- University of Southern California, Philosophy, Department Memberadd
- I am a philosopher with wide-ranging research and teaching interests.. My partner is Christina H. Dietz, who is a col... moreI am a philosopher with wide-ranging research and teaching interests.. My partner is Christina H. Dietz, who is a collegue at Dianoia. I have a daughter, Marlowe, and a son, Sean. I used to play a lot of chess (my ELO peaked around 2330). I am an avid collector of antiquarian books and manuscripts.edit
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After an opening section surveying some possible alternative ways of employing semantic plasticity to handle the puzzles, this chapter discusses two challenges to the view developed in chapters 11 and 12. One involves the threat of... more
After an opening section surveying some possible alternative ways of employing semantic plasticity to handle the puzzles, this chapter discusses two challenges to the view developed in chapters 11 and 12. One involves the threat of rampant error in counterfactual speech reports. The second involves certain uncomfortable consequences of applying our favoured treatment of words like ‘that’ and ‘table’ to words like ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘person’, ‘thinker’, and ‘conscious’. We show how considerations of semantic plasticity militate in the direction of a kind of “metaphysical misanthropy”, and explore its ethical ramifications.
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This is the second of two chapters devoted to a special subclass of Tolerance Puzzles based on ‘indiscernible modality’, on which qualitative truths are automatically necesssary. This chapter develops our favoured solution to these... more
This is the second of two chapters devoted to a special subclass of Tolerance Puzzles based on ‘indiscernible modality’, on which qualitative truths are automatically necesssary. This chapter develops our favoured solution to these puzzles, which involves denying the qualitativeness of properties like being a table. We introduce a metaphysical notion of “aboutness” which can be used to probe the sources of non-qualitativeness, and consider some special challenges that arise on the assumption that there could be new objects that aren’t among the objects there actually are.
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How should a group with different opinions (but the same values) make decisions? In a Bayesian setting, the natural question is how to aggregate credences: how to use a single credence function to naturally represent a collection of... more
How should a group with different opinions (but the same values) make decisions? In a Bayesian setting, the natural question is how to aggregate credences: how to use a single credence function to naturally represent a collection of different credence functions. An extension of the standard Dutch-book arguments that apply to individual decision-makers recommends that group credences should be updated by conditionalization. This imposes a constraint on what aggregation rules can be like. Taking conditionalization as a basic constraint, we gather lessons from the established work on credence aggregation, and extend this work with two new impossibility results. We then explore contrasting features of two kinds of rules that satisfy the constraints we articulate: one kind uses fixed prior credences, and the other uses geometric averaging, as opposed to arithmetic averaging. We also prove a new characterisation result for geometric averaging. Finally we consider applications to neighboring philosophical issues, including the epistemology of disagreement
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This book didn’t have to consist of exactly the sentences that it in fact contains: any one of its sentences could have been very different. But it could not have consisted of an entirely different collection of sentences, such as to make... more
This book didn’t have to consist of exactly the sentences that it in fact contains: any one of its sentences could have been very different. But it could not have consisted of an entirely different collection of sentences, such as to make it a gothic novel or a treatise on wine-tasting. Other familiar objects are similarly capable of being moderately different, but not radically different, in various respects. But there are puzzling arguments which threaten these apparently obvious judgments, exploiting the fact that an appropriate sequence of small differences can add up to a radical difference. This book presents the first full-length treatment of these puzzles, using them as an entry point to a broad range of metaphysical questions about possibility, necessity, and identity. It introduces tools of higher-order modal logic which enable a rigorous treatment of the puzzles, and develops a strategy for resolving them based on a plenitudinous ontology of material objects, which induces fine-grained variability in the reference of words like ‘book’
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Is the fact that our universe contains fine-tuned life evidence that we live in a multiverse? Ian Hacking and Roger White influentially argue that it is not. We approach this question through a systematic framework for self-locating... more
Is the fact that our universe contains fine-tuned life evidence that we live in a multiverse? Ian Hacking and Roger White influentially argue that it is not. We approach this question through a systematic framework for self-locating epistemology. As it turns out, leading approaches to self-locating evidence agree that the fact that our own universe contains fine-tuned life indeed confirms the existence of a multiverse (at least in a suitably idealized setting). This convergence is no accident: we present two theorems showing that, in this setting, any updating rule that satisfies a few reasonable conditions will have the same feature. The conclusion that fine-tuned life provides evidence for a multiverse is hard to escape.
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This chapter explores Tolerance Puzzles in which the operative modality is that of objective chance. We show that a principle of ‘Chance Fixity’, according to which facts about the chances at a given time are not themselves matters of... more
This chapter explores Tolerance Puzzles in which the operative modality is that of objective chance. We show that a principle of ‘Chance Fixity’, according to which facts about the chances at a given time are not themselves matters of chance at that time, is deeply embedded in ordinary and scientific reasoning about chance and rules out Iteration-denial for the relevant chance operators. We also develop a new ‘Robustness Puzzle’ in which the analogue of Hypertolerance completely untenable. This puzzle turns on strengthenings of Tolerance claims to claims about high (conditional) chance, as opposed to mere positive chance.
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This is the second of two chapters exploring the option of resolving various Tolerance Puzzles by accepting Hypertolerance, the conclusion that the objects in question could have been arbitrarily different in the respects relevant to the... more
This is the second of two chapters exploring the option of resolving various Tolerance Puzzles by accepting Hypertolerance, the conclusion that the objects in question could have been arbitrarily different in the respects relevant to the puzzle. This chapter considers what seems to us to be the most promising strategy for arguing against Hypertolerance, based on a physicalist supervenience principle. We show how this principle rules out Hypertolerance in certain “fine-grained” Tolerance Puzzles, and consider to what extent this generalises to other Hypertolerance claims.
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This chapter presents the system of classical higher-order modal logic which will be employed throughout this book. Nothing more than a passing familiarity with classical first-order logic and standard systems of modal logic is... more
This chapter presents the system of classical higher-order modal logic which will be employed throughout this book. Nothing more than a passing familiarity with classical first-order logic and standard systems of modal logic is presupposed. We offer some general remarks about the kind of commitment involved in endorsing this logic, and motivate some of its more non-standard features. We also discuss how talk about possible worlds can be represented within the system.
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This chapter provides a general schema for regimenting a broad family of puzzles of modal variation. These puzzles begin with a ‘Tolerance’ premise according to which an objects (or a certain kind of object) can differ in any small way... more
This chapter provides a general schema for regimenting a broad family of puzzles of modal variation. These puzzles begin with a ‘Tolerance’ premise according to which an objects (or a certain kind of object) can differ in any small way along a certain parameter. This is supplemented with a ‘Non-contingency’ premise according to which the Tolerance premise is necessarily true if true at all, an ‘Iteration’ premise according to which anything possibly possible is possible, and a ‘Persistent Closeness’ premise according to which what counts as a ‘small difference’ is modally constant. These premises jointly imply the conclusion, ‘Hypertolerance’, that the object or objects in question can differ arbitrarily along the relevant parameter. We show how this schema is general enough to subsume puzzles involving time or objective chance, and discuss some difficulties that arise in trying to formulate compelling instantiations of the schema involving variation in originating matter.
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This chapter presents and discusses a general schema that subsumes a variety of puzzles having to do with the modal behaviour of material objects, some new and some familiar. These puzzles involve ‘Robustness’ premises according to which... more
This chapter presents and discusses a general schema that subsumes a variety of puzzles having to do with the modal behaviour of material objects, some new and some familiar. These puzzles involve ‘Robustness’ premises according to which certain objects of a given kind are counterfactually robust in certain respects; ‘Non-coincidence’ premises according to which distinct objects of that kind are incapable of coinciding, and ‘Non-distinctness’ premises that rule out the scenarios in which actually distinct objects could have been identical; these jointly entail an absurd conclusion.
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This chapter takes up the question of how to motivate the crucial ‘Non-Contingency’ premise in the Tolerance Puzzles introduced in Chapter 2, a question that has received surprisingly little attention in the literature on these puzzles.... more
This chapter takes up the question of how to motivate the crucial ‘Non-Contingency’ premise in the Tolerance Puzzles introduced in Chapter 2, a question that has received surprisingly little attention in the literature on these puzzles. We articulate and set aside some dubious motivations for the premise, including motivations which assimilate Tolerance Puzzles to the well-known Sorites Paradox. In place of these, we develop a ‘Security Argument’ for Non-contingency, based on the thought that it is not just a matter of chance or luck that we avoid error in believing the Tolerance premise.
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This is the first of two chapters exploring the option of resolving various Tolerance Puzzles by denying Iteration, the claim that whatever is possibly possible is possible. In this chapter we grant for the sake of argument that Iteration... more
This is the first of two chapters exploring the option of resolving various Tolerance Puzzles by denying Iteration, the claim that whatever is possibly possible is possible. In this chapter we grant for the sake of argument that Iteration fails for metaphysical necessity, and consider whether there are other Tolerance Puzzles which remain problematic even on that assumption. Our main focus is on puzzles involving ancestral metaphysical possibility—the status of being either possible, or possibly possible, or possibly possibly possible, or…—for which Iteration is guaranteed by our basic modal logic. We argue that plausible higher-order identities suggest that ancestral metaphysical possibility is not a trivial status even for those who deny Iteration for metaphysical possibility.
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This is the first of two chapters exploring the option of resolving various Tolerance Puzzles by accepting Hypertolerance, the conclusion that the objects in question could have been arbitrarily different in the respects relevant to the... more
This is the first of two chapters exploring the option of resolving various Tolerance Puzzles by accepting Hypertolerance, the conclusion that the objects in question could have been arbitrarily different in the respects relevant to the puzzle. This chapter discusses two influential objections to certain Hypertolerance claims, one based on the doctrine of ‘Anti-haecceitism’ (according to which an object’s qualitative profile suffices for its identity), and another based on the doctrine of ‘Overlap Essentialism’ (according to which a table originally made of certain matter could not have been originally made of entirely non-overlapping matter). We consider some arguments for Overlap Essentialism from certain ‘sufficiency of origin’ principles, and discuss some difficult cases which put pressure on Overlap Essentialism.
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This chapter further develops the framework introduced in the previous chapter. We suggest that the best approach to many Tolerance Puzzles involves some contextual flexibility, allowing not only for contexts in which Non-contingency is... more
This chapter further develops the framework introduced in the previous chapter. We suggest that the best approach to many Tolerance Puzzles involves some contextual flexibility, allowing not only for contexts in which Non-contingency is false but also for contexts in which Hypertolerance is true. We discuss how plasticity and plenitude can also be used to solve the Coincidence Puzzles introduced in chapter 4, and conclude by considering a range of open questions and case studies.
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This chapter develops a strategy for resolving Tolerance Puzzles based on two central ideas. The first idea is a principle of ‘plenitude’, according to which any given material objects coincides with innumerably many others differing from... more
This chapter develops a strategy for resolving Tolerance Puzzles based on two central ideas. The first idea is a principle of ‘plenitude’, according to which any given material objects coincides with innumerably many others differing from it in a wide variety of modal respects. The second idea is that because of this plenitude of candidate referents, the singular terms (like ‘this table’) and common nouns (like ‘table’) that feature in Tolerance Puzzles are subject to a high degree of semantic plasticity: small changes in the world, e.g. in the selection of parts to be made into tables, suffice to make a difference to what we refer to with these words. Such plasticity undermines the Security Argument for Non-contingency developed in chapter 2, by suggesting that even though Tolerance could easily have been false, Tolerance speeches robustly express truths.
This is the second of two chapters exploring the option of resolving various Tolerance Puzzles by denying Iteration, the claim that whatever is possibly possible is possible. This chapter argues for Iteration for metaphysical possibility,... more
This is the second of two chapters exploring the option of resolving various Tolerance Puzzles by denying Iteration, the claim that whatever is possibly possible is possible. This chapter argues for Iteration for metaphysical possibility, based on the premise that metaphysical possibility is the broadest form of possibility. Some reject this on the grounds that, for example, it is logically possible (although metaphysically impossible) that Hesperus is distinct from Phosphorus. We show that those who accept this premise should reject the form of existential generalization required to derive the conclusion that there is a form of possibility that attaches to the proposition that Hesperus is distinct from Phosphorus. We show how under certain attractive assumptions about the grain of higher-order reality one can show that there is a broadest form of possibility, and indeed define it in purely logical terms.
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This is the first of two chapters devoted to a special subclass of Tolerance Puzzles based on ‘indiscernible modality’, on which qualitative truths are automatically necesssary. The interest in these puzzles lies in the fact that there is... more
This is the first of two chapters devoted to a special subclass of Tolerance Puzzles based on ‘indiscernible modality’, on which qualitative truths are automatically necesssary. The interest in these puzzles lies in the fact that there is a distinctive argument for Non-contingency based on the premise that properties like being a table are qualitative. This chapter explores the options for resolving the puzzles compatible with accepting that premise, and hence Non-contingency for indiscernible modality.
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Many philosophers have thought that Tolerance Puzzles can be easily dissolved by adopting some form of counterpart theory, which is roughly the view that being possibly a certain way is having a counterpart that is that way. This chapter... more
Many philosophers have thought that Tolerance Puzzles can be easily dissolved by adopting some form of counterpart theory, which is roughly the view that being possibly a certain way is having a counterpart that is that way. This chapter shows how standard versions of counterpart theory involve radical departures from standard modal logic (going far beyond Iteration-denial) which we claim are unacceptable, and argues that once counterpart theory is developed in such a way as to avoid such logical revisionism, it has no special capacity to resolve the puzzles.
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This book didn’t have to consist of exactly the sentences that it in fact contains: any one of its sentences could have been very different. But it could not have consisted of an entirely different collection of sentences, such as to make... more
This book didn’t have to consist of exactly the sentences that it in fact contains: any one of its sentences could have been very different. But it could not have consisted of an entirely different collection of sentences, such as to make it a gothic novel or a treatise on wine-tasting. Other familiar objects are similarly capable of being moderately different, but not radically different, in various respects. But there are puzzling arguments which threaten these apparently obvious judgments, exploiting the fact that an appropriate sequence of small differences can add up to a radical difference. This book presents the first full-length treatment of these puzzles, using them as an entry point to a broad range of metaphysical questions about possibility, necessity, and identity. It introduces tools of higher-order modal logic which enable a rigorous treatment of the puzzles, and develops a strategy for resolving them based on a plenitudinous ontology of material objects, which induce...
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– We offer a new motivation for imprecise probabilities. We argue that there are propositions to which precise probability cannot be assigned, but to which imprecise probability can be assigned. In such cases the alternative to imprecise... more
– We offer a new motivation for imprecise probabilities. We argue that there are propositions to which precise probability cannot be assigned, but to which imprecise probability can be assigned. In such cases the alternative to imprecise probability is not precise probability, but no probability at all. And an imprecise probability is substantially better than no probability at all. Our argument is based on the mathematical phenomenon of non-measurable sets. Non-measurable propositions cannot receive precise probabilities, but there is a natural way for them to receive imprecise probabilities. The mathematics of non-measurable sets is arcane, but its epistemological import is far-reaching; even apparently mundane propositions are liable to be affected by non-measurability. The phenomenon of non-measurability dramatically reshapes the dialectic between critics and proponents of imprecise credence. Non-measurability offers natural rejoinders to prominent critics of imprecise credence. Non-measurability even reverses some of the critics’ arguments—by the very lights that have been used to argue against imprecise credences, imprecise credences are better than precise credences.
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David Builes presents a paradox concerning how confident you should be that any given member of an infinite collection of fair coins landed heads, conditional on the information that they were all flipped and only finitely many of them... more
David Builes presents a paradox concerning how confident you should be that any given member of an infinite collection of fair coins landed heads, conditional on the information that they were all flipped and only finitely many of them landed heads. We argue that if you should have any conditional credence at all, it should be 1/2.
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Most meanings we express belong to large families of variant meanings, among which it would be implausible to suppose that some are much more apt for being expressed than others. This abundance of candidate meanings creates pressure to... more
Most meanings we express belong to large families of variant meanings, among which it would be implausible to suppose that some are much more apt for being expressed than others. This abundance of candidate meanings creates pressure to think that the proposition attributing any particular meaning to an expression is modally plastic: its truth depends very sensitively on the exact microphysical state of the world. However, such plasticity seems to threaten ordinary counterfactuals whose consequents contain speech reports, since it is hard to see how we could reasonably be confident in a counterfactual whose consequent can be true only if a certain very finely tuned microphysical configuration obtains. This essay develops the foregoing puzzle and explores several possible solutions.
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Famous results by David Lewis show that plausible-sounding constraints on the probabilities of conditionals or evaluative claims lead to unacceptable results, by standard probabilistic reasoning. Existing presentations of these results... more
Famous results by David Lewis show that plausible-sounding constraints on the probabilities of conditionals or evaluative claims lead to unacceptable results, by standard probabilistic reasoning. Existing presentations of these results rely on stronger assumptions than they really need. When we strip these arguments down to a minimal core, we can see both how certain replies miss the mark, and also how to devise parallel arguments for other domains, including epistemic “might,” probability claims, claims about comparative value, and so on. A popular reply to Lewis's results is to claim that conditional claims, or claims about subjective value, lack truth conditions. For this strategy to have a chance of success, it needs to give up basic structural principles about how epistemic states can be updated—in a way that is strikingly parallel to the commitments of the project of dynamic semantics.
Research Interests: Mathematical Economics, Philosophy, Epistemology, Formal Epistemology, Conditionals, and 12 moreProbability, Probabilistic Logic, Dynamic Semantics, Epistemic Modals, Epistemic modality, Doxastic Logic, Philosophical, The Philosophical Quarterly, Subjective Value, triviality, commutativity, and Truth value
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Here is a compelling principle concerning our knowledge of coin flips: FAIR COINS: If you know that a coin is fair, and for all you know it is going to be flipped, then for all you know it will land tails. The idea is that the only way to... more
Here is a compelling principle concerning our knowledge of coin flips: FAIR COINS: If you know that a coin is fair, and for all you know it is going to be flipped, then for all you know it will land tails. The idea is that the only way to be in a position to know that a fair coin won't land a certain way is to be in a position to know that it won't be flipped at all. 1 One class of putative counterexamples to FAIR COINS which we want to set aside involves knowledge delivered by oracles, clairvoyance, and so forth. A second, and more interesting, class of counterexamples involves knowledge under unusual modes of presentation. For example, if you introduce the name 'Headsy' for the first
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Seth Yalcin has pointed out some puzzling facts about the behaviour of epistemic modals in certain embedded contexts. For example, conditionals that begin 'If it is raining and it might not be raining, …' sound unacceptable, unlike... more
Seth Yalcin has pointed out some puzzling facts about the behaviour of epistemic modals in certain embedded contexts. For example, conditionals that begin 'If it is raining and it might not be raining, …' sound unacceptable, unlike conditionals that begin 'If it is raining and I don't know it, …'. These facts pose a prima facie problem for an orthodox treatment of epistemic modals as expressing propositions about the knowledge of some contextually specified individual or group. This paper develops an explanation of the puzzling facts about embedding within an orthodox framework.
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Penultimate version
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In his recent monograph, Objects , Daniel Korman contrasts ontological conservatives with permissivists and eliminativists about ontology. Roughly speaking, conservatives admit the existence of " ordinary objects " like trees,... more
In his recent monograph, Objects , Daniel Korman contrasts ontological conservatives with permissivists and eliminativists about ontology. Roughly speaking, conservatives admit the existence of " ordinary objects " like trees, dogs, and snowballs, but deny the existence of " extraordinary objects " , like composites of trees and dogs (" trogs ") or snowball-like objects capable of surviving some but not all kinds of substantial squashings (" snowdiscalls "). Eliminativists, on the other hand, deny many or all ordinary objects, while permissivists accept both ordinary and extraordinary objects. Korman is a conservative. We are permissivists. In what follows, we will say something about why we are drawn to permissivism and not very drawn at all to conservatism. In the first section, we discuss a tempting epistemic line of argument against conservatism. This isn't a line of argument we find especially promising, and in this we agree substantially with Korman. However, we do disagree about the tricky issue of why this argument isn't promising, and what should be said about the other epistemic issues in the vicinity. We offer what we hope will be helpful remarks about the relevant epistemic issues, often drawing on epistemic ideology that guides our own thinking but is less salient in Korman's presentation. Along the way, we outline some of our misgivings about Korman's discussion. Our most basic complaint against conservatism is not the thought that conservatism has poor epistemic standing even if true, but instead the thought that conservatism is weird , and altogether foreign to our own metaphysical sensibilities. We develop this thought through our discussion of arbitrariness and parity in Section 5. Along the way, we voice some misgivings about Korman's own presentation and appraisal of arbitrariness arguments. In a final section we discuss some larger methodological issues about the project of ontology.
Research Interests: Metaphysics and Ontology
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Seth Yalcin has pointed out some puzzling facts about the behaviour of epistemic modals in certain embedded contexts. For example, conditionals that begin 'If it is raining and it might not be raining, …' sound unacceptable, unlike... more
Seth Yalcin has pointed out some puzzling facts about the behaviour of epistemic modals in certain embedded contexts. For example, conditionals that begin 'If it is raining and it might not be raining, …' sound unacceptable, unlike conditionals that begin 'If it is raining and I don't know it, …'. These facts pose a prima facie problem for an orthodox treatment of epistemic modals as expressing propositions about the knowledge of some contextually specified individual or group. This paper develops an explanation of the puzzling facts about embedding within an orthodox framework.
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The principle of universal instantiation plays a pivotal role both in the derivation of intensional paradoxes such as Prior’s paradox and Kaplan’s paradox and the debate between necessitism and contingentism. We outline a distinctively... more
The principle of universal instantiation plays a pivotal role both in the derivation of intensional paradoxes such as Prior’s paradox and Kaplan’s paradox and the debate between necessitism and contingentism. We outline a distinctively free logical approach to the intensional paradoxes and note how the free logical outlook allows one to distinguish two different, though allied themes in higher-order necessitism. We examine the costs of this solution and compare it with the more familiar ramificationist approaches to higher-order logic. Our assessment of both approaches is largely pessimistic, and we remain reluctantly inclined to take Prior’s and Kaplan’s derivations at face value.
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(A lightly edited transcript of a pre-read talk I gave at Oxford some years ago for a series of talks organized by Ofra Magidor. I plan to publish some version it some time in a planned collection of epistemological essays.)
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Normality is commonplace. We routinely distinguish normal weather from hurricanes and droughts; normal prices from bargains and rip-offs; and normal behavior from eccentricity and oddity. Not only do we form judgments about normality with... more
Normality is commonplace. We routinely distinguish normal weather from hurricanes and droughts; normal prices from bargains and rip-offs; and normal behavior from eccentricity and oddity. Not only do we form judgments about normality with ease, but facts about what is normal serve as a reliable guide to navigating the world. Knowing the normal presentation of a disease can help a doctor to successfully diagnose a patient. Knowing the normal level of rush hour traffic can help a commuter to arrive on time. And knowing the normal migration patterns of birds can help ornithologists to identify species. Our subject in this paper is the modality of normality. Items of a variety of types can be evaluated for normality. For example, we can readily compare the
normality of individuals, kinds and properties. Gerald Ford was more normal, for a president, than Richard Nixon. Weasels are more normal, for mammals, than wombats. And being tall is more normal, for basketball players, than being short. The modality of normality, in contrast, has to do with properties of states of affairs.There may be interesting connections between the properties of individuals, kinds and properties and the modality of normality. However, in what follows, our attention will be focused exclusively on facts about the latter.
normality of individuals, kinds and properties. Gerald Ford was more normal, for a president, than Richard Nixon. Weasels are more normal, for mammals, than wombats. And being tall is more normal, for basketball players, than being short. The modality of normality, in contrast, has to do with properties of states of affairs.There may be interesting connections between the properties of individuals, kinds and properties and the modality of normality. However, in what follows, our attention will be focused exclusively on facts about the latter.
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Epistemicism is one of the main approaches to the phenomenon of vagueness. But how does it far in its treatment of moral vagueness? This paper has two goals. First, I shall explain why various recent arguments against an epistemicist... more
Epistemicism is one of the main approaches to the phenomenon of vagueness. But how does it far in its treatment of moral vagueness? This paper has two goals. First, I shall explain why various recent arguments against an epistemicist approach to moral vagueness are unsuccessful. Second, I shall explain how, in my view, reflection on the Sorites can inform normative ethics in powerful and interesting ways. In this connection, I shall be putting the epistemicist treatment to work.