Philosophy

In contemporary discussions of the Ramsey Test for conditionals, it is commonly held that (i) supposing the antecedent of a conditional is adopting a potential state of full belief, and (ii) Modus Ponens is a valid rule of inference. I argue on the basis of Thomason Conditionals (such as "If Sally is deceiving, I do not believe it") and Moore's Paradox that both claims are wrong. I then develop a double-indexed Update Semantics for conditionals which takes these two results into account while doing justice to the key intuitions underlying the Ramsey Test. The semantics is extended to cover some further phenomena, including the recent observation that epistemic modal operators give rise to something very like, but also very unlike, Moore's Paradox.

A dynamic semantics for epistemically modalized sentences is an attractive alternative to the orthodox view that our best theory of meaning ascribes to such sentences truth-conditions relative to what is known. I demonstrate that a dynamic story about "might" and "must" offers elegant explanations of a range of puzzling observations about epistemic modals. The first part of the story provides a unifying treatment of disputes about epistemic modality and disputes about matters of fact while at the same time avoiding relativism or an overly weak pragmatics. The second part of the story extends what has been said to cover some further relevant data, including retraction, the interaction between epistemic modality and tense, and embeddings of epistemically modalized sentences under attitude verbs. A comparison between the suggestion made in this article and current versions of the orthodoxy is provided.

Heidegger's treatment of the topic of truth in "Being and Time" is confronted with many criticisms. Of special importance is the thesis that Heidegger is unable to provide a general analysis of the truth of a statement; furthermore, the claim is influential that when being concerned with Dasein's disclosedness Heidegger does not succeed in plausibly dealing with the topic of truth. This paper offers a new approach to Heidegger's conception as presented in "Being and Time" and defends it against well-known criticisms. It also reveals various positive impulses of this conception for the problem of truth and the philosophy of language.

Schulz has shown that the suppositional view of indicative conditionals leads to a corresponding view of epistemic modals. But his case backfires: the resulting theory of epistemic modals gets the facts wrong, and so we end up with a good argument against the suppositional view. I show how and why a dynamic view of indicative conditionals leads to a better theory of epistemic modals.

Every adequate semantics for conditionals and deontic "ought" must offer a solution to the miners paradox about conditional obligations. Kolodny and MacFarlane have recently argued that such a semantics must reject the validity of modus ponens. I demonstrate that rejecting the validity of modus ponens is inessential for an adequate solution to the paradox

A dynamic semantics for iffy oughts offers an attractive alternative to the folklore that Chisholm's paradox enforces an unhappy choice between the intuitive inference rules of factual and deontic detachment. The first part of the story told here shows how a dynamic theory about ifs and oughts gives rise to a nonmonotonic perspective on deontic discourse and reasoning that elegantly removes the air of paradox from Chisholm's puzzle without sacrificing any of the two detachment principles. The second part of the story showcases two bonus applications of the framework suggested here: it offers a response to Forrester's gentle murder paradox and avoids Kolodny and MacFarlane's miners paradox about deontic reasoning under epistemic uncertainty. A comparison between the dynamic semantic proposal made in this paper and a more conservative approach combining a static semantics with a dynamic pragmatics is provided.

Epistemic modals are a prominent topic in the literature on natural language semantics, with wide-ranging implications for issues in philosophy of language and philosophical logic. Considerations about the role that epistemic "might" and "must" play in discourse and reasoning have led to the development of several important alternatives to classical possible worlds semantics for natural language modal expressions. This is an opinionated overview of what I take to be some of the most exciting issues and developments in the field.

Folklore has it that counterfactual Sobel sequences favor a variably strict analysis of conditionals over its plainly strict alternative. Recent discussions of the lore have focussed on the question whether data about reverse counterfactual Sobel sequences actually speak in favor of a dynamic revival of the strict analysis. This paper takes the discussion into a new direction by looking at straight indicative Sobel sequences. The observation is that a variably strict analysis fails to predict the felicity of these sequences given minimal semantic and pragmatic assumptions. A properly elaborated dynamic analysis of indicatives, in contrast, handles the data with grace.

The fact that counterfactuals in general license simplification of disjunctive antecedents is a familiar problem for the traditional Lewis-Stalnaker variably strict analysis of counterfactuals. This paper argues that recent semantic attempts to solve this problem in a variably strict setting do not address related simplification patterns and demonstrates that the data are well explained by a dynamic strict analysis of counterfactuals using ideas from the inquisitive semantic tradition.

Several authors have observed that the tools and techniques developed within the field of nonmonotonic logic provide a fruitful framework for the theoretical study of deontic discourse and reasoning. The prominent sources of inspiration for the resulting work in deontic logic are the classical nonmonotonic analyses of reasoning with defeasible generalizations. But while the study of reasoning with defaults may help us understand the nature of prima facie obligations, it arguably does not generalize to address other major sources of nonmonotonicity in deontic discourse and reasoning: the violability of obligations and the sensitivity of obligations to epistemic uncertainty. I demonstrate that the tools and techniques developed within the field of dynamic semantics provide a more comprehensive foundation for deontic logic, the underlying observation being that the semantics of deontic ought is sensitive to the presence or absence of epistemic possibilities in discourse and reasoning. The nonmonotonicity of deontic thought and talk, so the key message of this paper, can be illuminated in terms of the familiar nonmonotonicity of epistemic thought and talk that finds a natural articulation in dynamic semantics.

Metaethical noncognitivists have trouble arriving at a respectable semantic theory for moral language. The goal of this paper is to make substantial progress toward demonstrating that these problems may be overcome. Replacing the predominant expressivist semantic agenda in metaethics with a dynamic perspective on meaning and communication allows noncognitivists to provide a satisfying analysis of negation and other constructions that have been argued to be problematic for metaethical noncognitivism, including disjunctions. The resulting proposal preserves some of the key insights from recent work on the semantics of expressivism while highlighting the widely neglected early noncognitivists' sympathies to the kind of dynamic story I intend to tell here. A comparison between the advertised dynamic semantic story and current proposals that treat expressivism as a pragmatic rather than semantic theory about moral language is provided.

Folklore has it that Sobel sequences favor a variably strict analysis of conditionals over its plainly strict alternative. While recent discussions for or against the lore have focussed on Sobel sequences involving counterfactuals, this paper draws attention to the fact that indicative Sobel sequences are just as felicitous as are their counterfactual cousins. The fact, or so I shall argue here, disrupts the folklore: given minimal assumptions about the semantics and pragmatics of indicative conditionals, a textbook variably strict analysis fails to predict that indicative Sobel sequences are felicitous. The correct lesson to draw from Sobel sequences is that their felicity challenges classical implementations of the variably strict and of the plainly strict analysis alike. In response to this challenge I develop a dynamic strict analysis of conditionals that handles indicative Sobel sequences with grace while preserving intuitive constraints on the semantics and pragmatics of their members. A discussion of how such an analysis may handle the challenge from reverse Sobel sequences is provided.

This paper offers a unified semantic explanation of two observations that prove to be problematic for classical analyses of modals, conditionals, and disjunctions: (i) the fact that disjunctions scoping under possibility modals give rise to the free choice effect and (ii) the fact that counterfactuals license simplification of disjunctive antecedents. It shows that the data are well explained by a dynamic semantic analysis of modals and conditionals that uses ideas from the inquisitive semantic tradition in its treatment of disjunction. The analysis explains why embedding a disjunctive possibility under negation reverts disjunction to its classical behavior, is general enough to predict less studied simplification patterns, and also makes progress toward a unified perspective on the distinction between informative, inquisitive, and attentive content.

Across languages, subjective attitude verbs such as English find, differ from ordinary doxastic attitude verbs (such as English 'believe') in that they require their complement to be subjective in a particular way. The goal of this paper is to develop a semantics for subjective attitude verbs that predicts this fact but also captures the finer-grained differences between find-type and consider-type subjective attitude verbs that make the former more restrictive than the latter. We propose that in terms of their core, at issue content, such verbs are just like believe in expressing a doxastic attitude towards the prejacent. They differ in that they introduce a presupposition that their prejacent is contingent with respect to a distinct set of discourse alternatives that we label counterstances: alternative common grounds that differ only in decisions about how to resolve semantic underdetermination by the facts of the discourse situation. By distinguishing between two ways in which a prejacent may be counterstance contingent, we provide a formal characterization of the “two types” of subjectivity that emerges in the variable acceptability of predicates under 'find' and 'consider'. The larger theoretical significance of our proposal is that it supports a characterization of “subjective language” as an essentially pragmatic, context-sensitive phenomenon, which does not correlate with semantic type (pace Sæbø) but derives from speakers’ recognition of the possibility of counterstance.

The challenge is this. Heidegger has much to contribute to our understanding of empathy and freeing it from its entanglements in philosophical puzzles, cognitive disputes, and even psychotherapy. The issue is that Heidegger would not necessarily have felt the undertaking was justified. For Heidegger, empathy was derivative not foundational for human interrelations, empirical not ontological, a superficial not an authentic way of being—even worse, a module in faculty psychology, at best philosophical anthropology. Of course, there is nothing wrong with good, solid empirical research; so let us not apologize for expanding the horizons of knowledge in modest ways. However, there is also a more fundamental issue, which is a function of Heidegger’s own historical horizon. 

The position of this essay is that, when properly engaged and cleared, empathy deserves to go from a footnote to a foundation of human relations. This position takes distinctions that articulate the structure of human existence in its totality—especially being in the world with other human beings (Dasein)--and show how these structures map provide a clearing for empathy as the foundation of human interrelations.  This will result in a rehabilitation of the uses of empathy and an authentic Heideggerian definition of empathy. This definition must be wrested from what Heidegger says as well what is understood in the everyday meaning of empathy as coming to appreciate what another feels because I feel it too. It will also revise Heidegger’s dismissal of empathy. Since it was Heidegger that dismissed empathy as not the “ontological bridge” between individual human beings, my position must reinterpret Heidegger’s explicit statement to that effect.

The argument of this essay is that unexpressed emotions are incomplete. Empathy, as form of receptivity to the expression of emotion, implies an invitation to unexpressed emotions to attain completeness. The expression of an emotion is required to complete it. This position is recommended to escape from the paradox that an unexpressed emotion does not exist. The occurrent emotion with its affective (felt) component - not a mere disposition - does indeed exist in interesting and important ways that will be engaged shortly. This position also escapes from the paradox that emotions, expressed or unexpressed, must have an affective (felt) component.  Many emotions have a readily identifiable affective (felt) component, but by no means all. Three paradigm cases (and subcases) will be explored and used to drive the argument. The lack of expression is just as significant, though less obvious, than that of expression and arouses an empathic receptivity. The point is the observation of small details, including empathic receptivity to a micro expressions, informs the interpretive activity of empathic understanding. Additional consequences and the resulting dynamics of this discovery—unexpressed emotions are incomplete - for empathy will be explored.

The argument of this essay is that empathy is required in order to get from the possibility of altruism to its implementation. A logical space is available to establish a link between empathy and the austere ethics of duty (“deontology”). This is needed to avoid sinking into the morass of moral sentiments (shame, guilt, benevolence, compassion), which are powerful motivators of behavior but logically dubious founders of it. The interest of the others in the world and my own interest are in balance. It is not that the world comes ahead of my own – which, arguably, would look like utilitarianism and the greatest good of the greatest number. We are not looking at consequences. Rather we are looking formally and logically at the priority of my own interest over against that of the world, and it does not have any more priority. But it does not necessarily have any less, for the majority of the world would not be justified in inflicting pain on me even if it resulted in their greater good. “Act so as to reduce the pain in the world.” Yes, I should so act. But how do I know the other is in pain? In any particular situation, altruism without empathy is like a concept without intuition. Empathy provides the implementation of the possibility of altruism. How do I know the other is in pain on this particular, objective occasion? The answer is empathy.