Online research in philosophy

It is argued that if there are truth-value gaps then the disquotational theory of truth is false. Secondly, it is argued that the same conclusion can be reached even without the assumption that there are truth-value gaps.

The paper asks: are all tautologies true in a language with truth-value gaps? It answers that they are not. No tautology is false, of course, but not all are true. It also contends that not all contradictions are false in a language with truth-value gaps, though none are true.

Among other good things, supervaluation is supposed to allow vague sentences to go without truth values. But Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore have recently argued that it cannot allow this - not if it also respects certain conceptual truths. The main point I wish to make here is that they are mistaken. Supervaluation can leave truth-value gaps while respecting the conceptual truths they have in mind.

This paper considers the so-called explanatory gap between brain activity and conscious experience. A number of different, though closely related, explanatory gaps are distinguished and a monistic account of conscious experience, a version of Herbert Feigl's "dual-access theory," is advocated as a solution to the problems they are taken to pose for physicalist accounts of mind. Although dual-access theory is a version of the mind-body identity thesis, it in no way "eliminates" conscious experience; rather, it provides a parsimonious and explanatorily fruitful theory of the consciousness-body relation which faithfully preserves the nature of conscious experience while going quite far in "bridging" the various explanatory gaps distinguished below.

Darwinian atheists ridicule the “God of the Gaps” argument, claiming that it is theology and/or metaphysics masquerading as science.This is true as far as it goes, but Darwinian atheism relies on an argument which is equally metaphysical, which I call the “No Gaps,No God” argument. This atheist argument is metaphysical because it relies on a kind of conceptual necessity, rather than scientificobservations or experiments. “No Gaps No God” is a much better metaphysical argument than “God of the Gaps,” because the latteris based on a clearly false conditional inference. However, there are also good, but not decisive, arguments against the “No Gaps NoGod” argument. Because metaphysical arguments never resolve as decisively as scientific research questions, there will probablyalways be a legitimate controversy at the metaphysical level on this topic, even though there is no serious controversy about Darwinianscience itself. If this fact were more widely acknowledged, it could help to defuse the controversy over teaching Darwin in the public schools.

This paper considers the so?called explanatory gap between brain activity and conscious experience. A number of different, though closely related, explanatory gaps are distinguished and a monistic account of conscious experience, a version of Herbert Feigl's ?dual?access theory,? is advocated as a solution to the problems they are taken to pose for physicalist accounts of mind. Although dual?access theory is a version of the mind?body identity thesis, it in no way ?eliminates? conscious experience; rather, it provides a parsimonious and explanatorily fruitful theory of the consciousness?body relation which faithfully preserves the nature of conscious experience while going quite far in ?bridging? the various explanatory gaps distinguished below.

Supplementing the well known results of Kunen we show that Martin's Axiom is not sufficient to decide the existence of (ω1, c)-gaps when (c, c)-gaps exist, that is, it is consistent with ZFC that Martin's Axiom holds and there are (c, c)-gaps but no (ω1, c)-gaps.