This paper gives experimental evidence against the claim that speakers’ intuitions support semantic relativism about assertions of epistemic modal sentences and uses this evidence as part of a broader argument against assessment relativism. It follows other papers that reach similar conclusions, such as that of Knobe and Yalcin (Semant Pragmat 7:1–21, 2014). Its results were achieved simultaneously and independently of the more recent work of Kneer (Perspectives on taste. Aesthetics, language, metaphysics, and experimental philosophy. Routledge, 2022). The experimental data in (...) this paper supports two claims. The first is that, as Knobe and Yalcin (Semant Pragmat 7:1–21, 2014) also found, speakers diverge in their judgments about the truth-values and about the appropriate retraction of epistemic modal claims. The second is that speakers diverge in their judgments about when a retraction is appropriate and when it is required. This divergence was not tested by Knobe and Yalcin (Semant Pragmat 7:1–21, 2014) but aligns with the results independently reached by Kneer ((Kneer, Synthese 199(3–4): 6455–6471; Perspectives on taste. Aesthetics, language, metaphysics, and experimental philosophy. Routledge, 2022), and supports the arguments previously developed by Marques (Synthese 199(3–4): 6455–6471). The present studies tested the intuitions of both North American English speakers and of peninsular Spanish speakers, whose judgements on the topic had never been tested. The broader argument involves the relation between required retractions and falsity. (shrink)

It is widely held that there are important differences between indicative conditionals (e.g. “If the authors are linguists, they have written a linguistics paper”) and subjunctive conditionals (e.g. “If the authors had been linguists, they would have written a linguistics paper”). A central difference is that indicatives and subjunctives convey different stances towards the truth of their antecedents. Indicatives (often) convey neutrality: for example, about whether the authors in question are linguists. Subjunctives (often) convey the falsity of the antecedent: (...) for example, that the authors in question are not linguists. This paper tests prominent accounts of how these different stances are conveyed: whether by presupposition or conversational implicature. Experiment 1 tests the presupposition account by investigating whether the stances project – remain constant – when embedded under operators like negations, possibility modals, and interrogatives, a key characteristic of presuppositions. Experiment 2 tests the conversational-implicature account by investigating whether the stances can be cancelled without producing a contradiction, a key characteristic of implicatures. The results provide evidence that both stances – neutrality about the antecedent in indicatives and the falsity of the antecedent in subjunctives – are conveyed by conversational implicatures. (shrink)

In one of their papers, Michael De and Hitoshi Omori observed that the notion of classical negation is not uniquely determined in the context of so-called Belnap-Dunn logic, and in fact there are 16 unary operations that qualify to be called classical negation. These varieties are due to different falsity conditions one may assume for classical negation. The aim of this paper is to observe that there is an interesting way to make sense of classical negation independent of (...) class='Hi'>falsity conditions. We discuss two equivalent semantics, and offer a Hilbert-style system that is sound and complete with respect to the semantics. (shrink)

Keith DeRose has argued that context shifting experiments should be designed in a specific way in order to accommodate what he calls a ‘truth/falsity asymmetry’. I explain and critique DeRose's reasons for proposing this modification to contextualist methodology, drawing on recent experimental studies of DeRose's bank cases as well as experimental findings about the verification of affirmative and negative statements. While DeRose's arguments for his particular modification to contextualist methodology fail, the lesson of his proposal is that there is (...) good reason to pay close attention to several subtle aspects of the design of context shifting experiments. (shrink)

Abstract: We see, experience, and live our lives in this empirical world. We, ordinary people, perceive the world as real or sattvāvāna. But, Advaitins say, the world is false, it has no actual existence. So, questions, then, arise, do we live in a falsified universe? Or, do the things which are around us have no essential value? Such questions haunt us to look into the meaning and analysis of the Advaitins, and thus, this paper is nothing but an unraveling interpretation (...) of the meaning of falsity presented by Madhusūdana Sarasvatī in his auspicious text, Advaitasiddhi. Not a single among the five definitions given in the book is his definition of Madhusūdna. He just tried to establish the validity of those definitions. Among the five, Pancapādikākāra wrote the first one. Vivaraṇakāra gave the second and the third. Citsukhācāriya wrote the fourth definition of falsity. And the last, i.e., the fifth definition of falsity, is provided by the author of Makaranda, Ᾱnandavodhācāriya. The first definition of falsity presented in the Advaitasiddhi is sadasattvānadhikaraṇatva. That is to say; the property falsity is not the substratum of either existence (sattvā) or non-existence (asattvā). Here, existence (sattvā) means free from contradiction for all the times, i.e., trikālāvādhyatva and non-existence (asattvā) means being the absence or vyatireka of trikālāvādhyatva. In this sense, Brahman is existent as it has the property trikālāvādhyatva. Brahman is never liable to contradiction, while the hare`s horn, sky-lotus, etc. are non-existent because such things cognize nowhere as trikālāvādhyatva. It has been said in the earlier that the first definition of the falsity would be analyzed, which is discussed and explained in Advaitasiddhi. Regarding the interpretations, the opponent leveled many objections which were subdued by Madhusūdana. Hence, I intend to focus only on the validity of the first definition of falsity by rejecting the opponent’s position. (shrink)

This paper argues that the obvious validity of certain inferences involving indirect speech reports as premises and truth or falsity ascriptions as conclusions is incompatible with Davidson's so-called "paratactic" analysis of the logical form of indirect discourse. Besides disqualifying that analysis, this problem is also claimed to indicate that the analysis is doubly in tension with Davidson's metasemantic views. Specifically, it can be reconciled neither with one of Davidson's key assumptions regarding the adequacy of the kind of semantic theory (...) he recommends nor with one of his key assumptions regarding the inadequacy of a kind of semantic theory he rejects. (shrink)

Stereotypes are commonly alleged to be false or inaccurate views of groups. For shorthand, I call this the falsity hypothesis. The falsity hypothesis is widespread and is often one of the first reasons people cite when they explain why we shouldn’t use stereotypic views in cognition, reasoning, or speech. In this essay, I argue against the falsity hypothesis on both empirical and ameliorative grounds. In its place, I sketch a more promising view of stereotypes—which avoids the (...) class='Hi'>falsity hypothesis—that joins my earlier work on stereotypes in individual psychology with the work of Patricia Hill Collins on cultural stereotypes. According to this two-part hybrid theory, stereotypes are controlling images or ideas that enjoy both a psychological and cultural existence, which serve a regulative social function. (shrink)

This paper attempts to develop a criterion for determining when one’s own opinion is incorrect. I first establish a Gadamerian critique of Enlightenment objectivism and continue by stating that neither radical objectivism nor radical relativism are applicable standards within epistemology. There must be both some valid and some invalid opinions. In dialogue with Georgia Warnke, the discussion of right and wrong perception is based on the minimums of immediate illegitimizing of certain prejudices: part-whole incongruity and dogmatic opinions. Further, in conjunction (...) with María Lugones’s theory of “world-traveling,” I state that one is unable to adequately dismiss an individual’s opinion on a phenomenon until they have “traveled” to the individual’s “world” and experienced the phenomenon through that individual’s personal epistemology. To get a proper and best-as-possible understanding of someone’s stance, especially a stance that opposes one’s own, one must address or interrogate the prejudices that are tied to the stance itself; and meaningfully investigating another person’s prejudices/perceptions requires traveling to their world. As this is incredibly difficult to do and requires high amounts of time and epistemic/hermeneutic labor, it becomes more efficient to be reflexive for only oneself than for others. I develop a criterion to determine such personal falsity, where first, building off Vrinda Dalmiya and Linda Alcoff, one must determine either propositional/theoretical or practical/educational expertise in the individual with the opposing opinion to one’s own. An expert’s differing stance is merely a signal to continue on with research into the relevant inquiry. Then one must enter the confirmation phase, in which one must confirm the expert’s opposing opinion with other experts in the relevant field. One must maintain the belief that opinions necessitate their own change, and expertise does not always stem from those with the most prestige behind their name. Humility is the crucial figure in the opinion-changing process that stands as the fountainhead of good knowledge. (shrink)

This book proposes a novel theory of truth and falsity. It argues that truth is a form of reference and falsity is a form of reference failure. -/- Most of the philosophical literature on truth concentrates on certain ontological and epistemic problems. This book focuses instead on language. By utilizing the Fregean idea that sentences are singular referring expressions, the author develops novel connections between the philosophical study of truth and falsity and the huge literature in in (...) the philosophy of language on the notion of reference. The first part of the book constructs the author’s theory and argues for it in length. Part II addresses the ways in which the theory relates to, and is different from, some of the basic theories of truth. Part III takes up how to account for the truth of sentences with logical operators and quantifiers. Finally, Part IV discusses the applications and implications of the theory for longstanding problems in philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology. -/- A Referential Theory of Truth and Falsity will appeal to researchers and advanced students working in philosophy of language, epistemology, metaphysics, and linguistics. -/- . (shrink)

Philosophers disagree about what makes news “fake”: some believe it is falsity, whereas others emphasize intentional deception about the content or the source. We report two preregistered studies (total N=1200) testing whether falsity and source deception predict fake-news classification. Participants evaluated scenarios in which a claim was either true or false, and the article appeared on either the official New York Times website or that of a near-identical impersonator. In both studies, falsity and source deception independently increased (...) fake-news classifications, indicating that many participants did not treat “fake news” as a synonym for “false news”. Whereas with a predictive claim (Study 1), the factors amplified each other, with a past-tense claim (Study 2), falsity was near-determinative and the interaction not reliable. Across both studies, conservatism predicted increased fake-news classifications, but the association disappeared once perceived source reliability was included, suggesting politics operates via biased priors rather than differences in meaning. (shrink)

$${{{\mathcal {F}}}}$$ -systems are useful digraphs to model sentences that predicate the falsity of other sentences. Paradoxes like the Liar and the one of Yablo can be analyzed with that tool to find graph-theoretic patterns. In this paper we studied this general model consisting of a set of sentences and the binary relation ‘ $$\ldots $$ affirms the falsity of $$\ldots $$ ’ among them. The possible existence of non-referential sentences was also considered. To model the sets of (...) all the sentences that can jointly be valued as true we introduced the notion of conglomerate, the existence of which guarantees the absence of paradox. Conglomerates also enabled us to characterize referential contradictions, i.e., sentences that can only be false under a classical valuation due to the interactions with other sentences in the model. A Kripke-style fixed-point characterization of groundedness was offered, and complete (meaning that every sentence is deemed either true or false) and consistent (meaning that no sentence is deemed true and false) fixed points were put in correspondence with conglomerates. Furthermore, argumentation frameworks are special cases of $$\mathcal{F}$$ -systems. We showed the relation between local conglomerates and admissible sets of arguments and argued about the usefulness of the concept for the argumentation theory. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose some transfor mations based on the centroid points between single valued neutrosophic numbers. We introduce these trans formations according to truth, indeterminacy and falsity value of single valued neutrosophic numbers. We propose a new similarity measure based on falsity value between single valued neutrosophic sets. Then we prove some properties on new similarity measure based on falsity value between falsity value between single valued neutrosophic sets. Furthermore, we propose similarity measure based (...) on falsity value between single valued neutrosophic sets based on the centroid points of transformed single valued neutrosophic numbers. We also apply the proposed similarity measure between single valued neutrosophic sets to deal with pattern recognition problems. (shrink)

This article examines several answers to the question, can lexical definitions be true or false.

Aristotle's theory of perception is complicated by the fact that he recognizes three kinds of perceptible object: special, common, and incidental, all of which have different levels of reliability. Focusing on De Anima 3.3, 428b17–25, this paper discusses why these three sorts of perception are true and false. It argues that perceptions of special objects can be false because of the blind-spot phenomenon and that common objects are typically perceived as predicated of an incidental object. This helps explain why perceptions (...) of common objects are the most error prone. The paper ends with a suggestion about the importance of predicational perception for Aristotle's epistemology. (shrink)

This is a review of Ilhan Inan's book "A Referential Theory of Truth and Falsity".

There are many kinds of negation and denial. Perhaps the most common is the Boolean negation not that applies to propositions-in-extension, i.e. truth-values. The others are, inter alia, the property of propositions of not being true which applies to propositions; the complement function which applies to sets; privation which applies to properties; negation as failure applied in logic programming; negation as argumentation ad absurdum, and many others. The goal of this paper is neither to provide a complete list, nor to (...) analyse all of them. Rather, I am going to deal with negation of propositions that come attached with a presupposition that is entailed by the positive as well as negated form of a given proposition. However, there are two kinds of negation, namely internal and external negation. I am going to prove that while the former is presupposition-preserving, the latter is presupposition-denying. This issue has much in common with the difference between topic and focus articulation within a sentence. Whereas articulating the topic of a sentence activates a presupposition, articulating the focus frequently yields merely an entailment. The main contribution of this paper is the proof that the two kinds of negation are not equivalent. While the Russellian wide-scope (external) negation gets the truthconditions of a sentence right for a subject occurring as a focus, Strawsonian narrow-scope (internal) negation is validly applicable for a subject occurring as the topic. I also deal with other kinds of presupposition triggers, in particular factive attitudes and prerequisites of a given property. My background theory is Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL). TIL is an expressive logic apt for the analysis of sentences with presuppositions, because in TIL we work with partial functions, in particular with propositions with truth-value gaps. Moreover, the procedural semantics of TIL make it possible to uncover the hidden semantic features of sentences, make them explicit and logically tractable. (shrink)

There are three questions associated with Simpson’s paradox (SP): (i) Why is SP paradoxical? (ii) What conditions generate SP? and (iii) How to proceed when confronted with SP? An adequate analysis of the paradox starts by distinguishing these three questions. Then, by developing a formal account of SP, and substantiating it with a counterexample to causal accounts, we argue that there are no causal factors at play in answering questions (i) and (ii). Causality enters only in connection with action.

Abstract Utterances of counterfactual conditionals are typically attended by the information that their antecedents are false. But there is as yet no account of the source of this information that is both detailed and complete. This paper describes the problem of counterfactual antecedent falsity and argues that the problem can be addressed by appeal to an adequate account of the presuppositions of various competing conditional constructions. It argues that indicative conditionals presuppose that their antecedents are epistemically possible, while subjunctive (...) conditionals bear no presupposition. Given this arrangement, utterance of the counterfactual results in an antipresupposition, that is, a scalar implicature generated from the presuppositions of competing alternatives rather than from the at-issue content of competing alternatives. The content of the antipresupposition is the negation of the presupposition of the competing indicative, i.e., that the antecedent of the conditional is known to be false by the speaker. (shrink)

In the present paper I defend an interpretation of the Cartesian notion of material falsity that it would be adequate to describe as ‘epistemic’, as opposed to most other views in the literature, which could be described as ‘metaphysical’. Whereas metaphysical conceptions of material falsity consider an idea to be such because of some kind of failure in their representative properties, that is, in the relation between what they exhibit and their objects, an epistemic view considers that what (...) makes an idea materially false is some kind of opacity that precludes their representational properties to be known in the first place. In the paper the evidence for these two kinds of reading is assessed, and it is shown that epistemic views are clearly more adequate. (shrink)

JOHN CORCORAN AND WAGNER SANZ, Disbelief Logic Complements Belief Logic. Philosophy, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260-4150 USA E-mail: [email protected] Filosofia, Universidade Federal de Goiás, Goiás, GO 74001-970 Brazil E-mail: [email protected] Consider two doxastic states belief and disbelief. Belief is taking a proposition to be true and disbelief taking it to be false. Judging also dichotomizes: accepting a proposition results in belief and rejecting in disbelief. Stating follows suit: asserting a proposition conveys belief and denying conveys disbelief. Traditional logic implicitly (...) focused on logical relations and processes needed in expanding and organizing systems of beliefs. Deducing a conclusion from beliefs results in belief of the conclusion. Deduction presupposes consequence: one proposition is a consequence of a set of a propositions if the latter logically implies the former. The role of consequence depends on its being truth-preserving: every consequence of a set of truths is true. This paper, which builds on previous work by the second author, explores roles of logic in expanding and organizing systems of disbeliefs. Aducing a conclusion from disbeliefs results in disbelief of the conclusion. Aduction presupposes contrequence: one proposition is a contrequence of a set of propositions if the set of negations or contradictory opposites of the latter logically implies that of the former. The role of contrequence depends on its being falsity-preserving: every contrequence of a set of falsehoods is false. A system of aductions that includes, for every contrequence of a given set, an aduction of the contrequence from the set is said to be complete. Historical and philosophical discussion is illustrated and enriched by presenting complete systems of aductions constructed by the second author. One such, a natural aduction system for Aristotelian categorical propositions, is based on a natural deduction system attributed to Aristotle by the first author and others. ADDED NOTE: Wagner Sanz reconstructed Aristotle’s logic the way it would have been had Aristole focused on constructing “anti-sciences” instead of sciences: more generally, on systems of disbeliefs. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Truth and Falsity Truth and Belief Truth and Correspondence Truth and Coherence Defining and Testing for Truth: Correspondence and Coherence Sources.

This paper presents the Paradoxical Theorem, which states that no imperfect being can determine the truth or falsity of any statement with absolute perfection. We then apply the theorem to itself for any imperfect being, which leads to a self-referential paradox.

We give a single consolidated account of what the analytic structure of the Riemann zeta function does and does not settle about the location of its non-trivial zeros, and we settle the relation between the two exactly. The work has four parts and we mark the grade of each. First, a geometric reformulation, stated at the strength it earns. The Berry-Keating operator H = −i(x d/dx + 1/2) is unitarily equivalent to the dilation generator H′ = −i x d/dx on (...) the multiplicative Hilbert space L²(ℝ⁺, dx/x) carrying the Haar measure of the dilation group, where Stone's theorem renders H′ self-adjoint with no boundary parameter. Both realizations are essentially self-adjoint, with deficiency indices (0, 0), so the extension ambiguity reported in the spectral literature belongs to truncated and regularized models rather than to the full half-line operator, and the contribution of the change of geometry is the canonical Mellin diagonalization, not the removal of an ambiguity the full operator never had. The operator certifies a unique spectral arena, not the location of the zeros, and it certifies more sharply that the arena alone cannot supply them: every operator commuting with the dilation flow is a function of the generator and so has no eigenvalue of finite multiplicity, and by the Kato-Rosenblum theorem no trace-class perturbation of the generator escapes the absolutely continuous spectrum of the whole real line, so any spectral realization of the zeros must break the flow symmetry and exceed the trace-class neighborhood, which is the absorption-spectrum form rather than a discrete point spectrum. Second, a localization. A regularized Cauchy-Stieltjes functional built from −ζ′/ζ vanishes unconditionally in the safe regime to the right of the critical line; a Hardy-space equivalence reformulates the Riemann Hypothesis losslessly as a single causal-Fourier-support condition on one explicit tempered distribution, the boundary value of the polar-normalized logarithmic derivative g(s) = −ζ′/ζ(s) − 1/(s − 1) − 1/s, the normalization forced by the pole of ζ at s = 1, which sits inside the relevant half-plane and is governed by no hypothesis on zeros; and the obstruction that blocks the safe vanishing from extending to the critical line is identified exactly as one object, the odd-symmetric Fourier component of the boundary distribution, equivalently the imaginary part of the normalized logarithmic derivative on the critical line, which the functional equation does not constrain and which three natural closure routes cannot supply without circularity. Third, the consolidating contribution: an identity and a two-sided barrier. The identity proves that determining the odd-part object is logically equivalent to the Riemann Hypothesis, so the obstruction is not adjacent to the problem but identical to it. The barrier brackets that object from two sides, each side a theorem. On the even side the entire machinery generated by the functional equation, being symmetric under the reflection of the critical line, is structurally incapable of determining an odd-parity object, so no refinement of the functional-equation toolkit can reach it; the even channel undershoots. On the odd side the natural positivity structure that does enter the odd channel, the de Branges Hilbert-space approach, imposes a condition that implies the Riemann Hypothesis yet fails for the zeta function, established by Conrey and Li; the odd channel overshoots into falsity. The obstruction sits in the gap between an even-channel undershoot and an odd-channel overshoot, and the direction of each miss is named. The even-side miss is sharpened to a conservation law: the functional equation is an involution acting on the critical line as the parity reflection, the hypothesis lives in its odd eigenspace, and by the spectral theorem no consequence of the functional equation can carry information into that eigenspace, so the closure requirement takes the exact form of a second symmetry of the zeta function acting nontrivially on the conserved eigenspace, the structure realized in the proven function-field case by the action of Frobenius on cohomology. The conservation is active rather than passive: the functional equation forces every off-line zero into a partner sharing its height, whose contributions to the even channel are equal and opposite and cancel identically while their contributions to the odd channel are equal and add, so the even channel is a matched filter that nulls precisely the off-line signal a proof must detect, the on-line spectrum entering the even channel only as a real atomic measure the functional equation does not supply, and the off-line signature surviving solely in the odd channel as an explicit doubled dispersion profile 2(τ − γ)/[(1/2 − β)² + (τ − γ)²]. The conservation law is witnessed in the wild: the Davenport-Heilbronn function carries the identical Riemann-type symmetry shape and possesses zeros off the critical line, so the symmetry data is exhibited as independent of the on-line property over the extended class. A magnitude bound of Lindelöf type, often listed as an independent route, is shown to be parity-even and therefore to fall inside the even-side barrier rather than outside it. Fourth, a universality analysis identifying the equilibrium class of the prime field by four orthogonal critical exponents, with a measurement of which exponents discriminate the Riemann Hypothesis from its negation and which are truth-invariant across it, rendered as vanishing mutual information; and an independent structural witness from atomic physics, that the periodic table, a physical spectrum whose shell structure is fixed by the spatial rotation group and whose ordering runs over the integer counting of nuclear charge with its filling order an empirical effective-theory rule, never invokes the factorization of the integers into primes, confirming that the multiplicative prime channel in which the Riemann Hypothesis lives is a structurally distinct sector from the spatial-and-counting channel that suffices elsewhere. The consolidated picture is a measurement and a bracket. The distance from the unconditional Cauchy anchor to the critical line is one object wide; the object is the odd-part component; the component is the Riemann Hypothesis itself; and it is bracketed between two named, theorem-grade failure-directions, the even channel that cannot reach it and the odd channel that overshoots it. We make no claim of a proof. The boldest statement is the measurement: the problem is one object wide, the object is located, and the two standard channels miss it in opposite directions, the even channel falling short of it and the odd channel overshooting it. The bracket encloses these two standard channels exactly; a route that closes the hypothesis must either thread the gap between them, entering the odd channel without the even channel's parity limitation and without the natural odd construction's over-demand, or step outside the odd-side wall by building a modified construction the Conrey-Li counterexample does not reach. Either way the two named channels are walled off, and the work that remains is precisely characterized. We close by stating the determination in the two registers in which the hypothesis has a status. In the strict formal register of syntactic proof it is open, localized to the odd-part object, and bracketed between the two walls. In the physical-structural register it is the convergent determination of four mutually independent axes, the formal equivalence, the equilibrium universality class, three arithmetic-topological invariants of the integers, and the universal physics of order-parameter localization, which survive removal of every shared covariate but one. The single covariate that does not subtract out, the identification of the spectrum of the self-adjoint operator with the imaginary parts of the zeros, is identically the strict-register gap, so the two registers meet on one open object. The physical-structural register returns a convergent determination that points to the hypothesis as true, pending the determination of the odd-part component of the normalized logarithmic derivative on the critical line. That odd-part component is, pointwise, the regularization width of each pole of −ζ′/ζ on the line and so the record of every deviation of a zero from it, which makes its determination logically the hypothesis; and the explicit formula being a conserved identity between the zeros and the primes excludes any prime-side identity that would determine it independently, since such an identity is either insensitive to the deviations and true regardless of the hypothesis, or sensitive to them and reducible to the hypothesis through the conservation. The one determination the structure does not foreclose is one sourced from outside the prime-zero ledger, an operator exhibiting the zeros as its spectrum given independently of the zeta function, and none is known. The originating framework and its interpretive layer are confined to an appendix and are load-bearing for no result in the body. Keywords: Riemann Hypothesis, Hilbert-Polya conjecture, multiplicative Hilbert space, Haar measure, Mellin transform, Cauchy-Stieltjes transform, Hardy space, Paley-Wiener-Schwartz theorem, even-odd parity decomposition, functional equation, Davenport-Heilbronn function, de Branges spaces, Conrey-Li positivity, Selberg variance theorem, Gaussian Unitary Ensemble, universality class, mutual information. (shrink)

This book explores a question central to philosophy--namely, what does it take for a belief to be justified or rational? According to a widespread view, whether one has justification for believing a proposition is determined by how probable that proposition is, given one's evidence. In this book this view is rejected and replaced with another: in order for one to have justification for believing a proposition, one's evidence must normically support it--roughly, one's evidence must make the falsity of that (...) proposition abnormal in the sense of calling for special, independent explanation. This conception of justification bears upon a range of topics in epistemology and beyond. Ultimately, this way of looking at justification guides us to a new, unfamiliar picture of how we should respond to our evidence and manage our own fallibility. This picture is developed here. (shrink)

We argue that all comparative expressions in natural language obey a principle that we call Comparability: if x and y are at least as F as themselves, then either x is at least as F as y or y is at least as F as x. This principle has been widely rejected among philosophers, especially by ethicists, and its falsity has been claimed to have important normative implications. We argue that Comparability is needed to explain the goodness of several (...) patterns of inference that seem manifestly valid, that the purported failures of Comparability would have absurd consequences, and that the influential arguments against Comparability are less compelling than they may have initially seemed. (shrink)

Answer-engine optimization shapes what answer engines say, not which sources they list. Ask one a contested question and it may return not sources but a verdict in its own voice, with no visible author. An optimizer authors that verdict while the engine voices it as its own; a public acts on it, the framer unreachable. That is the wrong on the verdict channel; its form is false assurance: the appearance of an answerable party behind a frame whose author is hidden (...) or absent. The reply that it is only a tool concedes rather than settles: a tool that settles a frame settles someone’s, and that someone the channel conceals, leaving the non-authoring user the only party in view. The wrong is not exhausted by falsity, concealment, or machine origin: a verdict may be accurate, disclosed, and cited, while frame-ownership stays illegible. It runs along one axis: the agency of whoever executes the frame. At the answer end a person acts on another’s covert frame: the hidden author stays answerable, the user partly excused. At the action end an AI agent executes it in the user’s place, and the case turns new: a covertly authored frame joined to an executor that cannot answer, which inherited categories cannot hold. The deed’s answer finds no bearer where it is done; the deployer stays answerable for loosing it. The remedy is answerable legibility: not disclosure of sources, prompts, models, or origin, but a visible owner of the frame the engine voices. (shrink)

It is often argued that higher-level special-science properties cannot be causally efficacious since the lower-level physical properties on which they supervene are doing all the causal work. This claim is usually derived from an exclusion principle stating that if a higher-level property F supervenes on a physical property F* that is causally sufficient for a property G, then F cannot cause G. We employ an account of causation as difference-making to show that the truth or falsity of this principle (...) is a contingent matter and derive necessary and sufficient conditions under which a version of it holds. We argue that one important instance of the principle, far from undermining non-reductive physicalism, actually supports the causal autonomy of certain higher-level properties. (shrink)

The non-reductive physicalist would like to believe that mental properties are not identical to physical properties; that there are complete causal explanations of all events in terms of physical properties; and that there are sometimes explanations of events in terms of mental properties. However, some have argued that these claims cannot all be true, since they are collectively inconsistent with a principle of causal exclusion. In this paper I argue that the best formulation of the interventionist theory of causation entails (...) the falsity of the exclusion principle. However, I argue that it does so at the cost of revealing a weakness in the interventionist theory itself. (shrink)

It is widely held that physicalism is incompatible with the metaphysical possibility of zombies, i.e. beings physically just like us yet lacking in phenomenal consciousness. e present paper argues that this orthodoxy is mistaken. As against the received wisdom, physicalism is perfectly compatible with the possibility of zom-bies and zombie-worlds. Arguments from the possibility of zombies to the falsity of physicalism do not, therefore, succeed. To establish this, the paper develops a form of physicalism on which the phenomenal facts (...) are metaphysically grounded in the basic physical facts in accordance with metaphysically contingent grounding laws. It also draws out some important morals for the contemporary mind-body debate. (shrink)

How should we respond to extremist views that we know are false? This paper proposes that we should be intellectually humble, but not open-minded. We should own our intellectual limitations, but be unwilling to revise our beliefs in the falsity of the extremist views. The opening section makes a case for distinguishing the concept of intellectual humility from the concept of open-mindedness, arguing that open-mindedness requires both a willingness to revise extant beliefs and other-oriented engagement, whereas intellectual humility requires (...) neither. Building on virtue-consequentialism, the second section makes a start on arguing that intellectually virtuous people of a particular sort—people with ‘effects-virtues’—would be intellectually humble, but not open-minded, in responding to extremist views they knew were false. We suggest that while intellectual humility and open-mindedness often travel together, this is a place where they come apart. (shrink)

Naïve realism, often overlooked among philosophical theories of perception, has in recent years attracted a surge of interest. Broadly speaking, the central commitment of naïve realism is that mind-independent objects are essential to the fundamental analysis of perceptual experience. Since the claims of naïve realism concern the essential metaphysical structure of conscious perception, its truth or falsity is of central importance to a wide range of topics, including the explanation of semantic reference and representational content, the nature of phenomenal (...) consciousness, and the basis of perceptual justification and knowledge. One of the greatest difficulties surrounding discussions of naïve realism, however, has been lack of clarity concerning exactly what affirming or denying it entails. In particular, it is sometimes unclear how naïve realism is related to the claim that perceptual experience is in some sense direct or unmediated, and also to what extent the view is compatible with another widely discussed thesis in the philosophy of perception, the claim that perceptual experiences are states with representational content. In this essay, I discuss how recent work on these issues helps to clarify both the central commitments of naïve realism, as well as its relation to representationalist theories of perception. Along the way, I will attempt to shed light on the different ways in which each approach tries to address the various theoretical challenges facing a philosophical theory of perception, and also to assess the prospects for views that attempts to combine features of each approach. (shrink)

This paper defends the thesis that LLM hallucinations are best explained as a truth representation problem: Current models lack an internal representation of propositions as truth-bearers, so truth and falsity cannot constrain generation in the way factual discourse requires. It begins by surveying leading explanations—computational limits on self-verification, deficiencies in training data as truth sources, and architectural factors—and argues that they converge on the same underlying representational deficit. Next, it reconstructs the philosophical background of current LLM design, showing how (...) optimization for fluent continuation aligns with coherence-style evaluation and with a broadly structuralist, relational semantics, before turning to David Chalmers’s recent attempt to secure propositional interpretability by drawing on Davidson/Lewis-style radical interpretation and by locating propositional content in “middle-layer” structures; it argues that this approach downplays the ubiquity of hallucination and inherits instability from post-training edits. Finally, the paper offers a positive proposal: Atomic propositions should be represented in the basic vector layer, reviving a logical-atomist program as a principled route to reducing hallucination. (shrink)

Frankfurt gave an account of “bullshit” as a statement made without regard to truth or falsity. Austin argued that a large amount of language consists of speech acts aimed at goals other than truth or falsity. We don't want our account of bullshit to include all performatives. I develop a modification of Frankfurt's account that makes interesting and useful categorizations of various speech acts as bullshit or not and show that this account generalizes to many other kinds of (...) act as well. I show that this illuminates some of Graeber's classification of “bullshit jobs,” though it doesn't fully agree with it. (shrink)

Groups, like individuals, can communicate. They can issue statements, make promises, give advice. Sometimes, in doing so, they lie and deceive. The goal of this paper is to offer a precise characterisation of what it means for a group to make an assertion and to lie. I begin by showing that Lackey’s influential account of group assertion is unable to distinguish assertions from other speech acts, explicit statements from implicatures, and lying from misleading. I propose an alternative view, according to (...) which a group asserts a proposition only if it explicitly presents that proposition as true, thereby committing to its truth. This proposal is then put to work to define group lying. While scholars typically assume that group lying requires (i) a deceptive intent and (ii) a belief in the falsity of the asserted proposition, I offer a definition that drops condition (i) and significantly broadens condition (ii). (shrink)

Computer hardware is heavily reliant on classical logic, but could we use some non- classical logic instead? In this paper I suggest an alternative model of implementation of logic gates in electronics. In particular, I propose a model that takes descriptions of logical connectives through means of Dunn semantics and implements them as logic gates by using a double current system: one for truth and one for falsity, instead of the classical use of a single current for both values. (...) The outcome of this proposal should pave the way to new models of non-classical and even contra-classical computation based on paraconsistent, paracomplete and paranormal logics. (shrink)

Reprinted in Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, Wadsworth 2015, 6th edition, eds Michael Rea and Louis Pojman. What is propositional faith? At a first approximation, we might answer that it is the psychological attitude picked out by standard uses of the English locution “S has faith that p,” where p takes declarative sentences as instances, as in “He has faith that they’ll win”. Although correct, this answer is not nearly as informative as we might like. Many people say that there (...) is a more informative answer. They say that, at the very least, propositional faith requires propositional belief. More precisely, they say that faith that p requires belief that p or that it must be partly constituted by belief that p. This view is common enough; call it the Common View. I have two main aims in this paper: (i) to exhibit the falsity of the Common View and the paucity of reasons for it, and (ii) to sketch a more accurate and comprehensive account of what propositional faith is. (shrink)

Recent work on Natural Kind Essentialism has taken a deflationary turn. The assumptions about the grounds of essentialist truths concerning natural kinds familiar from the Kripke-Putnam framework are now considered questionable. The source of the problem, however, has not been sufficiently explicated. The paper focuses on the Twin Earth scenario, and it will be demonstrated that the essentialist principle at its core (which I call IDENT)—that necessarily, a sample of a chemical substance, A, is of the same kind as another (...) sample, B, if and only if A and B have the same microstructure—must be re-evaluated. The Twin Earth scenario also assumes the falsity of another essentialist principle (which I call INST): necessarily, there is a 1:1 correlation between (all of ) the chemical properties of a chemical substance and the microstructure of that substance. This assumption will be questioned, and it will be argued that, in fact, the best strategy for defending IDENT is to establish INST. The prospects for Natural Kind Essentialism and microstructural essentialism regarding chemical substances will be assessed with reference to recent work in the philosophy of chemistry. Finally, a weakened form of INST will be presented. (shrink)

The free will debate has been structured by a philosophical misconception that Constraint Theory (CT) identifies and dissolves: the assumption that freedom consists in the absence of constraint. If freedom is the absence of constraint, then causal determination and freedom are incompatible, generating the standard dichotomy between compatibilism and incompatibilism. This paper argues that this assumption is false, and that its falsity follows from CT’s foundational claim that constraint is the ontological primitive constitutive of determinate existence as such. -/- (...) On the CT account, freedom is not the absence of constraint but the appropriate organisation of constraint: the condition in which an agent’s action flows from the constitutive constraints that constitute their identity, character, and agency, rather than from merely restrictive constraints that are external to that identity and that override or bypass the agent’s constraint profile. This is not a version of standard compatibilism, because it does not merely assert that freedom is compatible with causal determination while leaving the distinction between free and unfree causation ungrounded. CT provides the structural account of what makes some causal histories free-action-generating and others not: the distinction between causal chains that run through the agent’s constitutive constraint profile and those that bypass it. -/- The paper develops this account in detail. A free action is one whose causal history runs through the agent’s constraint signature — the integrated pattern of cognitive, affective, evaluative, and dispositional constraint relations that constitutes the agent as the specific agent they are. An unfree action is one whose causal history bypasses the constraint signature, through coercion (external constraint overriding the agent’s constraint profile), compulsion (internal constraint dysregulation that overrides the agent’s characteristic constraint profile), or manipulation (external restructuring of the agent’s constraint profile without their participation). -/- The paper engages Frankfurt cases, the consequence argument, sourcehood requirements, reasons-responsiveness accounts, and mesh theories of freedom, showing that CT provides the structural grounding that each of these approaches reaches toward without supplying. Moral responsibility is grounded in the degree to which actions express the agent’s constraint signature, generating a graduated account that handles the standard difficult cases — coercion, addiction, manipulation, diminished responsibility through character change — without requiring a sharp boundary between responsible and non-responsible action. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a growing number of philosophers come to defend normative nihilism. Even if their arguments do not induce in many a belief in normative nihilism, there may be grounds on which to be less than certain about the falsity of normative nihilism. How, then, can we accommodate the possibility of normative nihilism when deliberating about what to do? In this article, I defend two theses. First, I distinguish between normative questions and deliberative questions and argue that (...) the question “what am I to do under uncertainty about the truth of normative nihilism?” is best understood as an example of the latter. Second, I propose a novel framework for deliberation under uncertainty about the truth of normative nihilism: maximize expected decision-relevance. A striking upshot of this article is that there is an important sense in which we need make no mistake by flouting normative considerations under uncertainty about the truth of normative nihilism. (shrink)

In this paper I will develop a view about the semantics of imperatives, which I term Modal Noncognitivism, on which imperatives might be said to have truth conditions (dispositionally, anyway), but on which it does not make sense to see them as expressing propositions (hence does not make sense to ascribe to them truth or falsity). This view stands against “Cognitivist” accounts of the semantics of imperatives, on which imperatives are claimed to express propositions, which are then enlisted in (...) explanations of the relevant logico-semantic phenomena. It also stands against the major competitors to Cognitivist accounts—all of which are non-truth-conditional and, as a result, fail to provide satisfying explanations of the fundamental semantic characteristics of imperatives (or so I argue). The view of imperatives I defend here improves on various treatments of imperatives on the market in giving an empirically and theoretically adequate account of their semantics and logic. It yields explanations of a wide range of semantic and logical phenomena about imperatives—explanations that are, I argue, at least as satisfying as the sorts of explanations of semantic and logical phenomena familiar from truth-conditional semantics. But it accomplishes this while defending the notion—which is, I argue, substantially correct—that imperatives could not have propositions, or truth conditions, as their meanings. (shrink)

In the 1960s Paul Ricoeur coined the phrase “masters of suspicion” to describe Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud for their ability to reveal the hidden or repressed meanings or truths located in texts or social and psychological phenomena. Philosophers, theologians, and literary theorists have subsequently applied the term “master of suspicion,” as well as the associated term “hermeneutics of suspicion,” in manifold ways. The concept has become one of philosophy’s recognizable turns of phrase, an “iconic term” that excites (...) imagination and interest in much the same way as Nietzsche’s ‘death of God.’ Ricoeur identifies four aspects that the masters of suspicion have in common: an engagement with religion; their contestation of the primacy of consciousness in the domain of knowledge, which implies a radical critique of the Cartesian cogito and the exposure of false consciousness; the development of a new method of demystification, or a new way to explain consciousness; the destruction of old myths, which implies simultaneously a rebuilding process towards developing a new, more true understanding of reality, a process that involves a liberation from illusion and the expansion of consciousness. Durkheim’s sociological project contains all of these elements: by showing how individuals are socially constructed, including even their ability for logical thought, his work exposes the falsity of the Cartesian cogito and the idea of the independent and autonomous ego; he develops a new sociological method which seeks to unmask the hidden social processes that determine individual thought and behavior; his sociology destroys old ways of thinking, but simultaneously actively rebuilds a new understanding of reality, and seeks to expand consciousness by highlighting how consciousness is shaped by social processes; his work on religion is an exercise in a hermeneutics of suspicion just as radical as that of the other masters of suspicion. This contribution will explain the ways in which Durkheim is truly a master of suspicion in Ricoeur’s sense, but also seeks to understand why Ricoeur did not mention Durkheim. The contribution will thus explore how Durkheim is relevant for hermeneutics, while also exploring facets of his methodology in new ways. (shrink)

Dispositionalism is the view that it is possible that p iff sometimes, something has an iterated potentiality to be such that p. Recently a formidable challenge has been raised against it: the paradox of necessary perfect masks (Vetter & Busse 2022). A mask is perfect if it guarantees that, come what may, the manifestation will not come about as long as the mask is present, and it is necessary if it cannot be removed or destroyed. This generates a contradiction for (...) Dispositionalism. -/- In this paper, I offer a novel solution to the paradox, which I call the Degree Solution. As the name suggests, it is centred around the role that degrees of potentiality play in grounding modality. My strategy to dispel the paradox comprises of three steps. First, I will argue that degrees of potentialities play a role in grounding modal truths: only non-zero potentialities ground modal truths. Then, I will argue that that degree of potentialities are extrinsic second order properties of potentialities –– and, in particular, that they depend on the modal status of both their stimuli/disposition partners and masks. I will argue that necessary perfect masks reduce the degree of a potentiality to zero, thereby preventing them from grounding a modal truth and preventing the contradiction to arise. Thirdly, I argue that there are zero-degree potentialities, that they are not ad hoc and have genuine explanatory power. They offer the theory important expressive resources to make sense of our intuitions concerning cases of ‘impossible dispositions’ (Jenkins & Nolan 2013) and perhaps also the resources to account for the truth and falsity of some non-vacuous counter-possible and counter-nomic conditionals. Necessary perfect masks are not the ‘big bad bug’ of dispositionalism. On the contrary, taking them seriously leads us to discover new and welcome features of the theory. -/- . (shrink)

The past decade has seen a protracted debate over the semantics of epistemic modals. According to contextualists, epistemic modals quantify over the possibilities compatible with some contextually determined group’s information. Relativists often object that contextualism fails to do justice to the way we assess utterances containing epistemic modals for truth or falsity. However, recent empirical work seems to cast doubt on the relativist’s claim, suggesting that ordinary speakers’ judgments about epistemic modals are more closely in line with contextualism than (...) relativism (Knobe & Yalcin 2014; Khoo 2015). This paper furthers the debate by reporting new empirical research revealing a previously overlooked dimension of speakers’ truth-value judgments concerning epistemic modals. Our results show that these judgments vary systematically with the question under discussion in the conversational context in which the utterance is being assessed. We argue that this ‘QUD effect’ is difficult to explain if contextualism is true, but is readily explained by a suitably flexible form of relativism. (shrink)

According to a prevailing view, conceptual engineering introduces a revolutionary philosophical methodology, challenging traditional conceptual analysis. However, in our paper, we argue that closer scrutiny reveals not only the falsity but also the inherent ambiguity of this narrative. We explore four interpretations of the "Anti-Novelty Claim", the claim that conceptual engineering is not a new way of doing philosophy. Discussing the Anti-Novelty Claim from the perspective of a text’s producer, the text’s consumers, and the exegetical potential of the text, (...) we examine each perspective’s metaphilosophical implications and demonstrate that taking each perspective requires different methods. Adopting these different methods, we argue that the different interpretations of the Anti-Novelty Claim range from nearly trivially true to unlikely but untested. Importantly, we emphasize that each interpretation offers unique philosophical insights, yet addressing them requires diverse types of evidence, preventing a singular, straightforward answer to whether conceptual engineering is new. (shrink)

Enactive approaches to cognition argue that cognition, including pretense, comes about through the dynamical interaction of agent and environment. Applied to cognition, these approaches cast cognition as an activity an agent performs interacting in specific ways with her environment. This view is now under significant pressure: in a series of recent publications, Peter Langland-Hassan has proposed a number of arguments which purportedly should lead us to conclude that enactive approaches are unable to account for pretense without paying a way too (...) severe theoretical price. In this paper, we will defend enactive approaches to pretense, arguing that they can in fact explain pretense without incurring in the negative theoretical consequences Peter Langland-Hassan fears. To this effect, we start by exposing Langland-Hassan’s challenge (§2), to then highlight its core assumptions and demonstrate their falsity (§3). Having done so, we argue that none of the theoretical consequences Langland-Hassan fears follow (§4), and in fact enactive approaches to cognition may be explanatorily superior to the one Langland-Hassan favors (§5). A brief conclusion will then follow (§6). (shrink)

Enactive approaches to cognition argue that cognition, including pretense, comes about through the dynamical interaction of agent and environment. Applied to cognition, these approaches cast cognition as an activity an agent performs interacting in specific ways with her environment. This view is now under significant pressure: in a series of recent publications, Peter Langland-Hassan has proposed a number of arguments which purportedly should lead us to conclude that enactive approaches are unable to account for pretense without paying a way too (...) severe theoretical price. In this paper, we will defend enactive approaches to pretense, arguing that they can in fact explain pretense without incurring in the negative theoretical consequences Peter Langland-Hassan fears. To this effect, we start by exposing Langland-Hassan’s challenge (§2), to then highlight its core assumptions and demonstrate their falsity (§3). Having done so, we argue that none of the theoretical consequences Langland-Hassan fears follow (§4), and in fact enactive approaches to cognition may be explanatorily superior to the one Langland-Hassan favors (§5). A brief conclusion will then follow (§6). (shrink)

Statements about fictional characters, such as “Gregor Samsa has been changed into a beetle,” pose the problem of how we can say something true (or false) using empty names. I propose an original solution to this problem that construes such utterances as reports of the “prescriptions to imagine” generated by works of fiction. In particular, I argue that we should construe these utterances as specifying, not what we are supposed to imagine—the propositional object of the imagining—but how we are supposed (...) to imagine. Most other theories of thought and discourse about fictional characters either fail to capture the intentionality of our imaginings, or else obscure the differences between imaginings directed toward fictional characters and those directed toward real individuals. I argue that once we have an account of prescriptions to imagine about real individuals, we can adapt the same framework to specify the contents of prescriptions to imagine about fictional characters, and thereby to account for the truth (or falsity) of statements about fictional characters. (shrink)

It is often said that normative properties are “just too different” to reduce to other kinds of properties. This suggests that many philosophers find it difficult to believe reductive theses in ethics. I argue that the distinctiveness of the normative concepts we use in thinking about reductive theses offers a more promising explanation of this psychological phenomenon than the falsity of Reductive Realism. To identify the distinctiveness of normative concepts, I use resources from familiar Hybrid views of normative language (...) and thought to develop a Hybrid view of normative concepts. In addition to using this new Hybrid view to explain why reductive theses are difficult to believe, I show how to preserve several patterns of inference involving normative concepts that, intuitively, it is possible to make, and hence answer an important recent challenge to Hybrid views from Mark Schroeder. (shrink)

Reliabilists hold that a belief is doxastically justified if and only if it is caused by a reliable process. But since such a process is one that tends to produce a high ratio of true to false beliefs, reliabilism is on the face of it applicable to binary beliefs, but not to degrees of confidence or credences. For while beliefs admit of truth or falsity, the same cannot be said of credences in general. A natural question now arises: Can (...) reliability theories of justified belief be extended or modified to account for justified credence? In this paper, I address this question. I begin by showing that, as it stands, reliabilism cannot account for justified credence. I then consider three ways in which the reliabilist may try to do so by extending or modifying her theory, but I argue that such attempts face certain problems. After that, I turn to a version of reliabilism that incorporates evidentialist elements and argue that it allows us to avoid the problems that the other theories face. If I am right, this gives reliabilists a reason, aside from those given recently by Comesaña and Goldman, to move towards such a kind of hybrid theory. (shrink)

Moorean arguments are a popular and powerful way to engage highly revisionary philosophical views, such as nihilism about motion, time, truth, consciousness, causation, and various kinds of skepticism (e.g., external world, other minds, inductive, global). They take, as a premise, a highly plausible first-order claim (e.g., cars move, I ate breakfast before lunch, it’s true that some fish have gills) and conclude from it the falsity of the highly revisionary philosophical thesis. Moorean arguments can be used against nihilists in (...) ethics (error theorists), too. Recently, error theorists have recognized Moorean arguments as a powerful challenge and have tried to meet it. They’ve argued that moral Moorean premises seem highly credible to us, but aren’t, by offering various debunking explanations. These explanations all appeal to higher-order evidence—evidence of error in our reasoning. I argue that drawing attention to higher-order evidence is a welcome contribution from error theorists, but that the higher-order evidence actually counts further against error theoretic arguments—including their debunking explanations—and further in favor of Moorean arguments and the commonsense views they support. Along the way I answer a few prominent objections to Moorean arguments: that they are objectionably question-begging, rely on categorizing some facts as “Moorean Facts”, and that reports of one’s credence in a proposition bears no interesting relation to that proposition’s credibility. (shrink)