolutely unrestricted quantification. Yet our standard semantic theories do not allow for interpretations of a language as expressing absolute generality. A prominent strategy for defending absolute generality, influentially proposed by Timothy Williamson in his paper ‘Everything’, avails itself of a hierarchy of quantifiers of ever increasing orders to develop non-standard semantic theo…Read more
  •  81
    Towards a theory of ground-theoretic content
    Synthese 195 (2): 785-814. 2018.
    A lot of research has recently been done on the topic of ground, and in particular on the logic of ground. According to a broad consensus in that debate, ground is hyperintensional in the sense that even logically equivalent truths may differ with respect to what grounds them, and what they ground. This renders pressing the question of what we may take to be the ground-theoretic content of a true statement, i.e. that aspect of the statement’s overall content to which ground is sensitive. I propo…Read more
  •  186
    A Note on the Logic of Worldly Ground
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 4 (1): 59-68. 2015.
    In his 2010 paper ‘Grounding and Truth-Functions’, Fabrice Correia has developed the first and so far only proposal for a logic of ground based on a worldly conception of facts. In this paper, we show that the logic allows the derivation of implausible grounding claims. We then generalize these results and draw some conclusions concerning the structural features of ground and its associated notion of relevance, which has so far not received the attention it deserves.
  •  147
    A lot of research has recently been done on the topic of ground, and in particular on the logic of ground. According to a broad consensus in that debate, ground is hyperintensional in the sense that even logically equivalent truths may differ with respect to what grounds them, and what they ground. This renders pressing the question of what we may take to be the ground-theoretic content of a true statement, i.e. that aspect of the statement’s overall content to which ground is sensitive. I propo…Read more
  •  245
    A Simpler Puzzle of Ground
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 2 (2): 85-89. 2013.
    Metaphysical grounding is standardly taken to be irreflexive: nothing grounds itself. Kit Fine has presented some puzzles that appear to contradict this principle. I construct a particularly simple variant of those puzzles that is independent of several of the assumptions required by Fine, instead employing quantification into sentence position. Various possible responses to Fine's puzzles thus turn out to apply only in a restricted range of cases.
  •  86
    Singular troubles with singleton socrates
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (1): 40-56. 2020.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.
  •  134
    Semantic values in higher-order semantics
    Philosophical Studies 168 (3): 709-724. 2014.
    Recently, some philosophers have argued that we should take quantification of any order to be a legitimate and irreducible, sui generis kind of quantification. In particular, they hold that a semantic theory for higher-order quantification must itself be couched in higher-order terms. Øystein Linnebo has criticized such views on the grounds that they are committed to general claims about the semantic values of expressions that are by their own lights inexpressible. I show that Linnebo's objectio…Read more
  •  68
    Implicit commitment in theory choice
    Synthese 191 (10): 2147-2165. 2014.
    The proper evaluation of a theory's virtues seems to require taking into account what the theory is indirectly or implicitly committed to, in addition to what it explicitly says. Most extant proposals for criteria of theory choice in the literature spell out the relevant notion of implicit commitment via some notion of entailment. I show that such criteria behave implausibly in application to theories that differ over matters of entailment. A recent defence by Howard Peacock of such a criterion …Read more
  •  116
    A hyperintensional criterion of irrelevance
    Synthese 194 (8): 2917-2930. 2017.
    On one important notion of irrelevance, evidence that is irrelevant in an inquiry may rationally be discarded, and attempts to obtain evidence amount to a waste of resources if they are directed at irrelevant evidence. The familiar Bayesian criterion of irrelevance, whatever its merits, is not adequate with respect to this notion. I show that a modification of the criterion due to Ken Gemes, though a significant improvement, still has highly implausible consequences. To make progress, I argue, w…Read more
  •  256
    Difference-making grounds
    Philosophical Studies 174 (5): 1191-1215. 2017.
    We define a notion of difference-making for partial grounds of a fact in rough analogy to existing notions of difference-making for causes of an event. Using orthodox assumptions about ground, we show that it induces a non-trivial division with examples of partial grounds on both sides. We then demonstrate the theoretical fruitfulness of the notion by applying it to the analysis of a certain kind of putative counter-example to the transitivity of ground recently described by Jonathan Schaffer. F…Read more