9 found
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  1.  51
    Desert is a dyadic relation.Toby Napoletano - 2022 - Analysis 82 (4):600-607.
    The orthodox view of the metaphysics of desert is that desert is a triadic relation that obtains between a subject, an object and a desert base. Not only is this view lacking in motivation, but conceiving of the desert base as part of the desert relation renders the concept of desert incoherent. Instead, desert should be thought of as a dyadic relation between a subject and an object, where desert bases are simply the grounds for dyadic desert facts.
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  2.  99
    Compositionality as weak supervenience.Toby Napoletano - 2015 - Synthese 192 (1):201-220.
    This paper argues against Zoltán Szabó’s claim in “Compositionality as Supervenience” that we ought to understand the principle of compositionality as the idea that in natural language, the meanings of complex expressions strongly supervene on the meanings of their constituents and how the constituents are combined. The argument is that if we understand compositionality Szabó’s way, then compositionality can play no role in explanations of the acquirability of natural languages, because it makes these explanations circular. This, in turn, would undermine (...)
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  3.  34
    Can Retributivism and Risk Assessment Be Reconciled?Toby Napoletano & Hanna Kiri Gunn - 2024 - Criminal Justice Ethics 43 (1):37-56.
    In this paper we explore whether or not the use of risk assessment tools in criminal sentencing can be made compatible with a retributivist justification of punishment. While there has been considerable discussion of the accuracy and fairness of these tools, such discussion assumes that one’s recidivism risk is relevant to the severity of punishment that one should receive. But this assumption only holds on certain accounts of punishment, and seems to conflict with retributivist justifications of punishment. Drawing on the (...)
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  4. How important are truth-conditions for truth-conditional semantics?Toby Napoletano - 2019 - Linguistics and Philosophy 42 (6):541-575.
    In this paper, I argue that while truth-conditional semantics in generative linguistics provides lots of good semantic explanations, truth-conditions do not play an important role in these explanations. That is, the fact that expressions have the particular truthconditional contents they have does not even partly explain facts about semantic phenomena. Rather, explanations of semantic phenomena appeal to extra-truth-conditional properties attributed to expressions via their lexical entries. Focusing on recent truth-conditional work on gradable adjectives and degree modifiers by Kennedy and McNally, (...)
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  5.  26
    Meritocracy, meritocratic education, and equality of opportunity.Toby Napoletano - 2024 - Theory and Research in Education 22 (1):3-18.
    There are two ways, broadly speaking, that one might conceive of meritocratic education. On a standard, ‘narrow’ conception, a meritocratic approach to education is one which distributes certain educational goods and opportunities according to merit. On a second, ‘broader’ conception, however, meritocratic education is an educational system suited to a commitment to meritocracy – where ‘meritocracy’ refers to a particular conception of distributive justice. In this article, I argue that these two conceptions are incompatible with each other, and so the (...)
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  6. Why Truth-Conditional Semantics in Generative Linguistics is Still the Better Bet.Toby Napoletano - 2017 - Erkenntnis 82 (3):673-692.
    In his “Meaning and Formal Semantics in Generative Grammar” (Erkenntnis 2015, 61–87), Stephen Schiffer argues that truth-conditional semantics is a poor fit with generative linguistics. In particular, he thinks that it fails to explain speakers’ abilities to understand the sentences of their language. In its place, he recommends his “Best Bet Theory”—a theory which aims to directly explain speakers’ abilities to mean things by their utterances and know what others mean by their utterances. I argue that Schiffer does not provide (...)
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  7.  4
    Desert or dignity? Rethinking injustice in wages.Toby Napoletano - forthcoming - Economics and Philosophy:1-27.
    A common idea, both in ordinary discourse and in the desert literature, is that wages can be deserved. The thought is not only highly intuitive, but it is also often appealed to in order to explain various injustices in employment income – pay gaps, for instance. In this paper, I challenge the idea that income from employment is the kind of thing that can be deserved. I argue that once one gets clear on the metaphysics of jobs and wages within (...)
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  8.  87
    Measurement and desert: Why grades cannot be deserved.Toby Napoletano - 2021 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 10 (4):282-292.
    It is typically thought that a student deserves—or at least can deserve—a grade in a class. The students who perform well on assessments, who display a high degree of competence, and who complete all of the required work, deserve a good grade. Students who perform poorly on assessments, who fail to understand the course material, and who fail to complete the required work, deserve a bad grade. In this paper, I raise a challenge to this conventional view about grades. In (...)
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  9.  39
    Can Essentiality of Origin Save Meritocracy From The Luck Objection?Toby Napoletano - 2022 - Philosophia 51 (2):883-895.
    Rawls famously argued against meritocratic conceptions of distributive justice on the grounds that the accumulation of merit is an unavoidably lucky process, both because of differences in early environment, and innate talents. Thomas Mulligan (2018a) has recently provided a novel defense of meritocracy against the “luck objection”, arguing that both sources of luck would be mostly eliminated in a meritocracy. While a system of fair equality of opportunity ensures that differences in social class or early environment do not lead to (...)
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