In this paper, I investigate whether generic sets, in the context of the theory of forcing, can be understood as arbitrary objects in the sense of Fine or Horsten. I will provide a partially positive and partially negative answer. Specifically, the answer will depend on whether I will consider generic sets as objects or as names. I also compare our perspective with Horsten's view on Boolean‐valued sets as arbitrary objects. I conclude by suggesting that there is a cluster of notions semantically similar to arbitrariness that gives rise to useful objects in mathematics.
{"title":"Generic Sets and Arbitrary Objects","authors":"Giorgio Venturi","doi":"10.1111/nous.70039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.70039","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, I investigate whether generic sets, in the context of the theory of forcing, can be understood as arbitrary objects in the sense of Fine or Horsten. I will provide a partially positive and partially negative answer. Specifically, the answer will depend on whether I will consider generic sets as objects or as names. I also compare our perspective with Horsten's view on Boolean‐valued sets as arbitrary objects. I conclude by suggesting that there is a cluster of notions semantically similar to arbitrariness that gives rise to useful objects in mathematics.","PeriodicalId":501006,"journal":{"name":"Noûs","volume":"88 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146145999","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
I argue that credences do not participate in an epistemically central kind of mental process—active (i.e., deliberate, person‐level) reasoning. My argument hinges on the empirical finding that human thinkers tend to “neglect alternatives” when deliberately reasoning with uncertainty: in cases where thinkers recognize that their uncertainty is distributed over various possibilities, they tend to engage in downstream reasoning that attends to just one possibility at a time. A model on which thinkers reason with beliefs about probabilities better accounts for the empirical results. I conclude that beliefs play an epistemically important role in human minds that credences do not. Besides motivating a new kind of dualism about belief and credence, my argument additionally suggests a way of characterizing the functional difference between credences and beliefs about probability.
{"title":"No Credences in Active Reasoning: The Argument From Alternative Neglect","authors":"Cristina Ballarini","doi":"10.1111/nous.70037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.70037","url":null,"abstract":"I argue that credences do not participate in an epistemically central kind of mental process—active (i.e., deliberate, person‐level) reasoning. My argument hinges on the empirical finding that human thinkers tend to “neglect alternatives” when deliberately reasoning with uncertainty: in cases where thinkers recognize that their uncertainty is distributed over various possibilities, they tend to engage in downstream reasoning that attends to just one possibility at a time. A model on which thinkers reason with beliefs about probabilities better accounts for the empirical results. I conclude that beliefs play an epistemically important role in human minds that credences do not. Besides motivating a new kind of dualism about belief and credence, my argument additionally suggests a way of characterizing the functional difference between credences and beliefs about probability.","PeriodicalId":501006,"journal":{"name":"Noûs","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-02-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146115589","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Metaphysical indeterminacy (MI) is indeterminacy originating in the nonrepresentational world. I develop a theory of MI in terms of objective chance with a number of attractive features: it provides a reductive analysis of MI; it applies at both macroscopic and microscopic scales; it demystifies the target phenomenon by employing no special‐purpose metaphysical primitives; it does not prejudge the question whether the logic of a language capable of describing an indeterminate subject matter is classical, or whether its semantics is bivalent; it comes with built‐in epistemic criteria informed by a naturalistic methodology. The chancy account is compared to three salient alternatives: the Third‐Way View, which postulates the existence of indeterminate propositions; Metaphysical Supervaluationism, which takes indeterminacy to be a metaphysical primitive; and the Determinable‐Based Account, which reduces the target phenomenon to patterns of determinables and determinates. It is argued that the chancy account fares better overall when tested against two paradigmatic case studies: future indeterminacy, and quantum indeterminacy. Applications to further domains are also sketched, and a number of open problems outlined.
{"title":"A Chancy Theory of Metaphysical Indeterminacy","authors":"Alessandro Torza","doi":"10.1111/nous.70030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.70030","url":null,"abstract":"Metaphysical indeterminacy (MI) is indeterminacy originating in the nonrepresentational world. I develop a theory of MI in terms of objective chance with a number of attractive features: it provides a reductive analysis of MI; it applies at both macroscopic and microscopic scales; it demystifies the target phenomenon by employing no special‐purpose metaphysical primitives; it does not prejudge the question whether the logic of a language capable of describing an indeterminate subject matter is classical, or whether its semantics is bivalent; it comes with built‐in epistemic criteria informed by a naturalistic methodology. The chancy account is compared to three salient alternatives: the Third‐Way View, which postulates the existence of indeterminate propositions; Metaphysical Supervaluationism, which takes indeterminacy to be a metaphysical primitive; and the Determinable‐Based Account, which reduces the target phenomenon to patterns of determinables and determinates. It is argued that the chancy account fares better overall when tested against two paradigmatic case studies: future indeterminacy, and quantum indeterminacy. Applications to further domains are also sketched, and a number of open problems outlined.","PeriodicalId":501006,"journal":{"name":"Noûs","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146098398","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Conversations can belong to different types, or genres . We consider four dimensions of variation as case studies: Some conversations are about sharing information, others about making decisions; some are about making firm commitments, others about brainstorming options; some are about sticking to the facts, others involve make‐believe; some are highly cooperative, others adversarial. These are orthogonal dimensions of variation which explain why some kinds of speech acts are more felicitous and expected than others in particular conversations. But what are genres, how do they shape conversation, and why do they exist? We argue that genre categories can be understood as types of conversation plans, which are the structures of intentions that we use to organize conversations, and that each of our four genre distinctions corresponds to an independently variable kind of element within these plans. Speakers are under rational pressure to make their communicative intentions cohere with the conversation plan, which gives their interlocutors a powerful extralinguistic resource for interpreting their speech acts. We use this idea to show how several influential pragmatic theories, including Grice's theory of conversational implicature, Stalnaker's theory of common ground, and Roberts' question‐under‐discussion model, can be generalized to account for more kinds of conversation.
{"title":"Genre and Conversation","authors":"Elmar Unnsteinsson, Daniel W. Harris","doi":"10.1111/nous.70035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.70035","url":null,"abstract":"Conversations can belong to different types, or <jats:italic>genres</jats:italic> . We consider four dimensions of variation as case studies: Some conversations are about sharing information, others about making decisions; some are about making firm commitments, others about brainstorming options; some are about sticking to the facts, others involve make‐believe; some are highly cooperative, others adversarial. These are orthogonal dimensions of variation which explain why some kinds of speech acts are more felicitous and expected than others in particular conversations. But what are genres, how do they shape conversation, and why do they exist? We argue that genre categories can be understood as types of conversation plans, which are the structures of intentions that we use to organize conversations, and that each of our four genre distinctions corresponds to an independently variable kind of element within these plans. Speakers are under rational pressure to make their communicative intentions cohere with the conversation plan, which gives their interlocutors a powerful extralinguistic resource for interpreting their speech acts. We use this idea to show how several influential pragmatic theories, including Grice's theory of conversational implicature, Stalnaker's theory of common ground, and Roberts' question‐under‐discussion model, can be generalized to account for more kinds of conversation.","PeriodicalId":501006,"journal":{"name":"Noûs","volume":"102 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146056044","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In several articles, McCall and Lowe have claimed that endurantism and perdurantism are “equivalent.” From this, they conclude that there is no fact of the matter as to whether we live in an endurantist world or in a perdurantist world. In this paper, I use the notion of Morita equivalence to show in which precise sense, McCall and Lowe's equivalence claim turns out to be true.
{"title":"A Persisting Equivalence","authors":"Joshua Babic","doi":"10.1111/nous.70033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.70033","url":null,"abstract":"In several articles, McCall and Lowe have claimed that endurantism and perdurantism are “equivalent.” From this, they conclude that there is no fact of the matter as to whether we live in an endurantist world or in a perdurantist world. In this paper, I use the notion of Morita equivalence to show in which precise sense, McCall and Lowe's equivalence claim turns out to be true.","PeriodicalId":501006,"journal":{"name":"Noûs","volume":"185 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146014410","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Necessitists about set theory think that the pure sets exists, and are the way they are, as a matter of necessity. They cannot explain why the sets ( de rebus ) are all the sets. This constitutes the Ur‐Objection against necessitism; it is the primary motivation cited by potentialists about set theory. At least three families of potentialism draw motivation from the Ur‐Objection. Contingentists think that any things could form a set even if they actually did not. Prioritists think that sets hyperintensionally depend upon their members. Structural‐potentialists think that any possible set‐hierarchy could be extended. However, once we have disentangled these three versions of potentialism, we see that the Ur‐Objection should not motivate anyone.
{"title":"Why Are All the Sets All the Sets?","authors":"Tim Button","doi":"10.1111/nous.70024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.70024","url":null,"abstract":"Necessitists about set theory think that the pure sets exists, and are the way they are, as a matter of necessity. They cannot explain why the sets ( <jats:italic>de rebus</jats:italic> ) are all the sets. This constitutes the Ur‐Objection against necessitism; it is the primary motivation cited by potentialists about set theory. At least three families of potentialism draw motivation from the Ur‐Objection. Contingentists think that any things could form a set even if they actually did not. Prioritists think that sets hyperintensionally depend upon their members. Structural‐potentialists think that any possible set‐hierarchy could be extended. However, once we have disentangled these three versions of potentialism, we see that the Ur‐Objection should not motivate anyone.","PeriodicalId":501006,"journal":{"name":"Noûs","volume":"116 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146014409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
I argue that a little learning is often dangerous even for ideal reasoners who are operating in extremely simple scenarios and know all the relevant facts about how the evidence is generated. More precisely, I show that, on many plausible ways of assigning value to a credence in a hypothesis H, ideal Bayesians should sometimes expect other ideal Bayesians to end up with a worse credence if they gather additional evidence, even when they agree completely about the likelihoods of the evidence given both H and not-H. This provides a new reason for pessimism about the prospect of disagreeing individuals resolving their disagreement by consulting additional evidence.
{"title":"Is A Little Learning Dangerous?","authors":"Bernhard Salow","doi":"10.1111/nous.70032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.70032","url":null,"abstract":"I argue that a little learning is often dangerous even for ideal reasoners who are operating in extremely simple scenarios and know all the relevant facts about how the evidence is generated. More precisely, I show that, on many plausible ways of assigning value to a credence in a hypothesis H, ideal Bayesians should sometimes expect other ideal Bayesians to end up with a worse credence if they gather additional evidence, even when they agree completely about the likelihoods of the evidence given both H and not-H. This provides a new reason for pessimism about the prospect of disagreeing individuals resolving their disagreement by consulting additional evidence.","PeriodicalId":501006,"journal":{"name":"Noûs","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146000839","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Purity is the principle that fundamental facts only have fundamental constituents. In recent years, it has played a significant (if sometimes implicit) role in metaphysical theorizing. A philosopher will argue that a fact contains a derivative entity and cite Purity as a reason to deny that is fundamental. I argue that recent developments in higher order logic reveal a subtle ambiguity regarding the interpretation of Purity; there are stronger and weaker versions of that principle. Justifications for Purity support only the weaker interpretation, but arguments that rely upon it only succeed if the stronger interpretation holds. Consequently, nearly every metaphysician who has invoked Purity has made a mistake, in that their inferences are not justified by their arguments.
{"title":"Unstructured Purity","authors":"Samuel Z. Elgin","doi":"10.1111/nous.70029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.70029","url":null,"abstract":"Purity is the principle that fundamental facts only have fundamental constituents. In recent years, it has played a significant (if sometimes implicit) role in metaphysical theorizing. A philosopher will argue that a fact contains a derivative entity and cite Purity as a reason to deny that is fundamental. I argue that recent developments in higher order logic reveal a subtle ambiguity regarding the interpretation of Purity; there are stronger and weaker versions of that principle. Justifications for Purity support only the weaker interpretation, but arguments that rely upon it only succeed if the stronger interpretation holds. Consequently, nearly every metaphysician who has invoked Purity has made a mistake, in that their inferences are not justified by their arguments.","PeriodicalId":501006,"journal":{"name":"Noûs","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145920101","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Lukas Tank, Nils Wendler, Jan Peter Carstensen Mainka
In this paper, we introduce a new class of cases to the debate on rescue dilemmas and whether to save the greater number. We argue that situations involving both risk and overlap shine a new light on some of the most important issues within this discussion. First, they teach us that two of the most important lottery solutions to rescue dilemmas, Kamm's Proportional Lottery and Timmermann's Individualist Lottery, are not practically equivalent after all. Second, these cases show how Henning's recent Voting Solution does not consistently amount to saving the greater number, even if every person in need votes in their own self‐interest. Third, they illuminate the relation between Kamm's Proportional Lottery and a lottery based on voting. Finally, and most importantly, cases involving risk and overlap lay open that there are two different forms of aggregation at the heart of the debate: interpersonal aggregation in accordance with the will of the people and interpersonal aggregation against the will of the people. The latter seems much harder to defend than the former. To consistently save the greater number, or just give it a higher chance to be saved, one has to do the latter.
{"title":"Risk, Overlap, and Two Forms of Aggregation","authors":"Lukas Tank, Nils Wendler, Jan Peter Carstensen Mainka","doi":"10.1111/nous.70031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.70031","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we introduce a new class of cases to the debate on rescue dilemmas and whether to save the greater number. We argue that situations involving both risk and overlap shine a new light on some of the most important issues within this discussion. First, they teach us that two of the most important lottery solutions to rescue dilemmas, Kamm's Proportional Lottery and Timmermann's Individualist Lottery, are not practically equivalent after all. Second, these cases show how Henning's recent Voting Solution does not consistently amount to saving the greater number, even if every person in need votes in their own self‐interest. Third, they illuminate the relation between Kamm's Proportional Lottery and a lottery based on voting. Finally, and most importantly, cases involving risk and overlap lay open that there are two different forms of aggregation at the heart of the debate: interpersonal aggregation in accordance with the will of the people and interpersonal aggregation against the will of the people. The latter seems much harder to defend than the former. To consistently save the greater number, or just give it a higher chance to be saved, one has to do the latter.","PeriodicalId":501006,"journal":{"name":"Noûs","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145893637","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Transparency is the view that the deliberative question whether to believe P gives way to the question whether P. In this paper, I argue that transparency is false. I begin by teasing out two commitments of transparency: (i) the set of possible answers to the question whether to believe P is the same set of possible answers to the question whether P; (ii) the question whether to believe P can be settled on the basis of all and only those considerations on the basis of which the question whether P can be settled. Against (i), I argue that a distinct type of suspended judgment constitutes an answer to whether to believe P, but not whether P. Against (ii), I argue that the question whether to believe P, but not the question whether P, can be settled partly on the basis of considerations about which evidential standards to use.
{"title":"Believe It or Not: Transparency Is False","authors":"Conner Schultz","doi":"10.1111/nous.70025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.70025","url":null,"abstract":"Transparency is the view that the deliberative question whether to believe P gives way to the question whether P. In this paper, I argue that transparency is false. I begin by teasing out two commitments of transparency: (i) the set of possible answers to the question whether to believe P is the same set of possible answers to the question whether P; (ii) the question whether to believe P can be settled on the basis of all and only those considerations on the basis of which the question whether P can be settled. Against (i), I argue that a distinct type of suspended judgment constitutes an answer to whether to believe P, but not whether P. Against (ii), I argue that the question whether to believe P, but not the question whether P, can be settled partly on the basis of considerations about which evidential standards to use.","PeriodicalId":501006,"journal":{"name":"Noûs","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-12-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145829976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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