conceptual

  Following a suggestion from Rubenstein (2025), one can defend the very counter-intuitive hypothesis that there are no conjunctive propositions by arguing that whenever we seem to assert a conjunction what we are actually doing is distributively assert a pair of proposition and not a proposition that is a conjunction. The same for any other propositional attitude. Thus, there is no need to postulate conjunctions. However, following a many-ist strategy from Thunder (2025), it is possible to extend the argument so that nothing but elementary propositions exist.   According to Champollion (2015), the following are examples of sentences with distributive predication: John, Peter and Bill carried a briefcase. All the men carried a briefcase. The notion of distributive predication has been developed to account for “the behavior of predicates when they occur with plural definites, noun phrases headed by distributive quantifiers like every, and noun phrases coordinated by and.”...

In the view of logic I endorse (and this is something that is also held by many if not all logical realists and kantians), logic has no (metaphysical) relation to language or, at least, to semantics: it is not about what “and” means or about what we do when we negate something, etc. It is about logical phenomena, centrally about the logical phenomenon of what follows logically from what, but probably about other phenomena as well. Thus, logical systems are logical theories or models that aim to explain what follows from what and why. Logical notions like ‘negation’, ‘disjunction’, ‘conjunction’, etc. are theoretical concepts that logic develops to make sense of these phenomena. That is why, they are not directly testable – think of them as the non-empirical analogue to non-observational notions in the empirical sciences. Yes, these notions may also be the semantic values of some expressions in (at least some) natural languages, i.e., the so-called logical expressions. But this is not ...

When he is hallucinating, Johannes sees a pink rat, even though there are no pink rats. Kripke wants to maintain the intuitive truth of this later claim, but what is the semantic content of “Johannes sees a pink rat” here? My hypothesis is that verbs like “to see” generates an [otherwise known as "intensional" perhaps?] context where predicates in its scope acquire a new [perhaps we should also call "intensional"?] extension. So that what he sees is not a pink rat but something – an imaginary entity – that looks pink and looks like a rat. These two later properties: looking-pink and looking-like-a-rat are not actual empirical properties, i.e., properties of concrete objects that can be discovered empirically, like being pink or a rat. That is so because looking-pink is not being pink. It entails it defeasibly, sure, but neither logically nor metaphysically. Normally, pink things look thing, but commonly things that are not pink look pink, and is some extreme cases –...

Metaphysical Trivialism is the view that every metaphysical question of whether a putative ontological kind belongs in our ontology has a (trivial) positive answer: Are chairs real? Yes! Are tropes real? Yes! Are ghosts real? Yes! Yes! Yes! Everything is real! Even what is not is also real! (His is a dialetheist proposal) Vacek confronts us with a new (to me, at least), arresting puzzle at the heart of thinking about non-being as separate from being: remember that among the most compelling — perhaps the most compelling — motivations for ontological monism is precisely the desire to circumvent the notorious problem of inter-categorial interaction: how do mind and body communicate? How do abstract entities bear on concrete ones? As Plato understood with characteristic acuity, the monist who admits a distinction between being and non-being inherits a problem no less vexing than any of these: she must now explain how what is relates to what is not — a relation every bit as intractable as...

  It is misleading to say that the aim of Frankfurt (1969) is to disprove the principle of alternate possibilities when he explicitly says that he is defending a revised version of the principle, according to which   “…a person is not morally responsible for what he has done if he did it because he could not have done otherwise…” (Frankfurt 1969: 838) He does say that “the principle of alternate possibilities is false” and argues against the claim that “… a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise…” which he calls the ( traditional ?)   principle of alternate possibilities (Frankfurt 1969: 829) But he does defend the view that a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he has not done it because he could not have done otherwise, which is also a version of the principle of alternate possibilities. He even starts his article by asserting that “…no one … seems inclined to deny or even to question that ...

Jennifer Nagel suggests that we say that people know stuff, because we care about the stuff they know; while we say that people believe stuff mostly when we care about them and what they think, not so much about the stuff about which they believe. [Compare this with a more traditional account of the relation between knowledge and belief, like Geurts' according to which “Attributing mental states to others and ourselves permits us to discern, predict, explain, and manipulate behavioural patterns.” (Geurts 2021)] So if I care about X and you are my source of information about X I must care about you and your mental state vis a vis X, but those, for me, would still be not important in themselves, but only of instrumental value. What she calls epistemic mapping is the fact that ‘caring about what others think” means both evaluating what they already know and making sure that they acquire valuable new knowledge.  There is ample evidence, like gaze following, that epistemic mapping is ...

Imagine you pour some water onto an empty glass but stop middle way before filling it. Would it be accurate to say that the glass is now “half full”? Common sense and our linguistic intuitions might immediately suggest that yes, it is. But Keefe’s talk yesterday made me think of an argument against this common sense intuition. One can say that it is nonsense to say that the glass is “half full” because the glass is clearly, totally and determinately not full. The glass is not full and this is not something that is half true, or indeterminate or whatever. It is true, period. Thus, it is inappropriate to say that the glass is half full because being full is something that glasses either are or are not and since you did not finish filling the glass, the glass is just not full. It does not matter how close you were to filling the glass, you still failed filling the glass and, therefore, the glass is not full. It is not empty either, of course, but being empty is not the same as being not f...

Notes on Franz Berto’s first talk of the 2023 Cátedra Gaos Just as to be an intentionalist (like Kripke, but unlike Quine) is to take extentionality to be too coarse as tool for philosophically analyzing some phenomena, to be a hyperintentionalist (like Dunn and Restall, Berto, Chalmers, Yablo, Fine, etc. but unlike Lewis (sometimes), Stalker   (sometimes) , Montague, etc.) is to take intensionality (traditional modality) to be too coarse as tool for philosophically analyzing some phenomena. Intentionality is to material equivalence as hyper-intentionality is to necessary equivalence, but this can be extended ad infinitum, at least in principle, thus: Let R be an equivalence relation on a representational domain D , then H is a hyper-R operator iff not- R(H(p), H(q)) in spite of R(p, q) . In this schema, intentionality is hyper-extensionality, and hyper-intentionality is, well, hyper-intentionality. Thus, there can be hyper-hyper-intentionality and hyper-hyper-hyp...

I take this to be a fundamental logical principle of rationality: that whatever you are already committed to believing restricts what else you can believe (without revising what you are already committed to believing). This is enough to derive some version of the principle of non-contradiction, all that is required is recognizing that this relation be recognized as being none other but what we call “negation”. The basis motivation behind the main and only premise of this argument is that rationality has to do not only with what one ought to believe or not ex nihilo , but what one ought to believe or not given what we already do believe or not. This basic principle can be decomposed in four different principles: What one believes restricts what one can believe or not What one believes restricts what one ought to believe or not What one does not believe restricts what one can believe or not What one does not believe restricts what one ought to believe or not Let us focus on the first on...

  Maps with big red dots saying "You are there" make no sense. They can only say “You are here”. Why? You are here! Niseko Station, Hokkaido David McKelvey (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 2010) According to Casati (forthcoming), it is because of the way the map is drawn, you can only understand the map (and read the sign that says “you are here”) if you are close enough, and if you are that close the truth of the claim that “you are here” is warranted. That is how you KNOW that that part of the map represents your current location. But, Casati adds, situation is not the only way to achieve epistemic segregation. Consider a map on a huge billboard on top of a distant building or, even farther away, drawn on the surface of the moon in such a way that it can be seen from many different places with a huge red dot saying “you are here” such that it can be seen both from places corresponding to the red dot in the map (which is actually pretty far from where the map is actually located) and pla...

hierarchical Different factors and agents at the base level contribute differently to the emerging phenomenon, but in a hierarchical way so that the contribution of some depends on the contribution of others in a hierarchical (possibly partial) order. Example : The system formed by herd and shepherd. A traditional business company. non-hierarchical structured Different factors and agents at the base level contribute differently to the emerging phenomenon, but not in a hierarchical way so that if the contribution of some depends on the contribution of others, it is in a complex, circular or symmetric way. Example : A funk band. genetic-evolutionary All factors and agents at the base level make the same sort of contributions but still different in a random (or close to random) way, reacting and building on each other’s contributions in a non-hierarchical way, generating recursive patterns of proposal-rejection/adoption. Example : A brainstorming session. Biological evolution. Genetic evo...

I was invited to talk about my book on luck this week in Sevilla as part of this wonderful workshop. It was a great experience and I am very thankful for the organizers. After hearing and discussing topics related to luck and risk, specially from an epistemological perspective, here are some of my main conclusions: Rejecting a philosophical theory because of a thought experiment that seems to provide counter-examples is not good practice.
 In general, thought experiments ought to be complemented by – turned into, I would say – rigorous theorising, modelling and argumentation. Epistemic risk is not a genuine phenomenon (at least not different from probability or other already well established epistemic notions).
 However, the theoretical tools developed for the study of epistemic risk are still epistemically valuable for other purposes. Except, perhaps, for truth (and very closely related notions), all central epistemic notions are modal. The relevant uncertainty in norma...

If asked about the most common pitfall that trips up inexperienced philosophers, close to the top of my list would be: Falling in love with your solution. Management advisor Ash Maruia has previously labeled this pre-disposition for the solution as the “Innovator’s Bias” and the following (and previous) words are mostly copied verbatim from one of his recent blog posts (2017) – I am trying to find a middle ground between plagirism and extensive quotation. According to Maruia, this so-called innovator bias is a sneaky troll:  rearing it’s ugly head, not just during the early stages of research, but thorough its lifecycle, often when you least expect it. At each step, the most insightful theories come from a deep understanding of problems before solutions. Ideas are cheap When we first get hit by an idea, this is what we most clearly see and what we spend most of our energy towards. But most initial hypotheses fail — not because we fail to develop them into full-fledged theories o...

In the talk on the video, my co-author  Angeles  Eraña assume delusions are beliefs and argue that they have an important rational aspect. To this aim, we will draw on a distinction among different senses of ‘rationality’ one of us has already developed (Eraña 2009). We will argue that delusions are not rational in the externalist sense of being the product of a well-functioning reliable cognitive system. On the contrary, there is ample evidence that some cognitive malfunctions are involved. Furthermore, they are not rational in an internalist, deontological sense either, since this sort of rationality requires the agent to have a well-functioning conscious, control system (corresponding to S1 in dual system theory), and delusional agents’ conscious control systems are too tied to the false and recalcitrant delusional belief.  One might wonder, once we accept that delusions are rational neither in the internist sense of giving us epistemic justification nor i...

Reconstructing Batens' argument: Hypothesis to reduce: Monism, i.e., there is one TRUE logic that is normative and universal, in so far as it provides us with the standard of correctness for reasoning about every domain, to any community, at any historical circumstance. In order for it to be universal, it must take ALL logical possibiltiies in consideration. In order for it to be normative, it must at least make a distinction between good and bad arguments, i.e., it must not trivialize the logical consequence relation. Taking all logical possibiltiies in consideration entails logical nihilism: nothing follows logically from nothing Nihilism trivializes the logical consequence relation (against 3) Ergo, monism is false.

Earlier this morning I had a chance to comment on Jeff Speak's talk “Merricks vs. the Russellian orthodoxy” at the Philosophical Aspects of Modality workshop  and you can watch the whole thing now at the following video: And here is the outline for my comments (the sections in blue are the ones we debated in the session): §1. Why think that propositions are structured? “Structured propositionalists have not always been as clear as they could have been, either about what the claim that propositions have constituents means, or about what, exactly, this claim is supposed to explain.”  So here is a probably partial list taken three recent papers: Gasiunas ( forthcoming ), Keller (2013) and Tillerman and Fowler (2012): Explain general content differences, for example between the proposition that Paris is a city and that Santa Monica is a city , or between the proposition that Ana loves Mary and that Mary loves Ana . According to proponents of the structured-...