Programme for Michaelmas 2014

Call a grammatical type confusion (GTC) any ungrammatical string whose ungrammaticality is owed a mismatch of the broad syntactic types of its constituent expressions. Paradigm examples are strings consisting solely of first-level predicates (e.g `sings dances') and strings consisting solely of singular terms (e.g. `Frege the Baltic Sea'). GTCs are widely held to be meaningless. This view, however, has been challenged by Ofra Magidor (2009) who argues that on semantic theories of several kinds GTCs are naturally assigned meanings. Fregean semantics is one such theory. I discuss in detail, and in light of Magidor's paper, what Frege ought to say about the semantic status of GTCs. I show that the issue interacts in interesting ways with Frege's views on the ontology of linguistic expressions, his views on the conditions for identity of reference and identity of sense, and the paradox of the concept horse.

Since 2007 many homeowners have found themselves with underwater mortgages – mortgages worth less than their home. I argue that we ought to guarantee homeowners the opportunity to insure against underwater mortgages by signing mortgage contracts with walking away-clauses: clauses that give homeowners the right to transfer the property rights of their home to the bank in return for the remainder of their mortgage being excused. I present two arguments: i) mortgages without walking away-clauses being intrinsically unfair and ii) mortgages without walking away-clauses giving rise to morally objectionable inequality.

A naive reading of certain physical theories suggests that physical laws are unattractively indeterministic. One strategy for avoiding this is to adopt the metaphysical doctrine of antihaecceitism. But it has been argued that this move leaves behind an unacceptable degree of de re indeterminism, and (more recently) that it cannot give the right account of de re objective chances. It looks like the antihaecceitist will have to bite some bullets, but which ones? After a gentle introduction to the issues, I will explain why some of the examples deployed against antihaecceitism don't work, and propose some better ones. Then I will suggest how some, but not all, of the remaining difficulties might be overcome by a more careful account of possible futures.

Conscientious accommodation is the practice of exempting someone from a legal requirement, or not imposing that requirement in the first place, because that person believes that it would be morally wrong to comply with that requirement. Conscientious accommodation is intuitive but baffling. First, where does it end? If pacifists are entitled to accommodation, why aren’t principled murderers as well? Second, what are its grounds? How could someone’s false belief that he must ϕ justify a legal permission for him to ϕ? I answer both these questions.

In this paper I respond to Cover & O'Leary-Hawthorne's (1996, 1999) claims that Leibniz did not construe the world as being fundamentally purely qualitative in character: in other words, that he did not think the world is in principle fully and perspicuously describable by general or "non-individual-involving" propositions alone (i.e. that he was not, in their terminology, a "generalist"). I begin by providing - and refining - the standard reasons given by theorists for thinking that Leibniz was a generalist. I then move on to present the reasons Cover & O'Leary-Hawthorne provide for doubting whether this "Received View" of Leibniz construed as a generalist is correct. I go on to argue that the textual evidence they cite in support of their thesis that Leibniz failed to conceive of the world as being fundamentally purely qualitative is not convincing, and I also claim they are importantly guilty of failing to properly situate many of these texts within their broader historical and dialectical contexts. Furthermore, I question whether their own attempted interpretative resolution to the (alleged) non-generalist strands in Leibniz's philosophy satisfactorily resolves the (apparent) difficulties they raise in interpreting Leibniz as a straightforward generalist, or indeed whether such a resolution is compatible with other important aspects of Leibniz's metaphysics. I conclude that the only reasonable inference to draw is that the Received View --- or what Cover & O'Leary-Hawthorne label the "natural interpretation" or "conservative reading" of Leibniz --- is in fact not only natural, but also probably correct, and is none the worse for also being conservative.

Recent interest in grounding explanations has generated a variety of different accounts. We may divide these alternatives into two groups: call an account nonconstitutive if whatever is grounded is thought to carry ontological commitments beyond that of its grounds, and constitutive otherwise. This paper considers a regress worry for grounding, arguing that nonconstitutive accounts make the regress come out vicious. I will argue that if grounding is taken to be a relation between facts, no fact can be grounded. Instead, I will take `ground' to be a sentential operator such as `and' or `unless', providing a new semantics for the ground operator that will not lead to a vicious regress.

This paper aims to defend the value of empathy by arguing that it plays an important moral epistemic role. This does not mean that empathy (broadly construed as feeling what another person feels) is always good, but rather that a particular kind of empathy, used within a context of rational deliberation, can be very useful in informing moral decisions.

The notion that a reason should be based on factual considerations (pace Maria Alvarez, Clayton Littlejohn, and others) appears to be a reasonable one. Additionally, the notion that one could have degrees of belief (or credences) also appears to be a reasonable notion. However, if an accurate account of an action were to be given, it would be difficult to reconcile the notion of degrees of belief with the notion of factive reasons. For example, if a person acts off of a 60% credence and her reason for acting happens to non-accidentally be based on factual considerations, there is a gap between the solidity of her credence and the objective rendering of her reason. Given this, the temptation would be to declare that either the notion of credences or the notion of factive reasons must be incorrect. My claim is that neither is incorrect, but rather the gap is in need of further analysis and explanation, which I provide in my paper.