It is a persistent trope in period dramas that the most garishly extravagant character — the matriarch with all the feathers — is most concerned to trumpet their conservative virtues. And so too in metaphysics! Fairchild (2019) advertised the humility of material plenitude, arguing that despite the profligate ontology of coincident objects it entails, the best version of plenitude is one that takes no stand on a range of nearby questions about modality and coincidence. Roughly, the thought is that plenitude says only that there are coincident objects corresponding to every consistent pattern of essential and accidental properties. Plenitude says — or should say — nothing about which patterns those might be, and so should be compatible with any reasonable hypothesis about which combinations of properties it is possible for something to have. I argued in the earlier paper that a particular formulation of the target view (Global Plenitude) has exactly that virtue. But like the many-feathered matriarch, Global Plenitude turns out not to be very humble at all. Most vividly, Global Plenitude is incompatible with an exceptionally compelling hypothesis about coincidence: that there are some things which coincide, but might not have. Scandal ensues. Thankfully (as we know from the dramas) untangling a scandal can reveal a lot about the underlying character of the thing. Getting a handle on the shape of the problem for Global Plenitude paves the way for an attractive fix, but also puts significant pressure on our aspriations to ‘humility’. In what follows, I recap and diagnose the problem for the old formulation (Section 2) and propose an improvement (Section 3). Along the way, I discuss a number of connected questions. Section 2.3 explores whether a plenitudinous picture of the world really does require that coincidence be contingent, and Section 5 asks whether plenitude allows for “nontrivial essences.” (Roughly, nontrivial properties that are had essentially if at all.) I argue that both are genuine choice-points, yielding quite different pictures which are nonetheless compatible with what I take to be the characteristic ambitions of plenitude. Both Global Plenitude and the new formulation I propose in Section 3 are what I’ll call ‘essentialist’ varieties of plenitude. Briefly, and with a promise to return to the details: plenitude is
{"title":"Plenitude, Coincidence, and Humility","authors":"Maegan Fairchild","doi":"10.1111/phpe.12161","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpe.12161","url":null,"abstract":"It is a persistent trope in period dramas that the most garishly extravagant character — the matriarch with all the feathers — is most concerned to trumpet their conservative virtues. And so too in metaphysics! Fairchild (2019) advertised the humility of material plenitude, arguing that despite the profligate ontology of coincident objects it entails, the best version of plenitude is one that takes no stand on a range of nearby questions about modality and coincidence. Roughly, the thought is that plenitude says only that there are coincident objects corresponding to every consistent pattern of essential and accidental properties. Plenitude says — or should say — nothing about which patterns those might be, and so should be compatible with any reasonable hypothesis about which combinations of properties it is possible for something to have. I argued in the earlier paper that a particular formulation of the target view (Global Plenitude) has exactly that virtue. But like the many-feathered matriarch, Global Plenitude turns out not to be very humble at all. Most vividly, Global Plenitude is incompatible with an exceptionally compelling hypothesis about coincidence: that there are some things which coincide, but might not have. Scandal ensues. Thankfully (as we know from the dramas) untangling a scandal can reveal a lot about the underlying character of the thing. Getting a handle on the shape of the problem for Global Plenitude paves the way for an attractive fix, but also puts significant pressure on our aspriations to ‘humility’. In what follows, I recap and diagnose the problem for the old formulation (Section 2) and propose an improvement (Section 3). Along the way, I discuss a number of connected questions. Section 2.3 explores whether a plenitudinous picture of the world really does require that coincidence be contingent, and Section 5 asks whether plenitude allows for “nontrivial essences.” (Roughly, nontrivial properties that are had essentially if at all.) I argue that both are genuine choice-points, yielding quite different pictures which are nonetheless compatible with what I take to be the characteristic ambitions of plenitude. Both Global Plenitude and the new formulation I propose in Section 3 are what I’ll call ‘essentialist’ varieties of plenitude. Briefly, and with a promise to return to the details: plenitude is","PeriodicalId":51519,"journal":{"name":"Philosophical Perspectives","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47570312","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Power to Govern","authors":"Erica Shumener","doi":"10.1111/phpe.12168","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpe.12168","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51519,"journal":{"name":"Philosophical Perspectives","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47377256","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Easy Ontologists, most notably Thomasson (2015), argue that ontological questions are shallow. They think that these questions can either be answered by using our ordinary conceptual competence—of course tables exist!—or are meaningless, or else should be answered through conceptual re-engineering. Ontology thus is “easy”, requiring no distinctively metaphysical investigation. This paper raises a two-stage objection to Easy Ontology. We first argue that questions concerning which entities exist are inextricably bound up with “ontological category questions”, which are questions concerning the identity of and differences between kinds of entities. We then argue that ontological category questions do not have trivial answers, are meaningful, and cannot be answered through conceptual re-engineering. Easy Ontology hence does not constitute a comprehensive ontological methodology. While some of ontology might be easy, category questions form a central part of ontology and are not answered easily. Easy Ontologists, most notably Amie Thomasson (2015, 2020a, 2021), argue that ontological questions are shallow. They think that these questions can either be answered by using our ordinary conceptual competence—of course tables exist!—or are meaningless, or else should be answered through conceptual re-engineering. They conclude that ontologists should focus on conceptual questions, regarding which concepts we in fact use and which concepts we should use. This paper raises a two-stage objection to Easy Ontology. We first argue that questions concerning which entities exist are inextricably bound up with ontological category questions—questions concerning the identity of and differences between kinds of entities. 1 For example, consider two philosophers who both think that there
{"title":"No “Easy” Answers to Ontological Category Questions","authors":"Vera Flocke, K. Ritchie","doi":"10.1111/phpe.12162","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpe.12162","url":null,"abstract":"Easy Ontologists, most notably Thomasson (2015), argue that ontological questions are shallow. They think that these questions can either be answered by using our ordinary conceptual competence—of course tables exist!—or are meaningless, or else should be answered through conceptual re-engineering. Ontology thus is “easy”, requiring no distinctively metaphysical investigation. This paper raises a two-stage objection to Easy Ontology. We first argue that questions concerning which entities exist are inextricably bound up with “ontological category questions”, which are questions concerning the identity of and differences between kinds of entities. We then argue that ontological category questions do not have trivial answers, are meaningful, and cannot be answered through conceptual re-engineering. Easy Ontology hence does not constitute a comprehensive ontological methodology. While some of ontology might be easy, category questions form a central part of ontology and are not answered easily. Easy Ontologists, most notably Amie Thomasson (2015, 2020a, 2021), argue that ontological questions are shallow. They think that these questions can either be answered by using our ordinary conceptual competence—of course tables exist!—or are meaningless, or else should be answered through conceptual re-engineering. They conclude that ontologists should focus on conceptual questions, regarding which concepts we in fact use and which concepts we should use. This paper raises a two-stage objection to Easy Ontology. We first argue that questions concerning which entities exist are inextricably bound up with ontological category questions—questions concerning the identity of and differences between kinds of entities. 1 For example, consider two philosophers who both think that there","PeriodicalId":51519,"journal":{"name":"Philosophical Perspectives","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48352322","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Tensed Facts and the Fittingness of our Attitudes\u0000 1","authors":"Kristie Miller","doi":"10.1111/phpe.12166","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpe.12166","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51519,"journal":{"name":"Philosophical Perspectives","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43216253","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Relativity in a Fundamentally Absolute World","authors":"Jack Spencer","doi":"10.1111/phpe.12164","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpe.12164","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51519,"journal":{"name":"Philosophical Perspectives","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43724015","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
We defend three claims about preference, credence, and choice. First, all agents (not just rational ones) have complete preferences. Second, all agents (again, not just rational ones) have real-valued credences in every proposition in which they are confident to any degree. Third, there is almost always some unique thing we ought to do, want, or believe. These claims may seem absurd. But as we will show, they follow from certain hard-to-resist premises by a principle of the logic of comparatives that we call Comparability. This principle requires, to a first approximation, that if two things are not equally F, then one must be more F than the other. Although many philosophers have rejected Comparability, it is widely assumed in the semantics literature on gradable adjectives and other comparative expressions. In a companion paper (Dorr, Nebel, and Zuehl 2021) we defend its validity. In the present paper, we take Comparability for granted and use it to argue for further controversial conclusions. Of course, those who reject these conclusions may prefer to read the present paper as providing a further battery ofmodus tollens arguments to back up the putative counterexamples that have already convinced so many philosophers to reject Comparability. But we argue, in each case, that the consequences of Comparability are less implausible than they might initially seem. We provide the necessary background in section 1. The rest of the paper draws out our central claims for preference, credence, and choice.
我们捍卫三个主张:偏好、信任和选择。首先，所有的主体(不仅仅是理性主体)都有完全的偏好。其次，所有的主体(再次强调，不仅仅是理性主体)在任何程度上对每个命题都有实值信任。第三，几乎总是有一些独特的事情我们应该去做，想要，或相信。这些说法可能看起来很荒谬。但正如我们将要展示的，它们遵循着某些难以抗拒的前提，遵循着比较逻辑的原则，我们称之为可比性。这个原理要求，近似地说，如果两个东西不等于F，那么其中一个一定比另一个大。虽然许多哲学家反对可比性，但在语义学文献中，可分级形容词和其他比较表达被广泛认为是可比性。在一篇同伴论文(Dorr, Nebel, and Zuehl 2021)中，我们捍卫了它的有效性。在本文中，我们认为可比性是理所当然的，并用它来论证进一步有争议的结论。当然，那些拒绝这些结论的人可能更愿意阅读本文，认为它提供了一系列进一步的模态论证，以支持那些已经说服许多哲学家拒绝可比性的假定反例。但我们认为，在每种情况下，可比性的结果并不像最初看起来那样令人难以置信。我们将在第1节中提供必要的背景知识。本文的其余部分阐述了我们对偏好、信任和选择的核心主张。
{"title":"Consequences of comparability","authors":"C. Dorr, Jacob M. Nebel, Jake Zuehl","doi":"10.1111/phpe.12157","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpe.12157","url":null,"abstract":"We defend three claims about preference, credence, and choice. First, all agents (not just rational ones) have complete preferences. Second, all agents (again, not just rational ones) have real-valued credences in every proposition in which they are confident to any degree. Third, there is almost always some unique thing we ought to do, want, or believe. These claims may seem absurd. But as we will show, they follow from certain hard-to-resist premises by a principle of the logic of comparatives that we call Comparability. This principle requires, to a first approximation, that if two things are not equally F, then one must be more F than the other. Although many philosophers have rejected Comparability, it is widely assumed in the semantics literature on gradable adjectives and other comparative expressions. In a companion paper (Dorr, Nebel, and Zuehl 2021) we defend its validity. In the present paper, we take Comparability for granted and use it to argue for further controversial conclusions. Of course, those who reject these conclusions may prefer to read the present paper as providing a further battery ofmodus tollens arguments to back up the putative counterexamples that have already convinced so many philosophers to reject Comparability. But we argue, in each case, that the consequences of Comparability are less implausible than they might initially seem. We provide the necessary background in section 1. The rest of the paper draws out our central claims for preference, credence, and choice.","PeriodicalId":51519,"journal":{"name":"Philosophical Perspectives","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48666615","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A rich tradition in metaethics seeks to explain the meaning of moral language in terms of desire-like attitudes. This approach can be implemented in di erent ways. On a contextualist implementation, moral discourse describes the desire-like attitudes of some agent(s), for example, the speaker or the speaker’s community. On an expressivist implementation, moral discourse does not describe desire-like attitudes; it expresses them. On a relativist implementation, the truth-value of a moral assertion at a context of assessment depends on the desire-like attitudes of the assessor—that is, someone assessing the utterance for truth or falsity. Despite these di erences, all such “attitudinal metaethics” are bound by a common thread: they analyze moral discourse in terms of conative states. Attitudinal metaethicists sometimes propose extending their approach to other varieties of normative discourse, including epistemic discourse.1 A generalized attitudinal semantics along these lines carries obvious attractions. But it also faces important challenges. An initial challenge concerns how to even spell out a generalized attitudinal semantics. While much ink has been spilled in pursuit of a precise attitudinal semantics for moral discourse, the extension to other fragments of normative language has not received a comparable degree of attention. Second, and more worrisome, some philosophers have argued that there are principled obstacles to the very idea of a generalized attitudinal semantics. For example, Boult and Köhler 2020 argue that a generalized attitudinal semantics is under-motivated, since the primary arguments for an attitudinal metaethics do not carry over to the epistemic domain. And Wodak 2017 argues that a generalized attitudinal semantics over-predicts disagreements across normative domains. These obstacles can be used to frame a dilemma for any attempt to generalize an attitudinal semantics. On the one hand, generalizers need to show that there are su cient commonalities between di erent normative domains to warrant a uni ed treatment. On the other hand, generalizers had better not erase the obvious di erences between di erent avors of normative judgment.
{"title":"Moral and epistemic evaluations: A unified treatment","authors":"Bob Beddor","doi":"10.1111/phpe.12159","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpe.12159","url":null,"abstract":"A rich tradition in metaethics seeks to explain the meaning of moral language in terms of desire-like attitudes. This approach can be implemented in di erent ways. On a contextualist implementation, moral discourse describes the desire-like attitudes of some agent(s), for example, the speaker or the speaker’s community. On an expressivist implementation, moral discourse does not describe desire-like attitudes; it expresses them. On a relativist implementation, the truth-value of a moral assertion at a context of assessment depends on the desire-like attitudes of the assessor—that is, someone assessing the utterance for truth or falsity. Despite these di erences, all such “attitudinal metaethics” are bound by a common thread: they analyze moral discourse in terms of conative states. Attitudinal metaethicists sometimes propose extending their approach to other varieties of normative discourse, including epistemic discourse.1 A generalized attitudinal semantics along these lines carries obvious attractions. But it also faces important challenges. An initial challenge concerns how to even spell out a generalized attitudinal semantics. While much ink has been spilled in pursuit of a precise attitudinal semantics for moral discourse, the extension to other fragments of normative language has not received a comparable degree of attention. Second, and more worrisome, some philosophers have argued that there are principled obstacles to the very idea of a generalized attitudinal semantics. For example, Boult and Köhler 2020 argue that a generalized attitudinal semantics is under-motivated, since the primary arguments for an attitudinal metaethics do not carry over to the epistemic domain. And Wodak 2017 argues that a generalized attitudinal semantics over-predicts disagreements across normative domains. These obstacles can be used to frame a dilemma for any attempt to generalize an attitudinal semantics. On the one hand, generalizers need to show that there are su cient commonalities between di erent normative domains to warrant a uni ed treatment. On the other hand, generalizers had better not erase the obvious di erences between di erent avors of normative judgment.","PeriodicalId":51519,"journal":{"name":"Philosophical Perspectives","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44750202","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Kevin Dorst, B. Levinstein, Bernhard Salow, B. Husic, Branden Fitelson
*K.D., B.A.L., andB.S. contributed equally—they jointly proved the theorems andwrote thepaper. †B.E.H. andB.F. pioneered the computationalmethods and located thekey counterexample (Fact 2.1); together, thesemade the rest of the paper possible. Abstract There are many things—call them ‘experts’—that you should defer to in forming your opinions. The trouble is, many experts are modest: they’re less than certain that they are worthy of deference. When this happens, the standard theories of deference break down: the most popular (“Reflection”-style) principles collapse to inconsistency, while their most popular (“New-Reflection”style) variants allow you to defer to someone while regarding them as an anti-expert. We propose a middle way: deferring to someone involves preferring to make any decision using their opinions instead of your own. In a slogan, deferring opinions is deferring decisions. Generalizing the proposal of Dorst (2020a), we first formulate a new principle that shows exactly how your opinions must relate to an expert’s for this to be so. We then build off the results of Levinstein (2019) and CampbellMoore (2020) to show that this principle is also equivalent to the constraint that you must always expect the expert’s estimates to be more accurate than your own. Finally, we characterize the conditions an expert’s opinions must meet to be worthy of deference in this sense, showing how they sit naturally between the too-strong constraints of Reflection and the too-weak constraints of New Reflection.
{"title":"Deference Done Better","authors":"Kevin Dorst, B. Levinstein, Bernhard Salow, B. Husic, Branden Fitelson","doi":"10.1111/phpe.12156","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpe.12156","url":null,"abstract":"*K.D., B.A.L., andB.S. contributed equally—they jointly proved the theorems andwrote thepaper. †B.E.H. andB.F. pioneered the computationalmethods and located thekey counterexample (Fact 2.1); together, thesemade the rest of the paper possible. Abstract There are many things—call them ‘experts’—that you should defer to in forming your opinions. The trouble is, many experts are modest: they’re less than certain that they are worthy of deference. When this happens, the standard theories of deference break down: the most popular (“Reflection”-style) principles collapse to inconsistency, while their most popular (“New-Reflection”style) variants allow you to defer to someone while regarding them as an anti-expert. We propose a middle way: deferring to someone involves preferring to make any decision using their opinions instead of your own. In a slogan, deferring opinions is deferring decisions. Generalizing the proposal of Dorst (2020a), we first formulate a new principle that shows exactly how your opinions must relate to an expert’s for this to be so. We then build off the results of Levinstein (2019) and CampbellMoore (2020) to show that this principle is also equivalent to the constraint that you must always expect the expert’s estimates to be more accurate than your own. Finally, we characterize the conditions an expert’s opinions must meet to be worthy of deference in this sense, showing how they sit naturally between the too-strong constraints of Reflection and the too-weak constraints of New Reflection.","PeriodicalId":51519,"journal":{"name":"Philosophical Perspectives","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46816564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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