{"title":"Proper names as counterpart‐theoretic individual concepts","authors":"James Ravi Kirkpatrick","doi":"10.1111/phpr.70005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70005","url":null,"abstract":"Many philosophers and linguists have been attracted to counterpart theory as a framework for natural language semantics. I raise a novel problem for counterpart theory involving simple declarative sentences with proper names. To resolve this problem, counterpart theorists must introduce the notion of a counterpart in the semantics of the non‐modal fragment of language. I develop my preferred solution: a novel theory of proper names as counterpart‐theoretic individual concepts. The resulting view highlights a hitherto unnoticed fact: counterpart theorists should formulate their theory, not by modifying the standard semantics for modal operators, but by modifying the standard semantics for names and variables.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"72 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143736528","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Longtermism and aggregation","authors":"Emma Curran","doi":"10.1111/phpr.70007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70007","url":null,"abstract":"Advocates of longtermism point out that interventions which focus on improving the prospects of people in the very far future will, in expectation, bring about an astronomical amount of good (or agent‐neutral value). As such, longtermists claim we have compelling moral reason to engage in long‐term interventions. In this paper, I show that longtermism is in conflict with plausible deontic scepticism about aggregation. I do so by demonstrating that, from both the <jats:italic>ex‐ante</jats:italic> and <jats:italic>ex‐post</jats:italic> perspectives, longtermist interventions generate extremely weak claims of assistance from future people.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143677511","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Are there transitional beliefs? – I think so?","authors":"Julia Staffel","doi":"10.1111/phpr.70006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70006","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates a novel question about the relationship between belief and deliberation: Is it ever rationally permissible to believe an answer to a question <jats:italic>Q</jats:italic> prior to concluding one's deliberation about <jats:italic>Q</jats:italic>? This question differs from a more commonly discussed one, insofar as it asks about the rationality of believing that <jats:italic>p before</jats:italic> settling on <jats:italic>p</jats:italic> as the answer to some question <jats:italic>Q</jats:italic>. By contrast, recent literature in this area has focused on whether it can ever be rational to keep inquiring into a question <jats:italic>after</jats:italic> one has adopted a belief that answers it.I argue that it is possible for rational agents to hold beliefs of a certain kind, namely transitional beliefs, prior to settling on an answer to a question. Developing the argument for this view can help us better understand the nature of belief and its relation to inquiry and deliberation. In particular, it follows that many common claims about what beliefs are don't identify important features of belief itself, but of attitudes that are held as conclusions of deliberations more generally. Further, the view has the surprising consequence that it is typically beneficial to have transitional beliefs that are epistemically akratic.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143675212","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Knowing to infinity: Full knowledge and the margin‐for‐error principle","authors":"Yonathan Fiat","doi":"10.1111/phpr.70001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70001","url":null,"abstract":"Let's say that <jats:italic>I fully know that</jats:italic> if I know that , I know that I know that , I know that I know that I know that , and so on. Let's say that <jats:italic>I partially know that</jats:italic> if I know that but I don't fully know that . What, if anything, do I fully know? What, if anything, do I partially know? One response in the literature is that I fully know everything that I know; partial knowledge is impossible. This response is in tension with a plausible margin‐for‐error principle on knowledge. A different response in the literature is that I don't fully know anything; everything that I know, I partially know. Recently, Goldstein (forthcoming, 2024) defended a third view, according to which I fully know some things and I partially know other things. While this seems plausible, Goldstein's account is based on denying the margin‐for‐error principle. In this paper, I show that the possibility of both full knowledge and partial knowledge is consistent with the margin‐for‐error principle. I also argue that the resulting picture of knowledge is well‐motivated.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143661161","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Nietzsche on art as the good will to appearance","authors":"Aaron Ridley","doi":"10.1111/phpr.70004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70004","url":null,"abstract":"Nietzsche makes a number of remarks that suggest that he thinks that art and truth are antithetical – indeed that he thinks that the value of art lies in its falsification of aspects of the world that would otherwise prove unbearable. ‘Truth is ugly,’ he says: ‘We possess art lest we perish of the truth.’ But the argument of the present paper is that the falsification reading is unsustainable, and that if we attend to the notion of ‘appearance’ rather more attentively than Nietzsche himself always did, we can (a) read him as defending a plausible account of the relation between art and truth, rather than an unsustainable one, (b) recast the passages that have encouraged the falsification reading so that they lend support to the reading suggested here, and (c) show how the resultant account squares with, and indeed reinforces, Nietzsche's perspectivism.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143653352","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Creativity as a higher agency","authors":"Kenneth Walden","doi":"10.1111/phpr.70003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70003","url":null,"abstract":"Can human agency produce things that are genuinely creative and original? Some philosophers are skeptical. Here I argue that the case of creative activity should lead us to reexamine and ultimately expand our conception of agency. When we do this, we see that rather than being incompatible with agency, creativity offers an especially robust form of agency: a form in which agents are responsible not just for token events but for the general patterns that characterize those events as forms of human activity.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"117 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143608032","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A modal theory of justification","authors":"Jaakko Hirvelä","doi":"10.1111/phpr.13143","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.13143","url":null,"abstract":"This article develops a modal theory of justification, according to which a belief is justified if it is more possible that it amounts to knowledge than that it does not. The core of the theory is neutral between internalism and externalism and it solves two problems that extant modal accounts of justification suffer from. In developing the theory, an account of comparative possibility is provided to yield degrees of justification.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"2015 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143417173","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Whose public reason? Which reasonableness?","authors":"Collis Tahzib","doi":"10.1111/phpr.70000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.70000","url":null,"abstract":"Rawlsian public reason liberalism holds that laws must be justified in terms of reasons that all reasonable citizens can accept. But who counts as a “reasonable” citizen? Rawlsians typically answer that reasonableness is conditional on acceptance of liberal values. But they do not typically defend this answer by explaining why the Rawlsian definition is superior to alternative possible definitions of reasonableness—for instance, libertarian reasonableness, perfectionist reasonableness, communitarian reasonableness, and so on. Once this full range of possibilities is set out in plain view, it creates a novel challenge which I call the which‐reasonableness challenge. This is the challenge of showing that the Rawlsian definition of reasonableness is superior to all the alternatives. In this paper, I set out this challenge (Section 1) and consider potential ways to overcome it: namely, by arguing that the Rawlsian definition of reasonableness is superior to the alternatives on grounds of its free‐standingness and stability (Section 2), its implicitness in the public political culture (Section 3), its anti‐sectarianism (Section 4), its fidelity to the underlying motivations of the public reason project (Section 5), and its avoidance of triviality, ad‐hocness, shoehorning and related perils (Section 6). I argue that while these considerations narrow the range of possible definitions of reasonableness, they do not do so by enough to uniquely pick out the Rawlsian definition. Rawlsian public reason liberals thus face a pressing challenge stemming from the simple question: Whose public reason? Which reasonableness?","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"78 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143393054","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From singular to plural. . . and beyond?","authors":"Jonathan D. Payton","doi":"10.1111/phpr.13136","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.13136","url":null,"abstract":"A growing number of philosophers and logicians advocate for plural languages in which we can refer to and quantify over pluralities of individuals. Some go further, advocating for higher‐level languages in which we can refer to and quantify over, not just pluralities of individuals, but pluralities of pluralities, pluralities of pluralities of pluralities, and so on. These languages suggest a metaphysical picture on which even a small pool of individuals gives rise to a potentially infinite hierarchy of distinct pluralities. Most higher‐levellists would be loathe to take that picture seriously, but avoiding it turns out to be more difficult than it appears. Fortunately, we can develop a ‘one‐level’ plural language which has all the benefits of higher‐level ones but which avoids any commitment to the hierarchy.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143192291","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An interpersonal form of faith","authors":"Yuan Tian","doi":"10.1111/phpr.13141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.13141","url":null,"abstract":"An athlete has faith in her unathletic partner to run a marathon, a teacher has faith in her currently poor‐performing students to improve in the future, and your friend has faith in you to succeed in the difficult project that you have been pursuing, even, and especially, when your chance of failing is non‐trivial. This paper develops and defends a relational view of interpersonal faith by considering four interesting phenomena: first, in virtue of placing faith in someone, we stand in solidarity with that person; second, interpersonal faith is called for during moments of difficulty, but it can seem inappropriate during moments of ease; third, one's faith in others can feel unwelcomed, and can be rejected; and fourth, when interpersonal faith is frustrated, disappointment, rather than resentment, is warranted. I propose that when the faithor (e.g., your friend) places faith in the faithee (e.g., you) to φ, the faithor does something close to inviting the faithee to (re)commit to φ‐ing. This invitation‐like move, once properly taken up by the faithee, puts both sides of the faith in a new kind of normative relationship that is in the same broad family as a promissory relationship, albeit with a different normative profile.","PeriodicalId":48136,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143083249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}