bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Extend or Identify: Two Stoic Accounts of Altruism
Authors: McCabe Mary Margaret
Published: November 2023

Why do we act for the sake of others? Why should we act for the sake of others? These questions are demanding on ethics, not least because the first may seem disingenuous. After all—it is commonly assumed—we are all selfish: our fundamental, our most basic, psychological drive is towards our own interests. This assumption, base in both senses of the word, implies that the phenomenon of altruistic behaviour needs explaining—why do we appear to act against these base drives? The explanation is often framed (or evaded) in terms of that appearance: we seem to act for others’ sake, when in fact, albeit indirectly, we are serving our own.1 Further, any imperative to altruism, any answer to the second question, must (on the base assumption) either harness our selfishness (by showing that considering the interests of others is consistent with it)2 or transcend it (by showing that there is another source of the demand that we act altruistically).
Raz on Values and Reasons
Authors: Heuer Ulrike
Published: November 2023

As a preliminary way of delineating two basic alternatives for mapping the relation between reasons and values, let me pose a Euthyphro style question: (1) Is something valuable because we have reason to behave in some way with respect to it? Or: (2) Do we have reason to behave in some way with respect to it because it is valuable? Though helpful for contrasting different approaches, this question is still multiply ambiguous. It may be interpreted as a question concerning the metaphysical primacy of values or reasons respectively that is, whether there have to be things of value for there to be reasons, or vice versa.
What does aristotle mean by priority in substance?
Authors: Miakin Stephen
Published: November 2023

In Metaphysics Θ8 Aristotle discusses three different ways in which actuality is prior to potentiality. First, actuality is prior in definition, λóγ, to potentiality (1049b12–17). For example, in defining a capacity I cite its exercise rather than vice versa: to be visible is to be capable of being seen. Second, actuality in one way is temporally, χρóν, prior to potentiality, and in another way is not temporally prior (1049b17-I050a3). For example, take something which is actually a human being: an adult. That was preceded by something which was potentially a human being (a fertilized egg, or an infant). In that way potentiality is temporally prior to actuality. On the other hand, something else which is actually a human being (an adult parent) temporally preceded the fertilized egg: and in that way actuality is temporally prior to potentiality.
Determinism And Recurrence In Early Stoic Thought
Authors: Salles Ricardo
Published: November 2023

The Stoic doctrine of everlasting recurrence holds that the present world will be destroyed by a mighty conflagration, but will endlessly recur in great cycles, and is in fact the recurrence of a world that existed in previous cycles. This paper deals with a question concerning the interpretation of the doctrine: how does it relate to determinism? In particular, does it imply determinism? I shall argue that it does, and that the kind of determinism at stake is based on the notion of regularity—it asserts not just that everything is necessitated, but also that the necessity holds in virtue of strict regularities of the form ‘same causes, same effects’ under which they are subsumed.
Grammatical relations across languages
Authors: Farrell Patrick
Published: November 2023

There are essentially three broad classes of fact about languages for which a theory of grammatical relations needs to be responsible. First, it appears that, at least in terms of their head-marking and dependent-marking systems for indicating grammatical relations, most languages draw a fundamental distinction between two basic roles, corresponding roughly to a category with agent as prototype and a category with patient as prototype. However, the different ways in which these categories are defined constitute one of the main syntactic typologies of languages. Secondly, in addition to active vs. passive voice alternations (see Section 1.2) and alternations between an object + oblique construction and a corresponding double-object construction (see Section 1.3.2), there are various kinds of “ relation-changing” and voice con-structions in languages that have important implications for an understanding of grammatical-relation systems. Thirdly, languages frequently have verb classes or constructions for which the dependents manifest some but not all of the properties of canonical subjects or objects (as, for example, with the dative-subject construction in Icelandic discussed in Section 1.2).
Role and Reference Grammar
Authors: Farrell Patrick
Published: November 2023

Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) (Foley and Van Valin 1984, Van Valin and La Polla 1997, Van Valin 1993, to appear) provides an interesting contrast to Relational Grammar precisely because it focuses considerable attention on the issue that RG needs to address most but doesn” t, that is the details of a presumed relationship between verb meaning and grammatical relations. Furthermore, while drawing a clear line between semantic roles, which are ascribed considerable importance, and syntactic functions, the latter are held to be defined and used in language-specific and even construction-specific ways that are subject to considerable variation and the former are ascribed a relatively central role in accounting for grammatical phenomena. Whereas RG attempts to provide a framework for analysing the syntactic component of grammar, which is assumed to be autonomous in the sense of Chomsky (1957), RRG maintains that syntax cannot be properly understood without an integrated account of the semantic and pragmatic functions of language. The design of RRG from its inception has been informed by a concern for accounting for the grammatical properties of typologically and genetically diverse languages, considered on their own terms. It has been utilized in grammatical descriptions of a wide variety of languages and its central ideas have been widely appealed to in theory-neutral typological and descriptive work.
Self-reference and self-awareness
Authors: Shoemaker Sydney
Published: November 2023

If we consider the logical powers of first-person statements and the role played by the first-person pronoun in communication, nothing seems clearer than that in all first-person statements, including “avowals,” the word ‘I’ functions as a singular term or singular referring expression. Statements expressed by the sentence “I feel pain” have it in common with those expressed by sentences like “He feels pain” and “Jones feels pain” that they contradict the proposition “Nobody feels pain” and entail the proposition “Someone feels pain.” In these and other ways “I feel pain” behaves logically as a value of the propositional function “X feels pain.” Moreover, in all first-person statements, including “psychological” or “experience” statements, the word ‘I’ serves the function of identifying for the audience the subject to which the predicate of the statement must apply if the statement is to be true (what it indicates, of course, is that the subject is the speaker, the maker of the statement). And this is precisely the function of a referring expression.
The inverted spectrum
Authors: Shoemaker Sydney
Published: November 2023

As best I can determine, the idea of spectrum inversion made its first appearance in the philosophical literature when John Locke, in the Essay, entertained the possibility that “the same Object should produce in several Men’s Minds different Ideas at the same time; e.g. the Idea, that a Violet produces in one Man’s Mind by his Eyes, were the same that a Marigold produced in another Man’s, and vice versa.”1 It was obviously part of Locke’s supposition that the color experiences of the two people differ in such a way that the difference could not manifest itself in their behavior and their use of color words, and we will take this as an essential feature of full-fledged inter subjective spectrum inversion.
Self and substance
Authors: Shoemaker Sydney
Published: November 2023

Nowadays the question whether the self is a substance, and whether the identity over time of a person requires the identity of a substance, has a musty smell to it. We recognize it as a question that played a central role in the intriguing discussions of personal identity in Locke, Butler, Hume, and Reid; but it has not been the central question in contemporary discussions of personal identity, and in most such discussions it is simply not addressed.
Introduction
Authors: Beall JC
Published: November 2023

Philosophers work at the limits of language; that is where standard principles are challenged; that is where paradoxes are found. The task, at least with respect to natural language, is to learn from such limiting cases; the task is to figure out what the paradoxes teach us about the very language we speak. The papers in this volume address (for the most part) two sorts of paradox: semantic and soritical.
Context, Vagueness, and the Sorites: Comments on Shapiro
Authors: Keefe Rosanna
Published: November 2023

Shapiro and Raffman have, together. told an interesting and plausible psychological and pragmatic story about many of our judgements involving vague predicates. Shapiro explains how, if we focus on changes in conversational context (prompted by changes of score, in Lewis’s sense), then the fact that, when taken through a Sorites series, subjects will at some point jump from applying the Sorites predicate to denying that it applies, does not mean that those subjects are violating a plausible principle governing judgement, a principle that he labels the tolerance principle.
Against Truth-Value Gaps
Authors: Glanzberg Michael
Published: November 2023

Many things are neither true nor false: shoes and ships and sealing wax, to name a few. But these things are neither true nor false because they are not the kinds of things that can be either. There are also some things that are apt for being true or false. Preferences vary on exactly what these things are. Common candidates include utterances, interpreted sentences paired with contexts, and propositions. Can there be something that is apt to be true or false, but fails to be either This is the question of whether there are substa11tial truth-value Baps. It has been a persistent idea in the philosophy of language that there are substantial truthvalue gaps.
Is the true self individualn in the Platonist tradition from Plato to Averroës?
Authors: Sorabji Richard
Published: November 2023

For the Platonist tradition there is a problem, as briefely mentioned in chapter two, of whether the true self is individual. The problem starts with Plato ;s belief that the true self is the rational soul or the intellect. Many people tend to think of intellect as a less distinctively individual part of their psychology, although it may seem more distinctive to philosophers, whose profession is intellectual discussion. As regards soul, Plato himself speaks as if all soul is one, indivisible except amongst bodies (Timaeus 35A 1– 6). And we shall see that Plotinus and Themistius think it even clearer that all intellect is one and indivisible.
Individual persona vs. Universalizability
Authors: Sorabji Richard
Published: November 2023

We saw earlier that the question of what constitutes personal identity over time can sometimes have an ethical dimension. Plato ;s true self in chapter six was an ideal self to be separated out from bodily concerns, and Locke in chapter five saw personal identity as a forensic concept concerned with reward and punishment.
Why I Am Not A Stream Of Consciousness
Authors: Sorabji Richard
Published: November 2023

My view in chapter one was that talk of me is, roughly speaking, talk of this person, and that a person is something that has psychological states and does things; for short that owns psychological states and actions. The importance of ownership will only become clear when I reach the subjects of agency and ethics.
Syntax
Authors: Hudson Richard
Published: November 2023

By far the most controversial characteristic of WG syntax has always been the adoption of dependencies rather than phrases as the basis for sentence structure (Hudson 1984: 75). Most theories of syntax have followed the American tradition of phrase-structure analysis which started with the Immediate-Constituent Analysis of the Bloomfieldians (Bloomfield 1933; Wells 1947; Harris 1951) and which was formally defined by Chomsky (Chomsky 1957). This gives a part–whole analysis in which sentences are divided into successively smaller phrases until the parts are syntactic atoms—morphemes in some theories and words in others. In contrast, the dependency tradition is much older, with roots in Paninian grammar (Bharati, Chaitanya, and Sangal 1995) and in the ancient grammars of Greek, Latin (Covington 1984; Percival 1990), and Arabic (Owens 1988). In this tradition, the main unit of syntax is the word, and all grammatical relations relate one word to another; these relations have had various names such as ‘connection’ (Tesnière 1959) but the term ‘dependency’ has a respectable ancestry and the great advantage of alluding to the asymmetrical relationship between a superordinate and subordinate word.
Hong Kong
Authors: Simpson Andrew
Published: November 2023

Modern-day Hong Kong is a territory of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) which has undergone a quite extraordinary development in its recent history, from being a small fishing port in the early nineteenth century to becoming one of the most high profile, cosmopolitan, and economically successful cities in Asia during the last forty years. Having functioned as a British colony from 1842 until 1997, Hong Kong is now (once again) an integral part of ‘mainland China’, where it currently enjoys the status of ‘Special Administrative Region’ (SAR) and the opportunity to continue with its pre-hand-over economic and social systems for a fifty-year period following 1997, the Chinese government in Beijing having pledged not to interfere in the internal a fairs of the territory during this time. Because Hong Kong is therefore now a component part of the PRC, an examination of language and national identity issues in Hong Kong could have been included as a section within this volume’s chapter 7 on mainland China. However, due to the special complexity of Hong Kong’s past and present circumstances, there are good reasons for deciding to devote an independent chapter to the study of Hong Kong here. First of all, what is commonly characterized as the basic identity of Hong Kong and its inhabitants was formed during a period when Hong Kong was largely isolated from mainland China due to twentieth-century political developments in China and Hong Kong’s status as a British colony. Secondly, Hong Kong currently functions with a socio-economic system which is significantly different from that of the rest of China, as part of the Chinese government’s promise of ‘One Country, Two Systems’; constraints on life in Hong Kong are therefore markedly different from those further north in the rest of the PRC. Thirdly, the level of post-industrial economic development present in Hong Kong is greater than that in most areas of mainland China, as is the degree with which Hong Kong maintains regular international connections with other countries in the rest of Asia and the West.
Japan
Authors: Gottlieb Nanette
Published: November 2023

The major language of Japan is Japanese, spoken by most of the 127.5 million people living in the Japanese archipelago stretching from Okinawa in the south to Hokkaido in the north. Dialectal variations exist, but the standard form of the language, based since 1916 on the dialect of an area of Tokyo, is that taught in schools and used in all areas of Japan. Estimates of how many people worldwide speak the language vary: many sources (e.g. Crystal 1987) limit the number to the population of Japan itself, ignoring the possible heritage speakers living in other parts of the world such as Hawaii, the west coast of North America, and Brazil, while others speculate that when all the overseas and other learners of Japanese since the late 1970s are taken into account another ten million may be added to that number (Katō 2000: 3).
Symposium: Defining Presentism
Authors: Crisp Thomas M
Published: November 2023

One sometimes hears the following argument put against presentism. Presentists say: “Only present things exist. “ But consider the verb “exist “ in the quoted sentence. Is it tensed or untensed? Suppose tensed: then the presentist ‘s thesis amounts to the claim that only present things exist now-a trivial truism. Suppose untensed: then her thesis is equivalent to the claim that only present things existed, exist, or will exist-a manifest falsehood: plenty of things (e.g. the Roman Empire) existed or will exist which aren ‘t present. The upshot: presentism is a trivial truism or an obvious falsehood. Either way, it ‘s not a very interesting piece of metaphysics.
Nonlocal correlations are generic 1 n infinite­dimensional bipartite systems
Authors: Clifton Rob
Published: November 2023

The observables of a bipartite quantum system are represented by the set of all self adjoint operators on the tensor product of two Hilbert spaces H1 ® ‘H2, whose dimensions we shall denote by d1 and d2, taking d1 :S: d2 without loss of generality. It is well known that when d1 2: 2 the states of the system can be nonseparable, and it is this possibility that much of the new technology associated with quantum information and computation theory relies upon. Prompted by concerns about whether the very noisy mixed states exploited by certain models of NMR quantum computing are truly nonseparable (Braunstein et al. 1999, Linden & Popescu 2001), de­ tailed investigations have shown that, whenever d2 < oo, there is always an open neighborhood of separable states surrounding the maximally mixed state (d1d2)­1 I® I (Zyczkowski et al. 1998, Caves
Representation and Unexploited Content
Authors: Cummins Robert , Blackmon Jim , Byrd David , Lee Alexa , Roth Martin
Published: November 2023

In this chapter, we introduce a novel difficulty for teleosemantics, namely, its inability to account for what we call unexploited content— content a representation has , but which the system that harbors it is currently unable to exploit. In Section 2, we give a characterization of teleosemantics. Since our critique does not depend on any special details that distinguish the variations in the literature, the characterization is broad, brief, and abstract. In Section 3, we explain what we mean by unexploited content, and argue that any theory of content adequate to ground representationalist theories in cognitive science must allow for it.¹ In Section 4, we show that teleosemantic theories of the sort we identify in Section 2 cannot accommodate unexploited content, and are therefore unacceptable if intended as attempts to ground representationalist cognitive science. Finally, in Section 5, we speculate that the existence and importance of unexploited content has likely been obscured by a failure to distinguish representation from indication, and by a tendency to think of representation as reference.
Two Mistakes About Credence and Chance
Authors: Hall Ned
Published: November 2023

David Lewis’s influential work on the epistemology and metaphysics of objective chance has convinced many philosophers of the central importance of the following two claims: First, it is a serious cost of reductionist positions about chance (such as that occupied by Lewis) that they are, apparently, forced to modify the Principal Principle-the central principle relating objective chance to rational subjective probability-in order to avoid contradiction. Second, it is a perhaps more serious cost of the rival non-reductionist position that, unlike reductionism, it can give no coherent explanation for why the Principal Principle should hold. I argue that both of these claims are fundamentally mistaken. David Lewis’s conception of the challenges involved in giving a philosophical account of objective chance [Lewis 1980; 1994] has shaped that of almost every other philosopher working in the field. (For a sampling, see Black [1998], Halpin [1998], Hoefer [1997], Ismael [1996], Roberts [2001], Strevens [1995; 1999], Sturgeon [1998], and Vranas [2002].) I think this conception embodies two key mistakes. The first concerns an alleged cost incurred by Lewis and other philosophers who advocate reductionism about chance. The second concerns an alleged cost incurred by their non-reductionist opponents. A summary: Lewis recognized early on that objective chance and subjective probability-the sort of probability that measures rational degree of belief-exhibit an important connection: a rational agent’s degrees of belief should conform in a certain way to her degrees of belief about the chances. Other philosophers had also recognized this connection; but Lewis provided perhaps the most sophisticated presentation of it, in the form of his famous ‘Principal Principle’ [1986b]. At the same time, Lewis’s reductionism about chance held that facts about chance at a world somehow reduce to-and so, supervene on-the totality of categorical (i.e., non-modal) facts about that world.
As Good As It Gets: Lewis on Truth in Fiction
Authors: Hanley Richard
Published: November 2023

David Lewis’s approach to analysing truth in fiction, significantly amended by ‘Postscripts’ in 1983, has been widely criticized on three main grounds, and it seems fair to say that nearly every writer on the subject thinks that one of these grounds is sufficient to show that Lewis is mistaken. I argue that with some minor revision, Lewis’s approach survives all extant objections. Indeed, I judge the Lewis approach to be even more successful than Lewis himself seems to think. David Lewis offers a way to analyse what is true in a fiction [1983]. More precisely, Lewis offers an approach, and gives two distinct but related analyses, remaining resolutely neutral on which of the two is more correct, and maintaining that neither analysis is completely correct as it stands. I shall defend the Lewis approach in the face of objections from Alex Byrne, Gregory Currie, Michael Gettings, Robin Le Poidevin, John Phillips, Graham Priest, and Lewis himself. Lewis’s approach has two core ideas. First, we properly regard typical fictions as if they were stories that are told as known fact. A fiction is a story told by a particular person on a particular occasion, and storytelling is pretence; typically pretence by the teller that he is relating a story which he knows to be true. Second, fictions are told and received against a ‘background’, such that there is more to truth in the fiction than its explicit content. Neither of these ideas is unique to Lewis. The novelty and elegance of his approach is the application, to the problem of the generation of ‘background’ fictional truths, of a modal semantics developed for the treatment of counterfactuals.
The Ballad of Ugly Dave
Authors: Mackenzie Jim
Published: November 2023

In reading over some of David Lewis’s papers and calling to mind his face and tone of voice (recalling David Armstrong’s description of him, the machine in the ghost), I came upon a puzzle he once posed, and which I have not seen taken up. Perhaps a discussion of it can contribute to his memory. In his postscript to ‘Truth in fiction’ [1983], Lewis considers a song in which the narrative voice claims to be a stockman called Ugly Dave and proceeds to skate about the many things he can do. Lewis construes the song thus: ‘The singer makes believe that he is Ugly Dave telling boastful lies’ [280]. Lewis points out that there is a fiction in the fiction, for Ugly Dave’s lies are themselves a fiction. In the fiction-within-a-fiction, Dave’s lies are true; but in the outer fiction, they are merely empty boasts. But why, asks Lewis, does the iteration not collapse? ‘When the singer pretends to be Ugly Dave pretending to tell the truth about himself, how does this differ from pretending to be Ugly Dave reallytelling the truth about himself ?’ [ibid.]We do many things with language, and part of understanding an utterance is to decide what it is that the speaker is doing by uttering it. A string of numerals may be a telephone number, the result of a tennis match, or the price of something; when the boss says that the door is open, this may be a description of the room, a complaint about the draft, or an instruction to leave. Error in interpreting what a speaker is doing with an utterance may lead to error in understanding the utterance.
Modal Realism with Overlap
Authors: McDaniel Kris
Published: November 2023

In this paper, I formulate, elucidate, and defend a version of modal realism with overlap, the view that objects are literally present at more than one possible world. The version that I defend has several interesting features: (i) it is committed to an ontological distinction between regions of space time and material objects; (ii) it is committed to compositional pluralism, which is the doctrine that there is more than one fundamental part-whole relation; and (iii) it is the modal analogue of endurantism, which is the doctrine that objects persist through time by being wholly present at each moment they are located. Despite David Lewis’s impressive arguments for modal realism, it is safe to say that it has won few adherents. Moreover, modal realism with overlap (henceforth: ‘MRO’)-the view that objects are literally present at more than one world-is probably the least popular position to occupy in modal metaphysics. Consequently, the possibility that a version of modal realism with overlap might be a serious contender has been virtually ignored. However, we ought to examine MRO more carefully for the following reasons. First, one reason for rejecting modal realism is that it allegedly implies a counterpart-theoretic account of de remodality, according to which claims about the properties that an object could have had are made true by the existence of a counterpart of that object which has those properties. But modal realism per seis not committed to counterpart theory. One realist alternative to counterpart theory is modal realism with overlap.
David Lewis and Schro dinger’s Cat
Authors: Papineau David
Published: November 2023

In ‘How Many Lives Has Schro dinger’s Cat?’ David Lewis argues that the Everettian no-collapse interpretation of quantum mechanics is in a tangle when it comes to probabilities. This paper aims to show that the difficulties that Lewis raises are insubstantial. The Everettian metaphysics contains a coherent account of probability. Indeed it accounts for probability rather better than orthodox metaphysics does. On 27 June 2001, not four months before his untimely death, David Lewis delivered the third Jack Smart Lecture at the Australian National University. His title was ‘How Many Lives has Schro dinger’s Cat?’ > and he spoke on a topic which is absent from his published writings, the interpretation of quantum mechanics. More specifically, he discussed the ‘no-collapse’ interpretation of quantum mechanics pioneered by Hugh Everett III [1957]. Lewis allowed that this interpretation offers initial theoretical attractions, but also argued that it suffers from irremediable flaws. If you have heard of Everett because of his association with the ‘many-worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics popularised by Bryce Dewitt [1970; 1973], you might suppose that there is some affinity between the no-collapse interpretation and Lewis’s philosophical realism about possible worlds. But this would be a mistake. While Everett’s interpretation does add extra ‘branches’ to the reality recognized by common sense, these additions fall far short of Lewis’s multiplication of worlds. For a start, the extra ‘branches’ that Everett adds to reality all lie within the actual world that evolves from the actual initial conditions in line with the actual laws of physics-these branches by no means include all possibilities. Moreover, Everett’s branches are best conceived, not as sundering’s of the whole universe, but rather as entities that spread out causally at finite speeds, ‘like ripples on a pond’, as Lewis puts it. For example, in the Schro dinger’s Cat experiment, firstthe photon branches into a deflected and undeflected version when it passes through the half-silvered mirror; thenthe detector branches into a triggered and untriggered state when it interacts with the photon; thenthe poison bottle branches into a smashed bottle and an unsmashed bottle under the influence of the detector; and so on, culminating in the cat branching into a live and dead cat, and the human observer branching into a self who sees a live cat and a self who sees a dead cat. >
The Context of Essence
Authors: Paul L A
Published: November 2023

I address two related questions: first, what is the best theory of how objects have de remodal properties? Second, what is the best defence of essentialism given the variability of our modal intuitions? I critically discuss several theories of how objects have their de remodal properties and address the most threatening ant essentialist objection to essentialism: the variability of our modal intuitions. Drawing on linguistic treatments of vagueness and ambiguity, I show how essentialists can accommodate the variability of modal intuitions while holding that objects have their modal properties independently of contexts. Essentialism is a doctrine about objects and their properties. Roughly, an object 0 has property P essentially when 0 must have P in order to be the object that it is. > If 0 has P essentially, then, necessarily, in any world in which 0 exists, 0 must have P. > Given that an object has the same essential properties in every possible world in which it exists, we can think of the essential properties as capturing the nature of the object. According to this picture, essentialism is grounded upon de remodality: the essential properties of an object are a feature of the way these objects are in themselves, and are not merelyan artefact of the waywe talk or think about them. > I think it is a fact about mycat, C. Louise, that she could not have been a banana. This is a fact about her. It is a fact about a particular protein that for it to exist it must include certain amino acids.
A Priority and Externalism
Authors: Hawthorne John
Published: November 2023

If an epistemological distinction fails to carve at the epistemological joints, then it is not worthy of serious and protracted discussion. The residual issue of whether the putative distinction is incoherent or merely gerrymandered ought not to strike anyone as especially important. My own externalist commitments—epistemological and semantic—lead me to think that the a priori– a posteriori distinction is not a particularly natural one, and hence that its importance to epistemology has been grossly overestimated.1 I shall be defending that perspective in what follows. Discussions of a priority typically assume that there is a distinguished subclass of beliefs whose epistemic status does not depend upon experiential encounter with the world.
From Mental/Physical Identity to Substance Dualism
Authors: Swinburne Richard
Published: November 2023

“Mental properties are the same as physical properties”, “mental events are the same as physical events”, “mental substances are the same as physical substances”—says many a physicalist. “Mental properties and events supervene on physical properties and events”, and “mental substances supervene on physical substances”—says many another physicalist. Whether these claims are true depends first on what is meant by “substances”, “properties”, and “events”, “mental” and “physical”, and by “supervene”; and then on what are the criteria for one property, event, or substance being the same as another.
Ghosts Are Chilly
Authors: Hart W D , Yagisawa Takashi
Published: November 2023

What you can imagine is possible, and you can imagine being disembodied, so you could be disembodied. Thus you do not depend for your existence on that of your body, so the distinctive thesis of Cartesian (and Platonic) dualism is true of you.1
Cartesian Psychophysics
Authors: Wong Hong Yu
Published: November 2023

In this paper, I shall examine a certain style of argument against the possibility of a Cartesian psychophysics, and a response to it. Both are due to John Foster.1
A Materialist Ontology of the Human Person
Authors: van Inwagen Peter
Published: November 2023

I will begin by setting out a metaphysical position that is so abstract that it hardly deserves the name ‘position’. (Perhaps it would be better called a ‘metaphysical framework’.) This very abstract position constitutes the metaphysical perspective from which I view all philosophical problems, including those problems that pertain to the human person. If you think this perspective is skewed, you will not find much to agree with in what I am going to say about the ontology of the human person.
Approaches: Computational Cladistics
Authors: McMahon April , McMahon Robert
Published: November 2023

Before turning to attempts to construct and evaluate linguistic family trees, which will be the main topic of this chapter and the next, we return briefiy to lexicostatistics, and to disturbing similarities of this method with mass comparison. In the chapters that follow we will be using elements of lexicostatistics, for instance in generating trees based on cognacy scores over standard Swadesh-type lists. We have also said that, in common with many comparative historical linguists, we regard mass comparison as inherently problematic, and as crucially compromised by a lack of rigour in determining what can count as a phonetic or semantic match. However, there remain areas of overlap between the two methods, since both are predominantly lexically based, and involve the comparison of lists. True, those lists are set in lexicostatistics, while there is no basic vocabulary criterion in mass comparison; lexicostatistics also tends to be applied step by step, in a series of pairwise comparisons between languages, whereas in mass comparison the more lists, the merrier. But, at least at first glance, these differences do not decisively favour lexicostatistics. For one thing, we made a series of suggestions in Chapter 2 for a slackening of the constraints on the composition of test lists, so that many-to-one or one-to-many matches between items and meanings might be allowed, and culture-specific meanings might be included in locally variable lists. Worse still, Greenberg (1987: 27) clearly sees the simultaneous comparison of multiple lists as strongly advantageous: ‘To inspect languages pairwise, or at a half-guess, is a different thing from a multilateral comparison undertaken with a consciousness of the types of resemblances that are likely to bespeak common origin.’ Moreover, Greenberg argues that mass comparison is free from the restrictions of time depth (see Ch. 7 below) which affect lexicostatistics and the comparative method, since ‘there is no theoretical limit to the depth at which classification can be carried out when the number of languages examined is large’ (ibid. 28—9). It would appear that mass comparison and lexicostatistics emerge as approximately equal on the issue of list composition, with mass comparison edging ahead on the number of lists to be compared.
Quantitative Methods Beyond the Lexicon
Authors: McMahon April , McMahon Robert
Published: November 2023

Our focus in this book so far has stayed rather firmly fixed on the lexicon, and on methods of comparison which apply to vocabulary or, more accurately, to cognacy judgements calculated over basic meaning lists. There are two reasons for this. First, lists of this kind are already well known in comparative linguistics, and we have been keen to demonstrate that it is possible to apply quantitative methods to familiar data: this is simply another case of starting from the known and moving subsequently into the unknown. Linked with this is the fact that methods for comparing meanings already exist, and are therefore available for testing and computerizing; but this is not the case, certainly not to the same extent, for other areas of the grammar. Working in areas other than the lexicon therefore means both developing methods for comparison and demonstrating that these can be quantified to good effect, and it did not seem to us a useful start to ask our readers to accept both simultaneously.
On Serial Verb Constructions in Cantonese
Authors: Matthews Stephen
Published: November 2023

Chinese has been considered a serializing language in most works on the subject. Indeed, most of the categories of SVC identified in Chapter 1 of this volume are represented in Chinese, and in Cantonese in particular.
Serial Verbs in Tetun Dili
Authors: Hajek John
Published: November 2023

Tetun Dili (TD) is an Austronesian language spoken as a first language by approximately 50,000-60,000 speakers in an enclave setting in Dili, the capital of East Timor. East Timor is mostly Austronesian-speaking, although four non-Austronesian languages are also spoken there.
Serial Verbs in Lakota (Siouan)
Authors: de Reuse Willem J
Published: November 2023

Lakota or Teton Dakota is a Native American language mainly spoken on reservations in North and South Dakota in the United States. Estimates of fluent speakers vary between 6,000 and 10,000. Lakota belongs to the Dakotan subgroup of the Mississippi Valley group within the Siouan family of languages.
On Our Interest in Getting Things Right: Pragmatism without Narcissism
Authors: Stout Jeffrey
Published: November 2023

The critics of pragmatism have long charged that it fails to do justice to the objective dimension of human inquiry. Philosophers who believe that classical pragmatism was on to something important, but that it requires careful reformulation if it is to meet the objections that have been raised against it, have recently renewed the effort to provide accounts of inquiry that are both recognizably pragmatic in orientation and demonstrably hospitable to the cognitive aspiration to get one’s subject matter right. One example of such an account can be found in Robert Brandom’s massive book Making It Explicit (1994: esp. ch. 8, sect. IV). One of Bjørn Ramberg’s recent papers (2000), though hardly as elaborate, also aims to provide such an account. Both of these philosophers explicate cognitive aspirations and conceptual norms pragmatically— as artifacts arising in human discursive practices of a certain kind. In framing their explications, they rigorously avoid resorting to metaphysical talk about correspondence to the real.
On Not Being a Pragmatist: Eight Reasons and a Cause
Authors: Hacking Ian
Published: November 2023

Nothing is easier than to familiarise one’s self with the mammalian brain. Get a sheep’s head, a small saw, chisel, scalpel and forceps (all three can best be had from a surgical instrument maker), and unravel its parts either by the aid of a human-dissecting book, such as Holden’s ‘Manual of Anatomy,’ or by the speciﬁc directions ad hoc given in such books as Foster and Langley’s ‘Practical Psychology’ (Macmillan) or Morrell’s ‘Comparative Anatomy and Dissection of Mammalia’ (Longman’s).
Pragmatism and Objective Truth
Authors: Macbeth Danielle
Published: November 2023

The pragmatist tradition, both classical and contemporary, is oddly divided on the question of the coherence of a robust conception of objective truth. Whereas both Peirce and Sellars take Peirce’s conception of meaning, on which the pragmatist tradition is founded, to make an essential contribution to an adequate account of objective truth, other pragmatists (notably James, Dewey, and Rorty) take that same conception to foreclose once and for all the possibility of such an account. There is, I think, real merit to both these wings of the tradition. My aim is not, however, to defend that claim— at least not directly— but instead to achieve a better understanding of the relationship between Peirce’s pragmatist maxim and the notion of objective truth by reﬂecting on the nature and signiﬁcance of that maxim.
Moore’s Paradox
Authors: Green Mitchell , Williams John N
Published: November 2023

G. E. Moore famously observed that to assert, ‘I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I don’t believe that I did’ would be ‘absurd’. Moore calls it a ‘paradox’ that this absurdity persists despite the fact that what I say about myself might be true. Over half a century later, such sayings continue to perplex philosophers and other students of language, logic, and cognition. Ludwig Wittgenstein was fascinated by Moore’s example, and the absurdity of Moore’s saying was intensively discussed in the mid-20th century. Yet the source of the absurdity has remained elusive, and its recalcitrance has led researchers in recent decades to address it with greater care. In this definitive treatment of the problem of Moorean absurdity Green and Williams survey the history and relevance of the paradox and leading approaches to resolving it, and present new essays by leading thinkers in the area. Contributors Jonathan Adler, Bradley Armour-Garb, Jay D. Atlas, Thomas Baldwin, Claudio de Almeida, André Gallois, Robert Gordon, Mitchell Green, Alan Hájek, Roy Sorensen, John Williams
What Reflexive Pronouns Tell Us about Belief: A New Moore’s Paradox De Se, Rationality, and Privileged Access
Authors: Atlas Jay David
Published: November 2023

Quine (1960) raised questions in the 1940s about the referential occurrences of singular terms in lower clauses in third-person, present tense, indicative sentences that contain intentional verbs, e.g. ‘believes’. In sentence (1) John believes that Gray Davis was re-elected governor of California. Quine distinguished between a ‘‘notional sense’’ of ‘believes’ and a ‘‘relational sense’’ of ‘believes’.
My Philosophical Position Says p and I Don’t Believe p
Authors: Hájek Alan
Published: November 2023

There is typically something strange about asserting or believing Moore- paradoxical sentences. In this paper I want to harness this strangeness to do a particular kind of philosophical work. I will argue that various prominent philosophers are committed to asserting and believing various Moore-paradoxical sentences in virtue of the very philosophical positions that they hold.
Moorean Pretense
Authors: Gordon Robert M
Published: November 2023

Wittgenstein noted that the absurdity of assertions of the form, p but I don’t believe that p, does not carry over to suppositions. He was right. The absurdity also does not carry over to what I take to be the more inclusive category, pretense. For example, you can pretend — or suppose or imagine — that a certain species of mushroom is poisonous but that you are ignorant of this fact. You might even picture yourself innocently saute´ing your mushrooms, then eating them and getting very sick.
Conceptual Art Is Not What It Seems
Authors: Lopes Dominic McIver
Published: November 2023

Hypotheses in aesthetics should explain appreciative failure as well as appreciative success. They should state the general conditions under which people fail to understand and value works as works of art. This stricture is all the more important when the typical response to avant-garde art is incomprehension, resistance, and rejection. Perhaps this typical response is justified and the art in question deserves to be repudiated. Assume this not always to be the case. Then if some art deserves a response that it typically does not get, we should try to explain the appreciative failure. Explaining appreciative failure might require interesting changes to theories about art.
Identity and Modality
Authors: MacBride Fraser
Published: November 2023

The papers in this volume address fundamental, and interrelated, philosophical issues concerning modality and identity, issues that have not only been pivotal to the development of analytic philosophy in the twentieth century, but remain a key focus of metaphysical debate in the twenty-first. How are we to understand the concepts of necessity and possibility? Is chance a basic ingredient of reality? How are we to make sense of claims about personal identity? Do numbers require distinctive identity criteria? Does the capacity to identify an object presuppose an ability to bring it under a sortal concept? Rather than presenting a single, partisan perspective, Identity and Modality enriches our understanding of identity and modality by bringing together papers written by leading researchers working in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of mathematics. The resulting variety of perspectives correspondingly reflects both the breadth and depth of contemporary theorizing about identity and modality, each paper addressing a particular issue and advancing our knowledge of the area. This volume will provide essential reading for graduate students in the subject and professional philosophers. .
The Julius Caesar Objection: More Problematic than Ever
Authors: MacBride Fraser
Published: November 2023

Is it possible that Julius Caesar was not only a person but also a number? Might the conqueror of Gaul—beneath his material guise—have been the bearer of numerical properties? Common sense appears to inform us otherwise. Caesar was a man and no doubt added up sums. Buthecould hardly have been the result of a subtraction. And what appears to be true of Caesar also appears to be true of other concrete items. They enjoy the benefits of being spatially related and causally interacting with their neighbours. By contrast, numbers appear quite different kinds of thing. They stand in equations and figure in the ancestral of the successor relation to zero. It seems that there is a Moorean fact, basic to our ordinary ways of thinking, any adequate philosophy of mathematics must accommodate. The fact that must be respected is the fact that no concrete item is a number. A theory encounters the ‘Caesar’ problem when it fails to meet this adequacy constraint.
Is There a Bodily Criterion of Personal Identity?
Authors: Olson Eric T
Published: November 2023

One of the main problems of personal identity is supposed to be how we relate to our bodies. A few philosophers endorse what is called a ‘bodily criterion of personal identity’: they say that weare our bodies, or that our identity over time consists in the identity of our bodies. Manymore deny this—typically on the grounds that we can imagine ourselves coming apart from our bodies. But both sides agree that the bodily criterion is an important view, which anyone thinking about personal identity must consider.
Recent Debates about the a Priori
Authors: Field Hartry
Published: November 2023

At least from the time of the ancient Greeks, most philosophers have held that some of our knowledge is independent of experience, or ‘‘a priori’’. Indeed, a major tenet of the rationalist tradition in philoso-phy was that a great deal of our knowledge had this character: even Kant, a critic of some of the overblown claims of rationalism, thought that the structure of space could be known a priori, as could many of the fundamental principles of physics; and Hegel is reputed to have claimed to have deduced on a priori grounds that the number of planets is exactly five.
The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology
Authors: Knobe Joshua , Leiter Brian
Published: November 2023

Moral psychology is the branch of ethics directly concerned with the psychology of the kind of agency we exercise in acting morally. Moral psychology asks whether such agency is psychologically possible, what motivations it requires, what the source of those motivations might be, and what the emotive and cognitive mechanisms are by which they translate into actions. Until fairly recently (e.g., Doris 2002; Nichols 2004; Prinz forthcoming), Anglophone philosophers writing about moral psychology have tended to approach these questions ‘from the armchair,’ and without regard to pertinent empirical ﬁndings about human psychology.