Thibaut Giraud

Experimental philosophers have been investigating folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility, wondering whether our intuitive understanding of free will and moral responsibility make them compatible or incompatible with determinism. However, methodological worries have been raised concerning such studies: some have claimed that participants in such studies are simply unable to understand the materials they are presented with. To bypass such methodological worries, we investigated “educated” folk intuitions, that is: intuitions of people who are not philosophers but have enough personal interest in philosophy to have a good grasp of philosophical concepts, and to which the vignettes and their context have been explained before they answer. To this end, we took the opportunity of a video and online survey (N = 4385) released by a popular French philosophy youtuber. The results suggest that, even in this context, the results of previous surveys replicate, suggesting that participants’ inclination toward compatibilism is not the mere product of a comprehension error.

Modal Meinongianism is a form of Meinongianism whose main supporters are Graham Priest and Francesco Berto. The main idea of modal Meinongianism is to restrict the logical deviance of Meinongian non-existent objects to impossible worlds and thus prevent it from “contaminating” the actual world: the round square is round and not round, but not in the actual world, only in an impossible world. In the actual world, supposedly, no contradiction is true. I will show that Priest’s semantics, as originally formulated in Towards Non-being, tell us something different. According to certain models (especially models that are interesting from a Meinongian point of view), there are true contradictions in the actual world. Berto and Priest have noticed this unexpected consequence and have suggested a solution (I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out to me the relevant footnotes in Priest and Berto’s work), but I will show that their solution is highly questionable. In the last section of this paper, I will introduce a new and simpler version of modal Meinongianism that avoids the problem.

In the past 20 years, experimental philosophers have investigated folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility, and their compatibility with determinism. To determine whether laypeople are “natural compatibilists” or “natural incompatibilists”, they have used vignettes describing agents living in deterministic universes. However, later research has suggested that participants’ answers to these studies are plagued with comprehension errors: either people fail to really accept that these universes are deterministic, or they confuse determinism with something else. This had led certain experimenters to conclude that maybe folk intuitions about the compatibility of free will with determinism could not be empirically investigated. Here, we propose that we should refrain from embracing this pessimistic conclusion, as scenarios involving time loops might allow experiments to bypass most of these methodological issues. Indeed, scenarios involving time loops belong both to the philosophical literature on free will and to popular culture. As such, they might constitute a bridge between the two worlds. We present the results of five studies using time loops to investigate people’s intuitions about determinism, free will and moral responsibility. The results of these studies allow us to reach two conclusions. The first is that, when people are introduced to determinism through time loops, they do seem to understand what determinism entails. The second is that, at least in the context of time loops, people do not seem to consider determinism to be incompatible with free will and moral responsibility.

In a first part, I defend that formal semantics can be used as a guide to ontological commitment. Thus, if one endorses an ontological view \(O\) and wants to interpret a formal language \(L\) , a thorough understanding of the relation between semantics and ontology will help us to construct a semantics for \(L\) in such a way that its ontological commitment will be in perfect accordance with \(O\) . Basically, that is what I call constructing formal semantics from an ontological perspective. In the rest of the paper, I develop rigorously and put into practice such a method, especially concerning the interpretation of second-order quantification. I will define the notion of ontological framework: it is a set-theoretical structure from which one can construct semantics whose ontological commitments correspond exactly to a given ontological view. I will define five ontological frameworks corresponding respectively to: (i) predicate nominalism, (ii) resemblance nominalism, (iii) armstrongian realism, (iv) platonic realism, and (v) tropism. From those different frameworks, I will construct different semantics for first-order and second-order languages. Notably I will present different kinds of nominalist semantics for second-order languages, showing thus that we can perfectly quantify over properties and relations while being ontologically committed only to individuals. I will show in what extent those semantics differ from each other; it will make clear how the disagreements between the ontological views extend from ontology to logic, and thus why endorsing an ontological view should have an impact on the kind of logic one should use.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how any domain of Meinongian objects can be structured by a special kind of mereology. The basic definition of this mereology is the following: an object is part of another iff every characteristic property of the former is also a characteristic property of the latter. I will show that this kind of mereology ends up being very powerful for dealing with Meinongian objects. Mereological sums and products are not restricted in any way in a domain of Meinongian objects: there is a sum and a product for any pair of Meinongian objects. With the mereological operations of sum, product and complement, and two special Meinongian objects, we can define a full boolean algebra on Meinongian objects. Moreover, this kind of mereology is atomic and extensional: an atom is a Meinongian object having just one characteristic property and two objects are identical iff the same atoms are parts of both of them. A Meinongian object can finally be defined in mereological terms as the sum of the atoms of its characteristic properties.

Modal Meinongianism is a form of Meinongianism whose main supporters are Graham Priest and Francesco Berto. The main idea of modal Meinongianism is to restrict the logical deviance of Meinongian non-existent objects to impossible worlds and thus prevent it from “contaminating” the actual world: the round square is round and not round, but not in the actual world, only in an impossible world. In the actual world, supposedly, no contradiction is true. I will show that Priest’s semantics, as originally formulated in Towards Non-being, tell us something different. According to certain models, there are true contradictions in the actual world. Berto and Priest have noticed this unexpected consequence and have suggested a solution, but I will show that their solution is highly questionable. In the last section of this paper, I will introduce a new and simpler version of modal Meinongianism that avoids the problem

Je montrerai en premier lieu comment et pourquoi la sémantique formelle peut être employée comme un outil pour déterminer l’engagement ontologique d’une théorie : je soutiendrai d’une part que la sémantique doit être prise au sérieux comme apte à décrire la vérifaction des formules du langage; d’autre part, que les engagements ontologiques d’une théorie sont déterminés par ses vérifacteurs. De là, j’exposerai une méthode générale permettant, étant donné un certain type d’ontologie, de construire une sémantique dont les engagements ontologiques sont en accord avec celle-ci. Pour cela, je définirai la notion de cadre ontologique : il s’agit d’une structure telle que toute sémantique cons-truite à partir de cette structure aura un certain engagement ontologique déterminé à l’avance. J’exposerai quatre cadres représentant deux types de nominalisme et deux types de réalisme, et j’esquisserai à partir de ces cadres quatre sémantiques pour les langages du premier ordre.