Sets are central to mathematics and its foundations, but what are they? In this book Luca Incurvati provides a detailed examination of all the major conceptions of set and discusses their virtues and shortcomings, as well as introducing the fundamentals of the alternative set theories with which these conceptions are associated. He shows that the conceptual landscape includes not only the naïve and iterative conceptions but also the limitation of size conception, the definite conception, the stratified conception and the (...) graph conception. In addition, he presents a novel, minimalist account of the iterative conception which does not require the existence of a relation of metaphysical dependence between a set and its members. His book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in logic and the philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss whether there are genuinely *diachronic* constraints of practical rationality, that is, pressures on combinations of practical attitudes over time, which are not reducible to mere synchronic rational pressures. Michael Bratman has recently argued that there is at least one such diachronic rational constraint that governs the stability of intentions over time. *Pace* Bratman, I argue that there are no genuinely diachronic constraints on intentions that meet the stringent desiderata set by him. But I show that (...) there are at least two synchronic rational constraints with distinctive and important, although only indirect, diachronic dimensions. Neither of them, however, supports the practical conservatism in the face of normative underdetermination that, according to Bratman, is part and parcel of the diachronic rationality of intention stability. (shrink)

As systems based on opaque Artificial Intelligence (AI) continue to flourish in diverse real-world applications, understanding these black box models has become paramount. In response, Explainable AI (XAI) has emerged as a field of research with practical and ethical benefits across various domains. This paper not only highlights the advancements in XAI and its application in real-world scenarios but also addresses the ongoing challenges within XAI, emphasizing the need for broader perspectives and collaborative efforts. We bring together experts from diverse (...) fields to identify open problems, striving to synchronize research agendas and accelerate XAI in practical applications. By fostering collaborative discussion and interdisciplinary cooperation, we aim to propel XAI forward, contributing to its continued success. Our goal is to put forward a comprehensive proposal for advancing XAI. To achieve this goal, we present a manifesto of 27 open problems categorized into nine categories. These challenges encapsulate the complexities and nuances of XAI and offer a road map for future research. For each problem, we provide promising research directions in the hope of harnessing the collective intelligence of interested stakeholders. (shrink)

In this paper we aim to offer a balanced argument to motivate (re)thinking about the mental illness clause within the insanity defence. This is the clause that states that mental illness should have a relevant causal or explanatory role for the presence of the incapacities or limited capacities that are covered by this defence. We offer three main considerations showing the important legal and epistemological roles that the mental illness clause plays in the evaluation of legal responsibility. Although we acknowledge (...) that these advantages could be preserved without having this clause explicitly stated in the law, we resist proposals that deny the importance of mental illness in exculpation. We argue, thus, that any attempt at removing the mental illness clause from legal formulations of the insanity defence should offer alternative ways of keeping in place these advantages. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate whether there are genuine and irreducible pressures of diachronic rationality grounded on the structure of the subject rather than on substantive considerations, such as pragmatic ones. I argue that structural pressures of diachronic rationality have a limited scope. The most important pressure only tells against arbitrary interference with the mechanisms for the retention of attitudes over time. I then argue that in the practical case, a substantial account in terms of the agent's temporal identity appears (...) more promising than a purely structural one, but in the end it still leaves many questions about diachronic practical rationality underdetermined. (shrink)

This article criticizes Laura Valentini's criterion for distinguishing good and bad idealizations in normative political theory. I argue that, on an attentive reading of her criterion, all ideal theories she discusses must be written off as incorporating bad idealizations. This fact makes Valentini's criterion trivially implausible, for it is argued that there are good idealizations that succeed in promoting the action-guiding goal of ideal theory. Upon rejecting an attempt to salvage the idealizations that Valentini marks off as bad, I develop (...) an alternative criterion for demarcating good and bad idealizations. The criterion holds that the standing of a theory's idealized assumptions depends on whether the stipulated idealizations can be feasibly realized in the non-ideal world, and thus on whether the principles that the theory generates can be made relevant for real-world practice. I also claim that the feasibility criterion better reflects the function of idealization in promoting action-guidance. Unlike Valentini's criterion, the feasibility criterion yields the result that Rawls' theories of domestic and international justice both incorporate bad idealizations. (shrink)

According to constitutivism, the objective authority of practical reason is to be grounded in the constitutive features of agency. In this paper, I offer a brief survey of the basic structure of constitutive argument about objectivity and consider how constitutivism might dispel the worry that it can only ground a conditional kind of authority. I then consider David Enoch’s original shmagency challenge and the response in terms of the inescapability of agency. In particular, I revisit the appeal to inescapability in (...) light of Enoch’s restatement of the challenge in 'Shmagency Revisited'. I argue that the revised challenge still fails but that it helps clarify: first, the distinction between external and internal challenges to constitutivism, and, second, the existence of at least different kinds of inescapability of agency (metaphysical, psychological, and dialectical). I argue that only dialectical inescapability is helpful to show that constitutivism is a viable metanormative theory. I conclude by claiming that an internal challenge to constitutivism is still possible in principle but that the burden of proof has shifted once again to the critics of constitutivism. (shrink)

Psychopaths have emotional and rational impairments that can be expressed in persistent criminal behaviour. UK and US law has not traditionally excused disordered individuals for their crimes citing these impairments as a cause for their criminal behaviour. Until now, the discussion of whether psychopaths are morally responsible for their behaviour has usually taken place in the realm of philosophy. However, in recent years, this debate has been informed by scientific and psychiatric advancements, fundamentally so with the development of Robert Hare's (...) diagnostic tool, the Psychopathy Checklist. Responsibility and Psychopathy explores the moral responsibility of psychopaths. It engages with problems at the interface between law, psychiatry, and philosophy, and is divided into three parts offering relevant interdisciplinary background information to address this main problem. The first part discusses the public policy and legal responses to psychopathy. It offers an introduction to the central practical issue of how public policy should respond to psychopathy, providing insights for those arguing about the responsibility of psychopaths. The second part introduces recent scientific advancements in the classification, description, explanation, and treatment of psychopathy. The third part of the volume includes chapters covering the most significant dimensions of philosophical debate on the moral and criminal responsibility of psychopaths. (shrink)

There are two standard conceptions of the functioning of and rationale for the diachronic will, i.e., for an agent's capacity to settle on her future conduct in advance. According to the pragmatic-instrumentalist view, the diachronic will benefits us by increasing the long-term satisfaction of our rational preferences. According to the cognitive view, it benefits us by satisfying our standing desire for self-knowledge and self-understanding. Contrary to these views, I argue for a constitutive view of the diachronic will: the rationale for (...) it is that it makes possible to engage in activities with a radically novel temporal structure, activities that are not merely continuous over time, but temporally integrated and unified. These activities are essential to our form of life and to our existence as temporally unified agents. The instrumental and cognitive benefits, if any, are merely secondary to the ontological ones. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est issu d’un colloque organisé lors du mois de juillet 2014 à Ioannina en Grèce. Il est constitué de quatorze chapitres rédigés en anglais par différents contributeurs et répartis en trois sections de manière à mettre en exergue une série d’approches thématiques distinctes mais complémentaires. La première partie (ch. 1–5 : Discourses, Legitimacy, Charisma) s’intéresse aux processus de créations par les élites gouvernantes de messages politiques invoquant des éléments appartenant...

Acerbo Stefano, « The εὐνοµώτατος ἔρανος in Pindar O. 1.25–27 and the Myth of Pelops: A Reassessment », Mnemosyne 75–2 (2022), p. 211–238 [revient sur les interprétations de l’épisode du chaudron de Pélops, avant de proposer une version différente, dans laquelle le chaudron évoquerait des représentations mythiques sur le rajeunissement et l’immortalité]. Alepidou Apostolia, « Thetis in Identity Crisis: Inversions of the Iliad in Statius’ Achilleid », Mnemosyne 74–5 (2021), p. 799–824 [compare...

This research was carried out to explore some of the cognitive processes involved in scientific anomalies resolution. 40 subjects with a good neuropsychology expertise were asked to explain two (invented) anomalous neuropsychological cases. The subjects' efforts to give a meaningful structure to the data were recorded, and the resulting reasoning blocks were analysed to extract and compute the inferential (deductive, inductive and abductive) and analogical processes used. The processes were intercorrelated to experimentally verify the co-occurrence of different forms of logical (...) thinking. Statistical analysis point out the relevance of abductive inferences, the possible presence of an inferential-style switching process , the high number of external analogies used, the cognitive closeness manifested by expert reasoners. (shrink)

This appreciation outlines the life and work of Giulio Preti, a philosopher of the critical rationalist movement. His was a tormented and conflictual philosophical itinerary from his intellectual roots in 1930s Italy, via the philosophical journal Studi filosofici in the 1940s, to his major works Praxis and Empiricism and Rhetoric and Logic in the 1950s and 1960s. His anxiety about the ambiguity of contemporary reality, it is suggested, is also ours.

One type of argument to sceptical paradox proceeds by making a case that a certain kind of metaphysically “heavyweight or “cornerstone” proposition is beyond all possible evidence and hence may not be known or justifiably believed. Crispin Wright has argued that we can concede that our acceptance of these propositions is evidentially risky and still remain rationally entitled to those of our ordinary knowledge claims that are seemingly threatened by that concession. A problem for Wright’s proposal is the so-called Leaching (...) worry: if we are merely rationally entitled to accept the cornerstones without evidence, how can we achieve evidence-based knowledge of the multitude of quotidian propositions that we think we know, which require the cornerstones to be true? This paper presents a rigorous, novel explication of this worry within a Bayesian framework, and offers the Entitlement theorist two distinct responses. (shrink)

I argue that intending and acting belong to the same genus: intending is a kind of doing continuous in structure with intentional acting. Future-directed intending is not a truly separate phenomenon from either the intending in action or the acting itself. Ultimately, all intentions are in action, or better still, in extended courses of action. I show how the intuitive distinction between intending and acting is based on modeling the two phenomena on the extreme and limiting cases of an otherwise (...) continuous spectrum of the ways in which agents exercise rational active intelligent guidance in the pursuit of goals. I argue that diachronic intentional agency is better understood in terms of continuity and unity of courses of active and intelligent guidance, and that the distinction between intending to do something and doing it is only a derivative and context-dependent segmentation of these continuous courses of rational active intelligent guidance. (shrink)

A common feature of all versions of constitutivism is the “simple constitutivist move” to the effect that engagement in any enterprise requires respecting the constitutive standards of the enterpri...

Coherentism in epistemology has long suffered from lack of formal and quantitative explication of the notion of coherence. One might hope that probabilistic accounts of coherence such as those proposed by Lewis, Shogenji, Olsson, Fitelson, and Bovens and Hartmann will finally help solve this problem. This paper shows, however, that those accounts have a serious common problem: the problem of belief individuation. The coherence degree that each of the accounts assigns to an information set (or the verdict it gives as (...) to whether the set is coherent tout court) depends on how beliefs (or propositions) that represent the set are individuated. Indeed, logically equivalent belief sets that represent the same information set can be given drastically different degrees of coherence. This feature clashes with our natural and reasonable expectation that the coherence degree of a belief set does not change unless the believer adds essentially new information to the set or drops old information from it; or, to put it simply, that the believer cannot raise or lower the degree of coherence by purely logical reasoning. None of the accounts in question can adequately deal with coherence once logical inferences get into the picture. Toward the end of the paper, another notion of coherence that takes into account not only the contents but also the origins (or sources) of the relevant beliefs is considered. It is argued that this notion of coherence is of dubious significance, and that it does not help solve the problem of belief individuation. (shrink)

This is the first edited collection entirely dedicated to non-evidentialist epistemology or non-evidentialism—the controversial view that evidence is not required in order for doxastic attitudes to enjoy a positive epistemic status. Belief or acceptance can be epistemically justified, warranted, or rational without evidence. The volume is divided into three section: the first focuses on hinge epistemology, the second offers a critical reflection about evidentialist and non-evidentialist epistemologies, and the third explores extensions of non-evidentialism to the fields of social psychology, psychiatry, (...) and mathematics. Contributors: N. Ashton, A. Coliva, J. Kim, K. McCain, A. Meylan, L. Moretti, S. Moruzzi, J. Ohlorst, N. Pedersen, T. Piazza, L. Zanetti. (shrink)

Given the common assumption that measurement plays an important role in the foundation of science, the paper analyzes the possibility that Measurement Science, and therefore measurement itself, can be properly founded. The realist and the representational positions are analyzed at this regards: the conclusion, that such positions unavoidably lead to paradoxical situations, opens the discussion for a new epistemology of measurement, whose characteristics and interpretation are sketched here but are still largely matter of investigation.

Can static pictures depict motion and temporal properties? This is an open question that is becoming increasingly discussed in both aesthetics and the philosophy of mind. Theorists working on this issue have mainly focused on static pictures of dynamic scenes and streaky images – such as futurists’ paintings or long-exposure photographs. And yet, we could ask: if there is some success in creating an illusory impression of movement in a static image - as is the case in optical illusions of (...) movement, such as Bridget Riley’s Fall (1963: Tate, London), or Kitaoka’s Rotating Snakes Illusion - is this to say that such static images depict movement? As far as I know, no one working on the depiction of motion has specifically and systematically tackled motion-based illusions nor tried to answer this question. This paper considers two cases of optical illusions of movement and concludes that one of them is involved in the depiction of movement. While the declared goal of my analysis is to answer a quite circumscribed question, it is also the occasion to tackle motion-based illusions tout court - to account for the complex visual experiences they elicit and related phenomenology. Moreover, this account has interesting consequences for theorizing depiction and pictorial experience in general. In particular, it constitutes a counterexample to resemblance theories of depiction. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that Michael Huemer’s phenomenal conservatism—the internalist view according to which our beliefs are prima facie justified if based on how things seems or appears to us to be—doesn’t fall afoul of Michael Bergmann’s dilemma for epistemological internalism. We start by showing that the thought experiment that Bergmann adduces to conclude that is vulnerable to his dilemma misses its target. After that, we distinguish between two ways in which a mental state can contribute to the justification (...) of a belief: the direct way and the indirect way. We identify a straightforward reason for claiming that the justification contributed indirectly is subject to Bergmann’s dilemma. Then we show that the same reason doesn’t extend to the claim that the justification contributed directly is subject to Bergmann’s dilemma. As is the view that seemings or appearances contribute justification directly, we infer that Bergmann’s contention that his dilemma applies to is unmotivated. In the final part, we suggest that our line of response to Bergmann can be used to shield other types of internalist justification from Bergmann’s objection. We also propose that seeming-grounded justification can be combined with justification of one of these types to form the basis of a promising version of internalist foundationalism. (shrink)

This is a book about intellectuals in late twentieth-century Hungary. Altough not strictly a work of intellectual history, it is very much of interest to intellectual historians of the Soviet and p...

Cet ouvrage est issu du colloque Beyond East and West. Hellenistic Commagene in its Local and Global Eurasian Contest, organisé en 2018 à l’Université de Münster. Prenant place dans le cadre d’une collaboration entre le Forschungsstelle Asia Minor et le cluster of excellence « Religion and Politics », ce rassemblement a vu la constitution d’un panel impressionnant de chercheurs issus de différentes disciplines. Le livre qui en résulte se présente sous la forme de 19 contributions réparties en...

It is often argued that future-directed decisions are effective at shaping our future conduct because they give rise, at the time of action, to a decisive reason to act as originally decided. In this paper, I argue that standard accounts of decision-based reasons are unsatisfactory. For they focus either on tie-breaking scenarios or cases of self-directed distal manipulation. I argue that future-directed decisions are better understood as tools for the non-manipulative, intrapersonal division of deliberative labor over time. A future-directed decision (...) to ϕ gives rise to a defeasible exclusionary reason to ϕ. This reason is grounded on the default authority that is normally granted to one’s prior self as an “expert” deliberator. I argue that this kind of exclusionary reason is the only one that can account for the effectiveness of future-directed decisions at shaping our diachronic agency without violating our autonomy over time. (shrink)

What can the philosophy of agency learn from Nguyen’s book on games? The most important lesson concerns, to use Nguyen’s terms, the ‘layered’ structure of our agency and the ‘fluidity’ requ...

According to Jim Pryor’s dogmatism, when you have an experience with content p, you often have prima facie justification for believing p that doesn’t rest on your independent justification for believing any proposition. Although dogmatism has an intuitive appeal and seems to have an antisceptical bite, it has been targeted by various objections. This paper principally aims to answer the objections by Roger White according to which dogmatism is inconsistent with the Bayesian account of how evidence affects our rational credences. (...) If this were true, the rational acceptability of dogmatism would be seriously questionable. I respond that these objections don’t get off the ground because they assume that our experiences and our introspective beliefs that we have experiences have the same evidential force, whereas the dogmatist is uncommitted to this assumption. I also consider the question whether dogmatism has an antisceptical bite. I suggest that the answer turns on whether or not the Bayesian can determine the priors of hypotheses and conjectures on the grounds of their extra-empirical virtues. If the Bayesian can do so, the thesis that dogmatism has an antisceptical bite is probably false. (shrink)

Human mental workload is arguably the most invoked multidimensional construct in Human Factors and Ergonomics, getting momentum also in Neuroscience and Neuroergonomics. Uncertainties exist in its characterization, motivating the design and development of computational models, thus recently and actively receiving support from the discipline of Computer Science. However, its role in human performance prediction is assured. This work is aimed at providing a synthesis of the current state of the art in human mental workload assessment through considerations, definitions, measurement techniques (...) as well as applications, Findings suggest that, despite an increasing number of associated research works, a single, reliable and generally applicable framework for mental workload research does not yet appear fully established. One reason for this gap is the existence of a wide swath of operational definitions, built upon different theoretical assumptions which are rarely examined collectively. A second reason is that the three main classes of measures, which are self-report, task performance, and physiological indices, have been used in isolation or in pairs, but more rarely in conjunction all together. Multiple definitions complement each another and we propose a novel inclusive definition of mental workload to support the next generation of empirical-based research. Similarly, by comprehensively employing physiological, task-performance, and self-report measures, more robust assessments of mental workload can be achieved. (shrink)

It is often argued, most recently by Samuel Scheffler, that we should reconcile with our mortality as constitutive of our existence: as essential to its temporal structure, to the nature of deliberation, and to our basic motivations and values. Against this reconciliatory strategy, I argue that there is a kind of immortal existence that is coherently conceivable and potentially desirable. First, I argue against the claim that our existence has a temporal structure with a trajectory that necessarily culminates in an (...) ending. This claim is based on two false assumptions: that a life as a whole calls for narrative structure, and that narratives necessarily require closure as temporal endings. Second, I reject the proposal that temporal finitude is constitutive of the basic elements of diachronic agency, including the nature of deliberation and of our values. I argue that only finitude as scarcity of opportunities is constitutive of these elements. Additionally, scarcity might be present in an endless existence. Therefore, it is not incoherent to conceive of a recognizable and potentially desirable immortality that grounds the core features of diachronic agency. Thus, against the reconciliatory strategy, I conclude that we might never fully reconcile with mortality. Although we might embrace our inescapable mortality as essential to a fuller range of features of our existence, we can still justifiably regret our missing on an immortal existence. (shrink)

In this paper we argue, against a somewhat standard view, that pragmatic phenomena occur in mathematical language. We provide concrete examples supporting this thesis.

ObjectiveThe study is an explorative investigation aimed to assess the differences in acute stress response patterns of health workers facing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) during Italy’s first lockdown.MethodsA cross-sectional investigation using convenience sampling method was conducted in Italy during April 2020. Eight hundred fifty-eight health workers participated in the research filling out self-report measures including Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD-7), Insomnia Severity Index (ISI), and Impact of Event Scale–Revised (IES-R).ResultsModerate/severe depression was found in 28.9% (95% CI, 25.8–32.04), (...) moderate/severe anxiety in 55.4% (95% CI, 51.9–58.8), insomnia in 15% (95% CI, 12.5–17.5), and distress in 52.5% (95% CI, 48.5%–56.6) of participants. The 3% of health workers reported frequent suicidal thoughts. Female sex, working for >15 h/week in a COVID-19 unit, and living apart from family were associated with a significantly higher risk of distress, anxiety, insomnia, depression, and functional impairment. Four profiles were identified on the basis of psychopathological measures: Profile_0 included 44% (N= 270); Profile_1, 25.6% (N= 157); Profile_2, 19.1% (N= 117); and Profile_3, 11.3% (N= 69) of participants. Results showed a significant effect for Profiles X IES-R (η2= 0.079;f= 0.29), indicating that in all profiles, except for Profile_0, avoidance scale is lower than hyperarousal and intrusion symptoms scales of the IES-R. This characteristic could be a probable index of the control exerted by the responders to not fly away from their job.ConclusionThe identification of specific profiles could help psychiatrists and emergency psychologists to build specific interventions in terms of both primary and secondary prevention to face future waves of the COVID-19 outbreak. (shrink)

Transmission of justification across inference is a valuable and indeed ubiquitous epistemic phenomenon in everyday life and science. It is thanks to the phenomenon of epistemic transmission that inferential reasoning is a means for substantiating predictions of future events and, more generally, for expanding the sphere of our justified beliefs or reinforcing the justification of beliefs that we already entertain. However, transmission of justification is not without exceptions. As a few epistemologists have come to realise, more or less trivial forms (...) of circularity can prevent justification from transmitting from p to q even if one has justification for p and one is aware of the inferential link from p to q. In interesting cases this happens because one can acquire justification for p only if one has independent justification for q. In this case the justification for q cannot depend on the justification for p and the inferential link from p to q, as genuine transmission would require. The phenomenon of transmission failure seems to shed light on philosophical puzzles, such as Moore's proof of a material world and McKinsey's paradox, and it plays a central role in various philosophical debates. For this reason it is being granted continued and increasing attention. (shrink)

”The last remnant of physical objectivity of space-time” is disclosed in the case of a continuous family of spatially non-compact models of general relativity. The physical individuation of point-events is furnished by the autonomous degrees of freedom of the gravitational field, which represent -as it were -the ontic part of the metric field. The physical role of the epistemic part is likewise clarified as embodying the unavoidable non-inertial aspects of GR. At the end the philosophical import of the Hole Argument (...) is substantially weakened and in fact the Argument itself dis-solved, while a specific four-dimensional holistic and structuralist view of space-time emerges, including elements common to the tradition of both substantivalism and relationism. The observables of our models undergo real temporal change: this gives new evidence to the fact that statements like the frozen-time character of evolution, as other ontological claims about GR, are model dependent. (shrink)

The central thesis of this paper is that human unconscious processes influence the behavior and design of artificial intelligence (AI). This thesis is discussed through the case study of a chatbot called Replika, which intends to provide psychological assistance and friendship but has been accused of inciting murder and suicide. Replika originated from a trauma and a work of mourning lived by its creator. The traces of these unconscious dynamics can be detected in the design of the app and the (...) narratives about it. Therefore, a process of de-psychologization and de-humanization of the unconscious takes place through AI. This psychosocial approach helps criticize and overcome the so-called “standard model of intelligence” shared by most AI researchers. It facilitates a new interpretation of some classic problems in AI, such as control and responsibility. (shrink)

According to the iterative conception of set, sets can be arranged in a cumulative hierarchy divided into levels. But why should we think this to be the case? The standard answer in the philosophical literature is that sets are somehow constituted by their members. In the first part of the paper, I present a number of problems for this answer, paying special attention to the view that sets are metaphysically dependent upon their members. In the second part of the paper, (...) I outline a different approach, which circumvents these problems by dispensing with the priority or dependence relation altogether. Along the way, I show how this approach enables the mathematical structuralist to defuse an objection recently raised against her view. (shrink)

In this work, we present some traits of the socio-political and economic thought of Giuseppe Toniolo, who lived in Italy at the turn of the XIX and XX century, with special reference to the contribution that the Italian economist and sociologist gave to the definition and implementation of the principle of subsidiarity and to the ethical foundation of economic science. After outlining the definition of the subsidiarity principle in the first paragraph, we sketch the historical background in which Toniolo lived (...) and operated. We then focus on the ethical factor and on the concept of subsidiary State emerging from Toniolo’s writings. Finally, we present some of the main elements of Toniolo’s legacy with reference to the current economic and socio-political debate. (shrink)

In this paper we focus on transmission and failure of transmission of warrant. We identify three individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for transmission of warrant, and we show that their satisfaction grounds a number of interesting epistemic phenomena that have not been sufficiently appreciated in the literature. We then scrutinise Wright’s analysis of transmission failure and improve on extant readings of it. Nonetheless, we present a Bayesian counterexample that shows that Wright’s analysis is partially incoherent with our analysis of (...) warrant transmission and prima facie defective. We conclude exploring three alternative lines of reply: developing a more satisfactory account of transmission failure, which we outline; dismissing the Bayesian counterexample by rejecting some of its assumptions; reinterpreting Wright’s analysis to make it immune to the counterexample. (shrink)

Many classically valid meta-inferences fail in a standard supervaluationist framework. This allegedly prevents supervaluationism from offering an account of good deductive reasoning. We provide a proof system for supervaluationist logic which includes supervaluationistically acceptable versions of the classical meta-inferences. The proof system emerges naturally by thinking of truth as licensing assertion, falsity as licensing negative assertion and lack of truth-value as licensing rejection and weak assertion. Moreover, the proof system respects well-known criteria for the admissibility of inference rules. Thus, supervaluationists (...) can provide an account of good deductive reasoning. Our proof system moreover brings to light how one can revise the standard supervaluationist framework to make room for higher-order vagueness. We prove that the resulting logic is sound and complete with respect to the consequence relation that preserves truth in a model of the non-normal modal logic _NT_. Finally, we extend our approach to a first-order setting and show that supervaluationism can treat vagueness in the same way at every order. The failure of conditional proof and other meta-inferences is a crucial ingredient in this treatment and hence should be embraced, not lamented. (shrink)

"The last remnant of physical objectivity of space-time" is disclosed, beyond the Leibniz equivalence, in the case of a continuous family of spatially non-compact models of general relativity. The physical individuation of point-events is furnished by the intrinsic degrees of freedom of the gravitational field, (viz, the "Dirac observables") that represent - as it were - the "ontic" part of the metric field. The physical role of the "epistemic" part (viz. the "gauge" variables) is likewise clarified. At the end, a (...) peculiar four-dimensional "holistic and structuralist" view of space-time emerges which includes elements common to the tradition of both substantivalism and relationism. The observables of our models undergo real "temporal change" and thereby provide a counter-example to the thesis of the "frozen-time" picture of evolution. (shrink)