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Dogmatism about perceptual warrant claims that if a subject has a perceptual experience as of p, then this can provide immediate and defeasible warrant to believe that p. Crispin Wright has put forward three original criticisms of this view. First, and most extensively, Wright argues that the dogmatist is committed to implausible answers to questions about when subjects are in a position to claim warrant to believe certain propositions. Second, he claims that the view is too permissive in assigning warrant in cases in which a subject has balanced evidence regarding the proper functioning of her perceptual system. Finally, he argues that the oft-included restriction of immediate and defeasible dogmatic warrant to perceptually basic beliefs results in a view that is unable to claim that beliefs about normal external world objects are warranted. I argue that none of these objections can be sustained and that dogmatism does not have the problematic consequences that Wright alleges.

In this article, we propose a new trope nominalist conception of determinate and determinable kinds of quantitative tropes. The conception is developed as follows. First, we formulate a new account of tropes falling under the same determinates and determinables in terms of internal relations of proportion and order. Our account is a considerable improvement on the current standard account because it does not rely on primitive internal relations of exact similarity or quantitative distance. The internal relations of proportion and order hold because the related tropes exist; no kinds of tropes need to be assumed here. Second, we argue that there are only pluralities of tropes in relations of proportion and order. The tropes mutually connected by the relations of proportion and order form a special type of plurality, tropes belonging to the same kind. Unlike the recent nominalist accounts, we do not identify kinds of tropes with any additional entities (e.g. sets) or abstractions from entities (e.g. pluralities of similar tropes).

Nihilists believe that nothing matters. This article discusses a pragmatic argument against nihilism proposed by Guy Kahane: If nothing matters it does not matter whether you believe that nothing matters, but if you falsely believe that nothing matters when some things actually do, then the consequences will be bad for you because you will fail to pay attention to things you should be paying attention to. If some things really do matter, then believing that some things matter will lead to a better outcome, because you will be paying attention to things you should be paying attention to. Therefore, it is rational to believe that some things matter even if the probability that this hypothesis is true is close to zero. I argue that this pragmatic argument against nihilism is unconvincing because it is vulnerable to the many-gods objection to traditional versions of Pascal's wager.

Realists about fictional characters accept an ontological commitment to fictional characters, which enables them to provide straightforward explanations of data that are difficult to explain absent this commitment. Fictionalists about fictional characters purport to appropriate realists’ explanatory power without their ontological commitments by paraphrasing the realist's claims (‘according to the realist, …’). However, this approach faces a critical hurdle: To claim the explanatory benefits the fictionalist paraphrase cannot (radically) change the content of the realist theory. But realism's explanatory power comes, in part, from an associated theory of how the relevant claims should be interpreted, and that metatheory is itself ontologically committing. Fictionalists must accordingly offer alternative interpretations of the paraphrased claims, jettisoning any advantage they may claim over other anti-realist views.

The theory of frames has recently been proposed as a universal format for knowledge representation in language, cognition and science. Frames represent categories as well as individual objects and events in terms of recursive attribute-value structures. In this paper, we would like to explore the potential ontological commitments of frame-based knowledge representations, with particular emphasis on the ontological status of the possessors of quality attributes in individual object frames. While not strictly incompatible with nominalistic, bundle- or substratum-theoretic approaches to the metaphysics of particular objects, it will be argued that representing objects in terms of attribute-value structures is more in accordance with a tradition that can be traced back to Aristotle's doctrine of physical substances. Attributes appear to describe primary potentialities of objects, which, in the Aristotelian view, are the unchangeable nature or essence, hence substance, of any separate object.

McKenzie Alexander presents a dilemma for a social planner who wants to correct the unfair distribution of an indivisible good between two equally worthy individuals or groups: either she guarantees a fair outcome, or she follows a fair procedure (but not both). In this paper I show that this dilemma only holds if the social planner can redistribute the good in question at most once. To wit, the bias of the initial distribution always washes out when we allow for sufficiently many redistributions.

This note discusses Onofri's recent argument that no theory of concepts can jointly satisfy the publicity constraint and Frege's constraint, because these constraints are inconsistent. I show that this argument relies on the publicity constraint having an implication that it does not have.