Battle Hall Davies' brother Nick ran away from home when she was in high school. Now he has found her and she is going to stay with him for the summer before starting college. Battle discovers that neither she nor her brother is the person she thought they were.

In this essay I present a new version of the Paradox of the Knower and show that this new paradox vitiates a certain argument against epistemic closure. I then prove a theorem that relates the new paradox to epistemological scepticism. I conclude by assessing the use of the Knower in arguments against syntactical treatments of knowledge.

In a 1994 ANALYSIS article Peter Klein and Ted Warfield show that an epistemically more coherent set of beliefs often has a smaller unconditional probability of joint truth than some of its less coherent subsets. They conclude that epistemic justification, as understood in one version of a coherence theory of justification, is not truth conducive. After getting clear about what truth conduciveness requires, I show that their argument does not tell against BonJour's coherence theory.

[IMPORTANT CORRECTION - See end of abstract.] In Syntactical Treatments of Modality, with Corollaries on Reflexion Principles and Finite Axiomatizability, Acta Philosophica Fennica 16 (1963), 153–167, Richard Montague shows that the use of a single syntactic predicate (with a context-independent semantic value) to represent modalities of alethic necessity and idealized knowledge leads to inconsistency. In A Note on Syntactical Treatments of Modality, Synthese 44 (1980), 391–395, Richmond Thomason obtains a similar impossibility result for idealized belief: under a syntactical treatment of (...) belief, the assumption that idealized belief is deductively closed, together with certain other plausible conditions on idealized belief, imply that an ideal believer with consistent beliefs cannot believe the truth of Robinson's Arithmetic. In this essay I assert an impossibility result similar to Thomason's but which does not assume that belief is deductively closed or ideal in any other way. There are technical mistakes in the formulations of Lemmas 1-4 and Theorem 2, however. Corrections can be found in the Erratum section of the author's website. (shrink)

In “Backward Causation and the Stalnaker–Lewis Approach to Counterfactuals,” Analysis 62:191–7, (2002), Michael Tooley argues that if a certain kind of backward causation is possible, then a Stalnaker–Lewis comparative world similarity account of the truth conditions of counterfactuals cannot be sound. In “Tooley on Backward Causation,” Analysis 63:157–62, (2003), Paul Noordhof argues that Tooley’s example can be reconciled with a Stalnaker–Lewis account of counterfactuals if the comparative world similarity relation on which the Stalnaker–Lewis account relies is allowed to be antecedent-relative. (...) In this paper I show that taking comparative world similarity to be antecedent-relative results in a formal semantics which is a comparative world similarity semantics in name only. (shrink)

In “The Paradox of the Knower without Epistemic Closure”, MIND 110:319-33, 2001, I develop a version of the Knower Paradox which does not assume epistemic closure, and I use it to argue that the original Knower Paradox does not support an argument against epistemic closure. In “The Paradox of the Knower without Epistemic Closure?”, MIND 113:95-107, 2004, Gabriel Uzquiano, using his own result, argues that my rebuttal to the anti-closure argument is not successful. I respond here by arguing that in (...) order to use Uzquiano’s result in an argument against closure, one must assume an implausible skepticism about arithmetic. (shrink)

I give a critique of the argument against the Identity of Indiscernibles found in Max Black's dialogue "The Identity of Indiscernibles". I begin by postulating and giving existence and individuation conditions for actually existent thought experiment characters on analogy with fictional characters as postulated in Peter van Inwagen's "Creatures of Fiction". I then show that Black's two-spheres thought experiment raises not one but two discernibility questions: 1) Is it true in the two-spheres thought experiment that there exist two indiscernible spheres? (...) NO. 2) Is it true in the actual world that there are two indiscernible sphere-characters? YES. (shrink)

After a run of over forty years, the series Readings in Moral Theology comes to a close with this retrospective volume by one of the original editors, Charles E. Curran.

Memory, funerals, and the communion of the saints: growing old and practices of remembering / M. Therese Lysaught -- God bends over backward to accommodate humankind...while the Civil Rights Acts and the Americans with Disabilities Act require [only] minimum effort / Mary Jo Iozzio -- Radical solidarity: migration as challenge ofr contemporary Christian ethics / Kristin E. Heyer -- Catholic lesbian feminist theology / Mary E. Hunt -- Theology of whose body? Sexual conplementarity, intersex conditions, and La Virgen de Guadalupe (...) / Katie M. Grimes -- Social conscience and politics in the United States of America: reflections / Mary Jo Bane -- Pope Francis, women, and the church for the poor / Lisa A. Fullam -- Floodwaters and the ticking clock: the systematic oppression and stigmatization of poor, single mothers in American and Christian theological responses / Julie A. Mavity Maddalena --What causes inequity? / Dean Baker -- Engaging the U.S. Bishops' pastoral on crime and criminal justice: from atomism to community justice / Robert DeFina and Lance Hannon -- Reconstructing the moral claim of racially unjust mass incarceration / Alison Benders -- The systemic erasure of the Black/dark-skinned body in Catholic ethics / Bryan Massingale -- Anti-blackness and white supremacy in the making of American Catholicism / M. Shawn Copeland -- White privilege / Charles E. Curran -- The Black Lives Matter Movement: justice and health equity / Michael P. Jaycox -- Mujerista theology: a challenge to traditional theology / Ada María Isasi-Díaz -- Faith of our mothers; Catholic womanist God-talk / Diana L. Hayes. (shrink)

Despite the results of David Lewis, Peter Gärdenfors, and others, showing that imaging and classical conditionalization coincide only in the most trivial probabilistic models of belief revision, it turns out that imaging on a proposition A can always be described via Popper function conditionalization on a proposition that entails A. This result generalizes to any method of belief revision meeting certain minimal requirements. The proof is illustrated by an application of imaging in the context of the Monty Hall Problem.

I show that given Jonathan Bennett's theory of 'even if,' the following statement is logically true iff the principle of conditional excluded is valid: (SE) If Q and if P wouldn't rule out Q, then Q even if P. Hence whatever intuitions support the validity of (SE) support the validity of Conditional Excluded Middle, too. Finally I show that Bennett's objection to John Bigelow's theory of the conditional can be turned into a (perhaps) more telling one, viz. that on Bigelow's (...) theory 'if P then Q' and 'if P and Q then R' do not jointly entail 'if P then R'. (shrink)

This article analyzes six ethical principles at work in the Pastoral Letter of the Roman Catholic Bishops on the United States economy. The first three principles derive from the Thomistic tradition with its attempt to avoid the extremes of collectivism and individualism. Human beings are by nature social and called to live in political society. The principle of subsidiarity guides the role of the state. Distributive and social justice furnish the criteria for a just distribution of human goods. The fourth (...) ethical principle which is a later development in the Catholic tradition recognizes human rights including economic rights. In keeping with recent emphases in Catholic teaching the fifth principle insists that the goods of creation exist to serve all and stresses the social aspect of property. The sixth principle enunciates a preferential option for the poor and has come to the fore in the light of recent liberation theology. (shrink)

We propose a model of physics that blends Rovelli’s relational quantum mechanics (RQM) interpretation with the language of finite information quantities (FIQs), defined by Gisin and Del Santo in the spirit of intuitionistic mathematics. We discuss deficiencies of using real numbers to model physical systems in general, and particularly under the RQM interpretation. With this motivation for an alternative mathematical language, we propose the use of FIQs to model the world under the RQM interpretation, wherein we view the propensities that (...) make up a FIQ as quantifications of potential interaction. Under this model, the stable facts, relative facts, and shifting perspectives that make up the relational interpretation correspond to shifting digits and propensities of the FIQs. The model’s predictions agree with those of both classical and quantum physics, and it is indeterministic. We also propose explanations, with examples, for how the propensities of a FIQ are distributed, and how its digits become actualized. This is equivalent to the notion of the measurement problem, and the question of what causes wave function collapse. In short, by stepping through the “new door” opened by the language of FIQs, we attempt to describe the world under the relational interpretation. (shrink)

Stephen Barker argues that a possible worlds semantics for the counterfactual conditional of the sort proposed by Stalnaker and Lewis cannot accommodate certain examples in which determinism is true and a counterfactual Q > R is false, but where, for some P, the compound counterfactual P > (Q > R) is true. I argue that the completeness theorem for Lewis’s system VC of counterfactual logic shows that Stalnaker–Lewis semantics does accommodate Barker’s example, and I argue that its doing so should (...) be understood as showing that the example is an exception to Lewis’s Time’s Arrow requirements. (shrink)

In "Against the Indicative," AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 72 (1994): 17-26, and more recently in "Classifying `Conditionals': the Traditional Way is Wrong", ANALYSIS 60 (2000): 147, V.H. Dudman argues that (a) `If Oswald didn't shoot Kennedy then someone else did' and (b) `If Oswald doesn't shoot Kennedy then someone else will' should not be classified together as "indicative conditionals." Dudman relies on the assumption that (a) is entailed by (c) `Someone shot Kennedy', whereas (b) is not entailed by (d) `Someone (...) will shoot Kennedy'. I argue that the same reasoning which shows that (d) does not entail (b) also shows that (c) does not entail (a). One upshot is that Dudman's and Mellor's respective interpretations of so-called past indicative conditionals cannot be correct. (shrink)

Nonmonotonic consequence is the subject of a vast literature, but the idea of a nonmonotonic counterpart of logical inconsistency—the idea of a defeasible property representing internal conflict of an inductive or evidential nature—has been entirely neglected. After considering and dismissing two possible analyses relating nonmonotonic consequence and a nonmonotonic counterpart of logical inconsistency, this paper offers a set of postulates for nonmonotonic inconsistency, an analysis of nonmonotonic inconsistency in terms of nonmonotonic consequence, and a series of results showing that nonmonotonic (...) inconsistency conforms to these postulates given the analysis of nonmonotonic inconsistency presented here and certain postulates for nonmonotonic consequence. The results presented here establish the interest of certain previously undiscussed postulates of nonmonotonic consequence. These results also show that nonmonotonicity, which has never seemed useful in the formulation of general principles governing nonmonotonic reasoning, is relevant to the positive characterization of nonmonotonic inference after all. (shrink)

Discrepancies between an agent's goals and beliefs play an important, if implicit, role in determining what a rational agent is motivated to do. This is most obvious in cases where an agent achieves a complex goal incrementally and must deliberate anew as each milestone is reached. In such cases the concept of goal/belief discrepancy defines an appropriate space to which a degree-of-achievement yardstick can be applied. This paper presents soundness and completeness results concerning a logic for reasoning about goal/belief discrepancy, (...) and it is suggested that a certain species of goal/belief discrepancy captures the concept of desire. (shrink)

Temporal necessity and the subjunctive conditional appear to be related by the principle of Past Predominance, according to which past similarities and differences take priority over future similarities and differences in determining the comparative similarity of alternative possible histories with respect to the present moment. R. H. Thomason and Anil Gupta have formalized Past Predominance in a semantics that combines selection functions with branching time; in this paper I show that Past Predominance can be formalized and axiomatized using ordinary possible (...) worlds semantics (without branching time). (shrink)

In his well-known 1952 dialogue Max Black describes a counterexample to the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles (PII). The counterexample is a world containing nothing but two purportedly indiscernible iron spheres. Reflecting on Black's example, Robert Adams uses the possibility of a world containing two almost indiscernible spheres to argue for the possibility of the indiscernible spheres world. One of Adams's almost indiscernible spheres has a small impurity, and, Adams writes, "Surely... the absence of the impurity would not make (...) such a universe impossible." The appeal to "surely" constitutes a gap in Adams's argument. This paper bridges the gap with a premise that exploits the counterfactual conditional and the related notion of causal independence. The paper then argues that causal independence bears in a similar way on an issue Nathan Salmon raises concerning Kripke's argument for the Essentiality of Origins. (shrink)

I present and discuss two logical results. The first shows that a non-trivial counterfactual analysis exists for any contingent proposition that is false in at least two possible worlds. The second result identifies a set of conditions that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for the success of a counterfactual analysis. I use these results to shed light on the question whether disposition ascribing propositions can be analyzed as Stalnaker-Lewis conditional propositions. The answer is that they can, but, in order (...) for a counterfactual analysis to work, the antecedent and consequent must be related in a particular way, and David Lewis’s Time’s Arrow constraints on comparative world similarity must be relaxed. The upshot is that counterfactual analyses are easy to come by, in principle, even if not in practice. In that sense, it’s easy to be iffy. (shrink)

I claim that our desire to be special motivates us to suppose that if we were not God created, we must be self-created. I also claim that Stephen J Gould's claims about punctuated equilibrium, the absence of directional selection, and exaptations, when taken together, lead to kind of secular creationism. I introduce the notion of “adaptive effects” and argue that a focus on the actual physiological and psychological mechanisms that produce adaptations provides a way out of the exaptation dilemma.

There are intriguing congruities between Kierkegaard and some recent tendencies in feminism and post-modern thought.1 Neither Kierkegaard, feminists, nor post-modernism are systematic (that's one congruity right there!), so the common points can't be neatly tabulated. But (again typically of all the parties concerned) they tend to lie in three areas: methodology, communicative strategy, and the rejection of procrustean metaphysics. In what follows I will try to assemble some fragments which point out these congruities.

Peter Gärdenfors has proved (Philosophical Review, 1986) that the Ramsey rule and the methodologically conservative Preservation principle are incompatible given innocuous-looking background assumptions about belief revision. Gärdenfors gives up the Ramsey rule; I argue for preserving the Ramsey rule and interpret Gärdenfors's theorem as showing that no rational belief-reviser can avoid reasoning nonmonotonically. I argue against the Preservation principle and show that counterexamples to it always involve nonmonotonic reasoning. I then construct a new formal model of belief revision that does (...) accommodate nonmonotonic reasoning. (shrink)

I give a probabilistic semantics for modal logic in which modal operators function as quantifiers over Popper functions in probabilistic model sets, thereby generalizing Kripke's semantics for modal logic.

The coherence of the whole truth is a presupposition of any holistic coherence theory of justification that postulates a positive connection between justification and truth, for unless the whole truth is itself systemically coherent there is no reason to look for systemic coherence when deciding whether one is justified in accepting a given body of beliefs as true. This paper develops a formal model of holistic evidential coherence and uses this model to formalize and defend the claim that the whole (...) truth must be coherent in an evidential sense. (shrink)

I investigate the consequences of interpreting Lehrer's account of system-relative justification as a theory of inductive inference. I discuss which assumptions about coherence would be sufficient to make the account of inductive inference derived from Lehrer's theory conform to a series of widely discussed general principles, including those constitutive of cumulative reasoning. I then discuss the epistemological significance of the resulting theory of inductive inference.

The Securities and Exchange Commission requires the disclosure of changes to or waivers of corporate codes of ethics. Because the nature of amendments or waivers can vary, we expect the text of Item 5.05 to include different topics within different filings. We examine the population of these disclosures in Item 5.05 8-K filings from 2004 to 2020. While previous studies utilized small samples (fewer than 50 observations) to examine limited aspects of these filings, we use the population of these filings (...) from 2004 to 2020 (2121 8-K filings) to elucidate the nature and details of the disclosures. We assess whether Latent Dirichlet Allocation—a computational linguistics technique—can help discern the underlying topics represented in filings. While the Securities and Exchange Commission identifies two topics—amendments and waivers—the Latent Dirichlet Allocation analysis reveals four topics (three related to amendments): (1) code updates and clarifications; (2) combining codes of conduct for all officers and employees, or splitting codes to include a code directly applicable to senior financial officers; (3) codes of ethics waivers; and (4) substantive code changes. The overall trend is for fewer 8-Ks to be filed in recent years, with updates and clarifications becoming the predominant filing type. Our results further indicate that Item 5.05s related to updates and clarifications, and those related to combined or split codes, use fewer words and are more easily readable than those disclosing waivers or material code changes. Although we find no significant price reaction to Item 5.05 8-K filings, we find significant trading volume and volatility reactions, suggesting that these disclosures could give rise to differences in opinion among investors, which is consistent with the US Senate's assertion that these disclosures are of interest to investors. (shrink)

Most of us came into ecology with memories of special personal places. A cliff top that Claude Monet might have painted. Allen as a youth spent his holidays on the Dorset Coast near Swanage; he can still smell the sea breeze of his childhood. Curtin grow up on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin, the dew of the grass and the bright green on a June morning remains vivid. The catching of reptiles and insects for him awakened a curiosity about the (...) natural world that has remained to this day. But once into the field there came the scholarship. With ever tighter grant monies, the pressure to publish takes so much of the fun out of it. A climate of unbridled careerism prevails and shows itself in the incremental state of the literature: little things to list on this year's activities report. There are now even predatory journals that cynically do not seriously review submissions, and only collect page charges. As journal editors have a desperate time getting reviews done by mature scholars, instead of a hand off to their overworked graduate students. So what is to be done - how can we bring the joy and importance of discovery back into it all? After all ecology is done by human beings. Mostly it is a personal mission, for what great ecologists write is frequently personal and life changing. So an undercurrent of this book is to remind and reveal the original purpose of science. Not professional advancement, but the genuine search for novel ideas and the imperative to share hard won insights and personal passions. (shrink)

In Curran's latest book, Diverse Voices in Modern US Moral Theology, he presents the twelve leading voices of Catholic Moral Theology (CMT) from the early twentieth century to the present. (One could argue that Curran, himself, should be in this book.) The book discusses key individuals, and one movement that included multiple people, in the development of the field to show how it has evolved. The New Wine, New Wineskins movement was included because the movement was led by lay people, (...) showing how dramatically the face of CMT changed. The book provides overviews of the major figures in CMT without offering critique in order to foster a dialogue between liberal and conservative approaches to MT, and demonstrates that one's approach to CMT is very rooted in one's historical circumstances--called Sitz-im-Leben in the field. It is the last aim that provides the main argument for the book; that CMT has changed and each of these theologians have shifted thinking largely because of the historical context in which they wrote. Curran also shows that those on opposing sides of the debates in moral theology have become more divided and urges in his conclusion that they have more conversations with each other and not just discussions within each side. (shrink)

This volume compiles writings by leading moral theologians and ethicists on an important, emerging topic in the field of ethics. As spirituality asserts its broad humanistic interdisciplinarity, and moral theology emerges from its fixation on sin to address broader questions of human formation and Christian discipleship, the need for the two disciplines to be in dialogue is clear.

There is general agreement about the very broad outlines of a just tax structure in the Roman Catholic tradition, and these are sketched in part I. There has been, however, no sustained, systematic, in-depth treatment of the question. Part II develops those aspects of the Roman Catholic ethical tradition which ground a just tax structure-the role of the state in working for the common good, distributive justice with its proportional equality, the universal destiny of the goods of creation to serve (...) the needs of all. In addition, some attention is given to the historical practice of tithing, the state's obligation to care for the poor, and the moral obligation to pay just taxes. Part III proposes the goals which should govern a just tax structure in the Roman Catholic perspective and defends these goals against other possible interpretations. (shrink)

Pope Francis’s two encyclicals—Laudato si’ and Fratelli tutti—belong to the tradition of Catholic social teaching that began in 1891 with Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum. There have been continuities and discontinuities within the tradition of Catholic social teaching, but there has been a tendency to downplay the discontinuities. Francis’s two encyclicals show both discontinuities and continuities with the earlier documents. The final section criticizes these two encyclicals as being too overly optimistic in their approach to solving the problems facing the (...) environment and the social, political, and economic orders. (shrink)

The Roman Catholic teaching on peace and war, as found in the documents of the universal church and of the American bishops, is found to be consistent with traditional Catholic approaches to ethical theory, eschatology, and ecclesiology. Mediation in ethical theory recognizes that the gospel is mediated through reason and the sciences to particular conclusions and insists on the importance of structures and institutions. An eschatology recognizing the tension between the now and the not yet argues against both pacifism and (...) a noncritical acceptance of the status quo. Catholic ecclesiology has traditionally accepted a pluralism of specific approaches in social ethics and understands the prophetic role of the church within such a "big" ecclesiology. (shrink)

Sin, reconciliation, and the manuals of moral theology -- Thomas Aquinas and the Thomistic tradition -- Natural law -- Papal teaching office -- Second Vatican Council -- Where do we stand today?

In this book, Charles Larmore develops an account of morality, freedom, and reason that rejects the naturalistic metaphysics shaping much of modern thought. Reason, Larmore argues, is responsiveness to reasons, and reasons themselves are essentially normative in character, consisting in the way that physical and psychological facts - facts about the world of nature - count in favor of possibilities of thought and action that we can take up. Moral judgments are true or false in virtue of the moral (...) reasons there are. We need therefore a more comprehensive metaphysics that recognizes a normative dimension to reality as well. Though taking its point of departure in the analysis of moral judgment, this book branches widely into related topics such as freedom and the causal order of the world, textual interpretation, the nature of the self, self-knowledge, and the concept of duties to ourselves. (shrink)

Charles Clark; Why Teachers Need Philosophy, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 23, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 241–252, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-.

Though some doubts about the principle that every proposition is either true or false were entertained even by Aristotle, both the number and the vigor of criticisms of this principle have been increasing in recent years. This paper attempts a restatement and a re-examination of the issues involved in this dispute, and in particular an evaluation of the effects on the argument of such recent discoveries as that of the “many-valued logics.”.

Charles Clark; Child-centred Education and the ‘Growth’ Metaphysic, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 22, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 75–88, https://do.

A new reading of justice engaging the work of two philosophical poets who stand in conversation with the work of Martin Heidegger.

The papers gathered in this volume offer precise investigations of the historical and philosophical grounds for the first medieval commentaries on the ...