There is Some Truth in That

Here’s a boring thought experiment that doesn’t demonstrate anything. Smith burgled the house last night; Detective Stanley is investigating the crime scene. He acquires evidence sufficient for knowledge that the burglar came in through the window, but finds very little evidence about whether it was Smith or someone else who committed the crime. Here are [...]

Read Full Post »

I’ve just uploaded a new draft of my paper on modals and modal epistemology. (I posted an earlier draft a few weeks ago.) If anyone’s interested, it’s here: Modals and Modal Epistemology Comments are extremely welcome. I hope to submit it soon, so if you wanted to provide feedback in the next week or so, [...]

Read Full Post »

Pretty much everybody, I think, agrees that some disputes are merely verbal. For example, I may overhear someone say “Derek has big hair,” think of my colleague Derek Ball, and retort, “you’re wrong, Derek has short hair.” If it turns out that my interlocutor was referring not to Derek Ball but to Derek Parfit, then [...]

Read Full Post »

A robust and celebrated fact is that imagining that p is often in various respects similar to believing that p. For example, when I imagine, say in the context of engaging with a fiction, that a great injustice has been committed, I feel angry in a way similar to the way I’d feel if I [...]

Read Full Post »

According to a common view, beliefs suffer a coherence constraint that desires do not. If I believe that p, then I’m very unlikely, at the very same time, to believe that not-p — and if I do, that’s a clear rational failing. But desiring various contradictory things is commonplace. I don’t want to dispute that [...]

Read Full Post »

Let us suppose that Dmitri knows how to sing the ”Il balen” cadenza from Verdi’s Il Trovatore. There’s a debate about whether Dmitri’s knowing how to sing the cadenza amounts to knowing some proposition. According to ‘intellectualists’, knowing how to X just is (to an approximation), knowing, for some w, that w is a way to X. [...]

Read Full Post »

Shaun Nichols writes: In addition to a pretense box, Stich and I propose a mechanism that supplies the pretense box with representations that initiate or embellish an episode of pretense, the “Script Elaborator”. This is required to explain the bizarre and creative elements that are evident in much pretend play. However, there are also much [...]

Read Full Post »

I’ve just completed a draft of a new paper on modals and modal epistemology, developing some of the ideas in my last few blog posts, and engaging with Timothy Williamson’s discussion of counterfactuals and modal epistemology. Here’s the abstract: Modals and Modal Epistemology Abstract. I distinguish (§§1-2) two projects in modal epistemology, and suggest (§3) [...]

Read Full Post »

This post is an exercise in Williamson exegesis. I’m looking primarily at chapter five — the modal epistemology chapter — of The Philosophy of Philosophy. (That chapter substantially overlaps a couple of earlier papers as well.) As many readers will know, Williamson emphasises the equivalence of claims of metaphysical modality with particular counterfactuals (such as the [...]

Read Full Post »

I like the approach to counterfactuals that treats them as modals. The sentence ‘if A were the case, C would be the case’ says that, out of some restricted class of possibilities, all the A possibilities are C possibilities. Which restricted class is in play is of course in part a context-sensitive matter. The relevant [...]

Read Full Post »

We all know that metaphysical possibility isn’t the same thing as physical possibility, or other ‘restricted’ notions. It is sometimes suggested that the modifiers ‘metaphysically’, ‘physically’, ‘epistemically’, etc., in phrases like ‘metaphysically possible’ act as restrictors on the more general, univocal, property of possibility. (Compare: someone can be surprisingly wealthy, unjustly wealthy, or extremely wealthy [...]

Read Full Post »

As you may have noticed, I haven’t been posting here much lately. That’s for a couple of reasons. One is that, as many of you will know, my personal life has lately been very exciting. Carrie Jenkins and I are recently engaged to be married. So that’s pretty awesome. It also means I’m spending a [...]

Read Full Post »

In a recent paper in Mind, Michael Blome-Tillmann defends a form of ‘knows’ contextualism that is broadly Lewisean. His project is, in its broad forms, very similar to that in one of my forthcoming papers. In my paper, I argue that Lewis’s particular suggested rules for proper ignoring are inessential to the central contextualist insight, [...]

Read Full Post »

I’m going to be discussing an argument that I know Jason Stanley to have given, but I’m away from my copy of his book at the moment, so I can’t cite it properly, or check and see who else has discussed it (or even whether it’s original to Jason). I’ll follow up if citation protocol [...]

Read Full Post »

Suppose you think that it’s possible to know that p, even though your epistemic position vis-a-vis p is weak enough for ‘it might be that not-p’, in its epistemic reading, to be true. I don’t really see why you’d want to think this myself, but I guess some people think that (a) this is a [...]

Read Full Post »