13 found
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  1. Deontic Modality and the Semantics of Choice.Melissa Fusco - 2015 - Philosophers' Imprint 15.
    I propose a unified solution to two puzzles: Ross's puzzle and free choice permission. I begin with a pair of cases from the decision theory literature illustrating the phenomenon of act dependence, where what an agent ought to do depends on what she does. The notion of permissibility distilled from these cases forms the basis for my analysis of 'may' and 'ought'. This framework is then combined with a generalization of the classical semantics for disjunction — equivalent to Boolean disjunction (...)
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  2. Absolution of a Causal Decision Theorist.Melissa Fusco - 2024 - Noûs 58 (3):616-643.
    I respond to a dilemma for Causal Decision Theory (CDT) under determinism, posed in Adam Elga's paper “Confessions of a Causal Decision Theorist”. The treatment I present highlights (i) the status of laws as predictors, and (ii) the consequences of decision dependence, which arises natively out of Jeffrey Conditioning and CDT's characteristic equation. My argument leverages decision dependence to work around a key assumption of Elga's proof: to wit, that in the two problems he presents, the CDTer must employ subjunctive‐suppositional (...)
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  3. Agential Free Choice.Melissa Fusco - 2020 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 50 (1):57-87.
    The Free Choice effect—whereby \\) seems to entail both \ and \—has traditionally been characterized as a phenomenon affecting the deontic modal ‘may’. This paper presents an extension of the semantic account of free choice defended by Fusco to the agentive modal ‘can’, the ‘can’ which, intuitively, describes an agent’s powers. On this account, free choice is a nonspecific de re phenomenon that—unlike typical cases—affects disjunction. I begin by sketching a model of inexact ability, which grounds a modal approach to (...)
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  4.  53
    Free choice effects and exclusive disjunction.Melissa Fusco - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy:1-15.
    This paper presents experimental data relevant to understanding the modal free choice effect (Kamp, 1973) when there are more than two disjuncts under the relevant modal operator. The results suggest that speakers' willingness to draw free choice inferences is correlated with whether the embedded disjuncts are *modally separable*, in a sense brought into focus by considering cases within which the relevant propositions fail to be pairwise redundant but are redundant as a set.
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  5.  56
    Jeffrey imaging revisited.Melissa Fusco - 2023 - Analysis 83 (3):447-464.
    In ‘The logic of partial supposition’ (Analysis vol. 81), Benjamin Eva and Stephan Hartmann investigate partial imaging, a credence-revision method which combines the partiality familiar from Jeffrey Conditioning(The Logic of Decision, 1983) with the formal notion of imaging familiar from Lewis’s ‘Causal decision theory’ (1981). They argue that because partial imaging is non-monotonic, it ‘fail[s] to provide a plausible account of the norms of partial subjunctive suppositions’.In this note, I present a notion of partial imaging that does satisfy monotonicity, and (...)
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  6. A two-dimensional logic for diagonalization and the a priori.Melissa Fusco - 2020 - Synthese 198 (9):8307-8322.
    Two-dimensional semantics, which can represent the distinction between a priority and necessity, has wielded considerable influence in the philosophy of language. In this paper, I axiomatize the dagger operator of Stalnaker’s “Assertion” in the formal context of two-dimensional modal logic. The language contains modalities of actuality, necessity, and a priority, but is also able to represent diagonalization, a conceptually important operation in a variety of contexts, including models of the relative a priori and a posteriori often appealed to Bayesian and (...)
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  7. Free choice permission and the counterfactuals of pragmatics.Melissa Fusco - 2014 - Linguistics and Philosophy 37 (4):275-290.
    This paper addresses a little puzzle with a surprisingly long pedigree and a surprisingly large wake: the puzzle of Free Choice Permission. I begin by presenting a popular sketch of a pragmatic solution to the puzzle, due to Kratzer and Shimoyama, which has received a good deal of discussion, endorsement and elaboration in recent work :535–590, 2006; Fox, in: Sauerland and Stateva Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics, 2007; Geurts, Mind Lang 24:51–79, 2009; von Fintel, Central APA session on Deontic (...)
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  8. Dutch‐booking indicative conditionals.Melissa Fusco - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (1):208-231.
    Recent literature on Stalnaker's Thesis, which seeks to vindicate it from Lewis (1976)'s triviality results, has featured linguistic data that is prima facie incompatible with Conditionalization in iterated cases (McGee 1989, 2000; Kaufmann 2015; Khoo & Santorio, 2018). In a recent paper (2021), Goldstein & Santorio make a bold claim: they hold that these departures light the way to a new, non‐conditionalizing theory of rational update.Here, I consider whether this new form of update is subject to a Dutch book. On (...)
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  9.  56
    Naturalizing Deontic Logic: Indeterminacy, Diagonalization, and Self‐Affirmation.Melissa Fusco - 2018 - Philosophical Perspectives 32 (1):165-187.
    It is an appealing idea that deontic modality is a modality of the open future, and that the indeterminacy of the open future is the key, within natural language, to understanding the deontic modal puzzles that form the traditional subject-matter of deontic logic. In this paper, I pull together three well-studied strands of indeterminism—Thomason (1980)’s settledness operator, the modal base of Kratzer (1981, 1991)’s analysis of modals, and Stalnaker (1978)’s notion of diagonal acceptance—to argue for two theses governing a deontic (...)
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  10.  74
    Diagonal decision theory.Melissa Fusco - 2024 - Economics and Philosophy 40 (2):485-496.
    Stalnaker’s ‘Assertion’ (1978 [1999]) offers a classic account of diagonalization as an approach to the meaning of a declarative sentence in context. Here I explore the relationship between diagonalization and some puzzles in Mahtani’s book The Objects of Credence. Diagonalization can influence how we think about both credence and desirability, so it influences both components of a standard expected utility equation. In that vein, I touch on two of Mahtani’s case-studies, chance and the finite version of the Two Envelope Paradox.
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  11.  75
    A Two-Dimensional Logic for Two Paradoxes of Deontic Modality.Melissa Fusco & Alexander W. Kocurek - 2022 - Review of Symbolic Logic 15 (4):991-1022.
    In this paper, we axiomatize the deontic logic in Fusco (2015), which uses a Stalnaker-inspired account of diagonal acceptance and a two-dimensional account of disjunction to treat Ross’s Paradox and the Puzzle of Free Choice Permission. On this account, disjunction-involving validities are a priori rather than necessary. We show how to axiomatize two-dimensional disjunction so that the introduction/elimination rules for boolean disjunction can be viewed as one-dimensional projections of more general two-dimensional rules. These completeness results help make explicit the restrictions (...)
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  12.  63
    Propositions and the Meaning of ‘Ought’.Melissa Fusco - 2018 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 15 (4):463-474.
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  13.  78
    Probabilistic Knowledge. [REVIEW]Melissa Fusco - 2020 - Philosophical Review 129 (1):139-144.
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