Esta enciclopédia abrange, de uma forma introdutória mas desejavelmente rigorosa, uma diversidade de conceitos, temas, problemas, argumentos e teorias localizados numa área relativamente recente de estudos, os quais tem sido habitual qualificar como «estudos lógico-filosóficos». De uma forma apropriadamente genérica, e apesar de o território teórico abrangido ser extenso e de contornos por vezes difusos, podemos dizer que na área se investiga um conjunto de questões fundamentais acerca da natureza da linguagem, da mente, da cognição e do raciocínio humanos, bem (...) como questões acerca das conexões destes com a realidade não mental e extralinguística. A razão daquela qualificação é a seguinte: por um lado, a investigação em questão é qualificada como filosófica em virtude do elevado grau de generalidade e abstracção das questões examinadas (entre outras coisas); por outro, a investigação é qualificada como lógica em virtude de ser uma investigação logicamente disciplinada, no sentido de nela se fazer um uso intenso de conceitos, técnicas e métodos provenientes da disciplina de lógica. O agregado de tópicos que constitui a área de estudos lógico-filosóficos é já visível, pelo menos em parte, no Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus de Ludwig Wittgenstein, uma obra publicada em 1921. E uma boa maneira de ter uma ideia sinóptica do território disciplinar abrangido por esta enciclopédia, ou pelo menos de uma porção substancial dele, é extrair do Tractatus uma lista dos tópicos mais salientes aí discutidos; a lista incluirá certamente tópicos do seguinte género, muitos dos quais se podem encontrar ao longo desta enciclopédia: factos e estados de coisas; objectos; representação; crenças e estados mentais; pensamentos; a proposição; nomes próprios; valores de verdade e bivalência; quantificação; funções de verdade; verdade lógica; identidade; tautologia; o raciocínio matemático; a natureza da inferência; o cepticismo e o solipsismo; a indução; as constantes lógicas; a negação; a forma lógica; as leis da ciência; o número. (shrink)

In contemporary discussions of the Ramsey Test for conditionals, it is commonly held that (i) supposing the antecedent of a conditional is adopting a potential state of full belief, and (ii) Modus Ponens is a valid rule of inference. I argue on the basis of Thomason Conditionals (such as ' If Sally is deceiving, I do not believe it') and Moore's Paradox that both claims are wrong. I then develop a double-indexed Update Semantics for conditionals which takes these two results (...) into account while doing justice to the key intuitions underlying the Ramsey Test. The semantics is extended to cover some further phenomena, including the recent observation that epistemic modal operators give rise to something very like, but also very unlike, Moore's Paradox. (shrink)

§0. A familiar if obscure idea: an indicative conditional presents its consequent as holding in the actual world on the supposition that its antecedent so holds, whereas a subjunctive conditional merely presents its consequent as holding in a world, typically counterfactual, in which its antecedent holds. Consider this pair.

The debate over Hypothetical Syllogism is locked in stalemate. Although putative natural language counterexamples to Hypothetical Syllogism abound, many philosophers defend Hypothetical Syllogism, arguing that the alleged counterexamples involve an illicit shift in context. The proper lesson to draw from the putative counterexamples, they argue, is that natural language conditionals are context-sensitive conditionals which obey Hypothetical Syllogism. In order to make progress on the issue, I consider and improve upon Morreau’s proof of the invalidity of Hypothetical Syllogism. The improved proof (...) relies upon the semantic claim that conditionals with antecedents irrelevant to the obtaining of an already true consequent are themselves true. Moreover, this semantic insight allows us to provide compelling counterexamples to Hypothetical Syllogism that are resistant to the usual contextualist response. (shrink)

Why are conditional degrees of belief in an observation E, given a statistical hypothesis H, aligned with the objective probabilities expressed by H? After showing that standard replies are not satisfactory, I develop a suppositional analysis of conditional degree of belief, transferring Ramsey’s classical proposal to statistical inference. The analysis saves the alignment, explains the role of chance-credence coordination, and rebuts the charge of arbitrary assessment of evidence in Bayesian inference. Finally, I explore the implications of this analysis for Bayesian (...) reasoning with idealized models in science. (shrink)

There is a renewed debate about modus ponens. Strikingly, the recent counterexamples in Cantwell, Dreier and MacFarlane and Kolodny are generated by restricted readings of the ‘if’-clause. Moreover, it can be argued on general grounds that the restrictor view of conditionals developed in Kratzer and Lewis leads to counterexamples to modus ponens. This paper provides a careful analysis of modus ponens within the framework of the restrictor view. Despite appearances to the contrary, there is a robust sense in which modus (...) ponens is valid, owing to the fact that conditionals do not only allow for restricted readings but have bare interpretations, too. (shrink)

This paper discusses the relation between Crispin Wright’s alethic pluralism and my global expressivism. I argue that on many topics Wright’s own view counts as expressivism in my sense, but that truth itself is a striking exception. Unlike me, Wright never seems to countenance an expressivist account of truth, though the materials needed are available to him in his approaches to other topics.

In this piece I characterise global expressivism, as I understand it, by contrasting it with five other views: the so-called Canberra Plan; Moorean non-naturalism and platonism; ‘relaxed realism’ and quietism; local expressivism; and response-dependent realism. Some other familiar positions, including fictionalism, error theories, and idealism, are also mentioned, but as sub-cases to one of these five.

In recent work Allan Gibbard claims to be both a local quasi-realist, in Blackburn’s sense, and a global expressivist. His local quasi-realism rests on an argument that for naturalistic discourse but not ethical discourse, the semantic relation of denotation and the causal relation of tracking can and should be identified; that denoting simply is tracking, for naturalistic vocabulary. I argue that Gibbard’s case for this conclusion is unconvincing, and poorly motivated by his own expressivist standards. I also argue that even (...) if it were successful, it is doubtful whether the resulting position would count as global expressivism, as Gibbard and I both use that term. (shrink)

Contemporary debates concerning warrant transmission take for granted this thesis: when warrant transmission fails the argument fails. I challenge this thesis. An argument with conclusion C, addressed to subject S, can be cogent in the sense that recognition that the premises entail (or make highly likely) C can rationally foster in S the belief in C, without the warrant for C necessarily being gained (or reinforced) by such recognition. A key idea is to accept that some arguments should be understood (...) in a way that involves the abandonment of two characteristic idealizations imposed on rational thinkers by Bayesian modelling. (shrink)

In the Paradox of the Ravens, a set of otherwise intuitive claims about evidence seems to be inconsistent. Most attempts at answering the paradox involve rejecting a member of the set, which seems to require a conflict either with commonsense intuitions or with some of our best confirmation theories. In contrast, I argue that the appearance of an inconsistency is misleading: ‘confirms’ and cognate terms feature a significant ambiguity when applied to universal generalisations. In particular, the claim that some evidence (...) confirms a universal generalisation ordinarily suggests, in part, that the evidence confirms the reliability of predicting that something which satisfies the antecedent will also satisfy the consequent. I distinguish between the familiar relation of confirmation simpliciter and what I shall call ‘predictive confirmation’. I use them to formulate my answer, illustrate it in a very simple probabilistic model, and defend it against objections. I conclude that, once our evidential concepts are sufficiently clarified, there is no sense in which the initial claims are both plausible and inconsistent. (shrink)

A probability distribution is regular if it does not assign probability zero to any possible event. While some hold that probabilities should always be regular, three counter-arguments have been posed based on examples where, if regularity holds, then perfectly similar events must have different probabilities. Howson and Benci et al. have raised technical objections to these symmetry arguments, but we see here that their objections fail. Howson says that Williamson’s “isomorphic” events are not in fact isomorphic, but Howson is speaking (...) of set-theoretic representations of events in a probability model. While those sets are not isomorphic, Williamson’s physical events are, in the relevant sense. Benci et al. claim that all three arguments rest on a conflation of different models, but they do not. They are founded on the premise that similar events should have the same probability in the same model, or in one case, on the assumption that a single rotation-invariant distribution is possible. Having failed to refute the symmetry arguments on such technical grounds, one could deny their implicit premises, which is a heavy cost, or adopt varying degrees of instrumentalism or pluralism about regularity, but that would not serve the project of accurately modelling chances. (shrink)

The experience machine was traditionally thought to refute hedonism about welfare. In recent years, however, the tide has turned: many philosophers have argued not merely that the experience machine doesn't rule out hedonism, but that it doesn't count against it at all. I argue for a moderate position between those two extremes: although the experience machine doesn't decisively rule out hedonism, it provides us with some reason to reject it. I also argue for a particular way of using the experience (...) machine to argue against hedonism – one that appeals directly to intuitions about the welfare values of experientially identical lives rather than to claims about what we value or claims about whether we would, or should, plug into the machine. The two issues are connected: the conviction that the experience machine leaves hedonism unscathed is partly due to neglect of the best way to use the experience machine. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.How to Use the Experience MachineVolume 28, Issue 3EDEN LIN DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0953820815000424Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. How to Use the Experience MachineVolume 28, Issue 3EDEN LIN DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0953820815000424Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. How to Use the Experience MachineVolume 28, Issue 3EDEN LIN DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0953820815000424Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

God, by definition, is all-powerful, all-good, all-wise, and all-knowing. Therein lies a problem for the theist, of course, for every one of these attributes has been the subject of fierce debate. In this paper I want to return to the debate by introducing a new problem for the idea that anyone could have the kind of perfect knowledge God is supposed to have. What distinguishes my problem from others is that the sort of knowledge it focuses on is self-knowledge, hence (...) knowledge of a particularly intimate kind. My claim is that God cannot have infallible knowledge of at least some of his own perfections, in particular his being all-wise or ideally rational. Such ignorance is not only inconsistent with the usual conception of God's omniscience, given that whatever knowledge God possesses is traditionally thought to be be a priori and infallible, but, more importantly, is inconsistent with the fundamental idea that God at least knows infallibly or incorrigibly that he has what it takes to be God: qualities such as omnibenevolence, omnipotence, and supreme wisdom. In short, my claim is that God must have a deep “blindspot” about his own nature, something which is inconsistent with a traditional picture of that nature. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ: Les philosophes, au cours des cinquante dernières années, se sont efforcés de démontrer qu’un professeur peut, d’une manière cohérente et exacte, annoncer à ses étudiants qu’un examen surprise aura lieu lors d’une journée non spécifiée d’une période donnée, le problème étant qu’une telle annonce peut sembler s’annuler ellemême lorsqu’elle est soumise à une induction régressive. Deux grandes approches, l’une épistémique et l’autre logique, one été développées à ce propos. Le présent article adopte une approche logique, mais repose aussi d’une (...) manière cruciale sur une compréhension épistémique du problème, pour essayer de montrer que l’annonce du professeur peut effectivement être cohérente et exacte. (shrink)

The authors outline a theory of conditionals of the form If A then C and If A then possibly C. The 2 sorts of conditional have separate core meanings that refer to sets of possibilities. Knowledge, pragmatics, and semantics can modulate these meanings. Modulation can add information about temporal and other relations between antecedent and consequent. It can also prevent the construction of possibilities to yield 10 distinct sets of possibilities to which conditionals can refer. The mental representation of a (...) conditional normally makes explicit only the possibilities in which its antecedent is true, yielding other possibilities implicitly. Reasoners tend to focus on the explicit possibilities. The theory predicts the major phenomena of understanding and reasoning with conditionals. (shrink)

The phrase ‘autoepistemic logic’ was introduced in Moore [1985] to refer to a study inspired in large part by criticisms in Stalnaker [1980] of a particular nonmonotonic logic proposed by McDermott and Doyle.1 Very informative discussions for those who have not encountered this area are provided by Moore [1988] and the wide-ranging survey article Konolige [1994], and the scant remarks in the present introductory section do not pretend to serve in place of those treatments as summaries of the field. A (...) good deal of the material omitted here pertains to the specifically nonmonotonic nature of autoepistemic logic as standardly developed, but as we shall urge, there is from one point of view nothing distinctively nonmonotonic about the basic motivating ideas of the subject. (shrink)

Various writers have proposed that the notion of a possible world is a functional concept, yet very little has been done to develop that proposal. This paper explores a particular functionalist account of possible worlds, according to which pluralities of possible worlds are the bases for structures which provide occupants for the roles which analyse our ordinary modal concepts. It argues that the resulting position meets some of the stringent constraints which philosophers have placed upon accounts of possible worlds, while (...) also trivializing the question what possible worlds are. The paper then discusses a range of problems facing the functionalist position. (shrink)

Many have accepted that ordinary counterfactuals and might counterfactuals are duals. In this paper, I show that this thesis leads to paradoxical results when combined with a few different unorthodox yet increasingly popular theses, including the thesis that counterfactuals are strict conditionals. Given Duality and several other theses, we can quickly infer the validity of another paradoxical principle, ‘The Counterfactual Direct Argument’, which says that ‘A> ’ entails ‘A> ’. First, I provide a collapse theorem for the ‘counterfactual direct argument’. (...) The counterfactual direct argument entails the logical equivalence of the subjunctive and material conditional, given a variety of assumptions. Second, I provide a semantics that validates the counterfactual direct argument without collapse. This theory further develops extant dynamic accounts of conditionals. I give a new semantics for disjunction, on which A or B is only true in a context when A and B are both unsettled. The resulting framework validates CDA while invalidating other commonly accepted principles concerning the conditional and disjunction. (shrink)

Recent work on conditional reasoning argues that denying the antecedent [DA] and affirming the consequent [AC] are defeasible but cogent patterns of argument, either because they are effective, rational, albeit heuristic applications of Bayesian probability, or because they are licensed by the principle of total evidence. Against this, we show that on any prevailing interpretation of indicative conditionals the premises of DA and AC arguments do not license their conclusions without additional assumptions. The cogency of DA and AC inferences rather (...) depends on contingent factors extrinsic to, and independent of, what is asserted by DA and AC arguments. arguments do not license their conclusions without additional assumptions. The cogency of DA and AC inferences rather depends on contingent factors extrinsic to, and independent of, what is asserted by DA and AC arguments. (shrink)

In "Backward causation and the Stalnaker-Lewis approach to counterfactuals," Analysis 62 (2002): 191–97, Michael Tooley argues that if a certain kind of backward causation is possible, then a Stalnaker-Lewis style comparative world similarity account of the truth conditions of counterfactuals cannot be sound. Tooley’s target is one particular type of semantics, but, as I show, the significance of Tooley’s example goes well beyond its consequences for any one semantics for the conditional.

Modus ponens is the argument from premises of the form If A, then B and A to the conclusion B. Nearly all participants agree that the modus ponens conclusion logically follows when the argument appears in this Basic form. However, adding a further premise can lower participants’ rate of agreement—an effect called suppression. We propose a theory of suppression that draws on contemporary ideas about conditional sentences in linguistics and philosophy. Semantically, the theory assumes that people interpret an indicative conditional (...) as a context-sensitive strict conditional: true if and only if its consequent is true in each of a contextually determined set of situations in which its antecedent is true. Pragmatically, the theory claims that context changes in response to new assertions, including new conditional premises. Thus, the conclusion of a modus ponens argument may no longer be accepted in the changed context. Psychologically, the theory describes people as capable of reasoning about broad classes of possible situations, ordered by typicality, without having to reason about individual possible worlds. The theory accounts for the main suppression phenomena, and it generates some novel predictions that new experiments confirm. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that contraposition, strengthening the antecedent and hypothetical syllogism fail for subjunctive conditionals. The following putative counter-examples are frequently cited, respectively.

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Let us call a statement of the form ‘If A was, is, or will be the case, then C was, is, or will be the case’ an indicative conditional. And let us call a statement of the form ‘If A had been, were, or were to be the case, then C would have been, would be, or would come to be the case’ a subjunctive, or counterfactual, conditional.

In the chapter entitled ‘Philosophy and the Meaning of Life’ in Robert Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations there is an admonitory passage with many applications. ‘It is a puzzle,’ says Nozick, ‘how so many people, including intellectuals and academics devote enormous energy to work in which nothing of themselves or their important goals shines forth, not even in the way their work is presented. If they were struck down, their children upon growing up and examining their work would never know why they (...) had done it, would never know who it was that did it. They work that way and sometimes live that way, too’. (shrink)

For many natural scientists, design, conceived as the action of an intelligent agent, is not a fundamental creative force in nature. Rather, material mechanisms, characterized by chance and necessity and ruled by unbroken laws, are thought sufficient to do all nature’s creating. Darwin’s theory epitomizes this rejection of design.

The distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic value can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle. I contend that the distinction has never been properly drawn. My main task is to formulate the distinction in a way that avoids the problems of the traditional formulations. ;After defending the traditional Moorean conception of intrinsic value against John Mackie's arguments from relativity and "queerness," and against recent attacks by Elizabeth Anderson and Shelly Kagan, I attempt to define two important types of extrinsic value (...) in terms of intrinsic value. First, I define instrumental value. The main problem with traditional definitions of instrumental value is that they fail to account for the fact that preventing something intrinsically evil from occurring seems to be just as worthwhile as bringing about something intrinsically good. I attempt to account for this fact by introducing a "contextualist" analysis of instrumental value. Next, I present and defend an analysis of contributory value. I compare contributory value with conditional intrinsic value, and present an argument to show that the notion of conditional intrinsic value faces problems that can be avoided by admitting the existence of contributory value. I then expand on the contextualist analysis of instrumental value, and provide an analysis of extrinsic value that explains what is common to instrumental and contributory value. I contend that my analysis can also account for other types of extrinsic value---for example, signatory value---and I defend my analysis against recent objections by Alastair Norcross involving the extrinsic values of actions. ;Finally, I argue that contributory value can help to solve a current problem in environmental ethics. The problem is this: how can it be that the last member of a species is more valuable than a similar member of a flourishing species ? I argue that diversity of goods increases the value of a whole; therefore, the last member of an endangered species has contributory value in virtue of its contribution to the world's biological diversity. (shrink)

Stalnaker's 1975 motivates an account of the truth conditions of indicative conditionals that seems in tension with the truth-conditions he offers. This paper discusses how best to resolve this tension.