Title: Essence, Potentiality, and Modality Abstract: According to essentialism, metaphysical modality is founded in the essences聽of things, where the essence of a thing is roughly akin to its real definition.聽According to potentialism (also known as dispositionalism), metaphysical聽modality is founded in the聽potentialities of things, where a potentiality is聽roughly the generalized notion of a disposition. Essentialism and…
Abstract: This paper investigates the norm of presupposition, as one pervasive type of indirect speech act. It argues against the view that sees presuppositions as an indirect counterpart of the direct speech act of assertion and proposes instead that they are much more similar to the direct speech act of assumption. More concretely, it suggests…
Abstract. 鈥斅燩recisifications of certain informal concepts could be thought of as instances of conceptual engineering: the concept of a Turing machine (human effective computability), the notion of a Kripke structure (possibility), the Kolmogorov axioms (probability), Tarski’s definition of truth in formal languages, to name just a few. Should we聽regard聽the technical notions these formalisms define as…
Title: ‘The Problem of Polarization’ Abstract: 鈥淭he cure for democracy’s ills is more democracy.鈥� This popular adage is false. Contemporary democracy faces problems that have their source in otherwise laudable forms of political participation. In short, enactments of democratic citizenship heighten our exposure to polarization, which in turn erodes our capacities to perform well as…
Title: Indicative Conditionals: Probabilities and Relevance Abstract:聽Adams鈥� Thesis claims that the acceptability of a simple indicative conditional equals聽the corresponding conditional probability. The Thesis is widely endorsed, but arguably false and refuted by empirical research. To fix it, we submit, we need a聽relevance constraint: we accept a simple conditional ‘If 蠒, then 蠄’ to the extent…
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