New Blackfriars, Volume 102, Issue 1101, Page 607-622, September 2021.

Isn't probability 1 certainty? If the probability is objective, so is the certainty: whatever has chance 1 of occurring is certain to occur. Equivalently, whatever has chance 0 of occurring is certain not to occur. If the probability is subjective, so is the certainty: if you give credence 1 to an event, you are certain that it will occur. Equivalently, if you give credence 0 to an event, you are certain that it will not occur. And so on for other (...) kinds of probability, such as evidential probability. The formal analogue of this picture is the regularity constraint: a probability distribution over sets of possibilities is regular just in case it assigns probability 0 only to the null set, and therefore probability 1 only to the set of all possibilities. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Operational epistemology is, to a first approximation, the attempt to provide cognitive rules such that one is in principle always in a position to know whether one is complying with them. In Knowledge and its Limits, I argue that the only such rules are trivial ones. In this paper, I generalize the argument in several ways to more thoroughly probabilistic settings, in order to show that it does not merely demonstrate some oddity of the folk epistemological conception of knowledge. Some (...) of the generalizations involve a formal semantic framework for treating epistemic probabilities of epistemic probabilities and expectations of expectations. The upshot is that operational epistemology cannot work, and that knowledge-based epistemology has the right characteristics to avoid its problems. (shrink)

In “Knowing the Intuition and Knowing the Counterfactual”, Jonathan Ichikawa objects that this misrepresents the thought experiment as more accident‐prone than it really is. Ichikawa could take over exactly the formalization of the Gettier argument that the book recommends counterfactual and all. Michael Martin suggests that the idea of progress in a discipline, although applicable to mathematics and the natural sciences, fails to fit some of the humanities, such as history, so that we should not be too surprised if it (...) also fails to fit philosophy. Martin is more willing to countenance progress for individual philosophers than for the discipline as a whole. The crucial difference, Brandom argues, is that only the human can do things like reasoning from “That’s red” to “That’s colored.” Metaphysics is back in fashion, at least in the analytic tradition that dominates English‐speaking philosophy and is growing rapidly across the rest of the world too. (shrink)

It is known that indicative and subjunctive conditionals interact differently with a rigidifying "actually" operator. The paper studies this difference in an abstract setting. It does not assume the framework of possible world semantics, characterizing "actually" instead by the type of logically valid formulas to which it gives rise. It is proved that in a language with such features all sentential contexts that are congruential (in the sense that they preserve logical equivalence) are extensional (in the sense that they preserve (...) material equivalence). For a subjunctive conditional, the natural conclusion to draw is that it is non-congruential. It is much harder to defend the claim that an indicative conditional is non-congruential. The pressure to treat the indicative conditional as truth-functional is correspondingly greater. The implications of these results for attempts to interpret the indicative conditional as an epistemic or doxastic operator are assessed. (shrink)

We study the following classes: Q* (r 1 A 1 ,..., r kA k ) which is defined to be the collection of all sets that can be computed by a Turing machine that on any input makes a total of r i queries to A i for all i ∈ {1,..., k}. Q(r 1A 1 ,...,r kA k ) which is defined like Q* (r 1A 1 ,..., r kA k ) except that queries to A i must be (...) made before queries to A i+1 for all i ∈ {1,..., k - 1}. QC(r 1A 1 ,..., r kA k ) which is defined like Q(r 1A 1 ,..., r kA k ) except that the Turing machine must halt even if given incorrect answers to some of its queries. We show that if A 1 ,..., A k are jumps that are not too close together, then all three of these classes are identical and are not changed if we permute (r 1A 1 ,..., r kA k ). This extends a result of Beigel's [1]. Since the second class is not affected by permutations, we say that these sets commute with each other. We also show that jumps that are too close together may not commute. We also characterize the commutative sequences of sets obtained by iterating the jump operation through an ordinal notation. (shrink)

Kleist viewed anew as a major contributor to the tradition of post-Kantian thought.

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

This is a book for all those fascinated by the state of politics, critical thinking, and the plight of the individual in the 21st century.

An introduction to the work and life of the 18th c. philosopher Salomon Maimon, followed by translations (the first into English) of Maimon's final essays.

In an earlier paper, I claimed that one version of Putnam's model-theoretic argument against realism turned on a subtle, but philosophically significant, mathematical mistake. Recently, Luca Bellotti has criticized my argument for this claim. This paper responds to Bellotti's criticisms.

It is suggested that an understanding of blackbody radiation within classical physics requires the presence of classical electromagnetic zero-point radiation, the restriction to relativistic (Coulomb) scattering systems, and the use of discrete charge. The contrasting scaling properties of nonrelativistic classical mechanics and classical electrodynamics are noted, and it is emphasized that the solutions of classical electrodynamics found in nature involve constants which connect together the scales of length, time, and energy. Indeed, there are analogies between the electrostatic forces for groups (...) of particles of discrete charge and the van der Waals forces in equilibrium thermal radiation. The differing Lorentz- or Galilean-transformation properties of the zero-point radiation spectrum and the Rayleigh-Jeans spectrum are noted in connection with their scaling properties. Also, the thermal effects of acceleration within classical electromagnetism are related to the existence of thermal equilibrium within a gravitational field. The unique scaling and phase-space properties of a discrete charge in the Coulomb potential suggest the possibility of an equilibrium between the zero-point radiation spectrum and matter which is universal (independent of the particle mass), and an equilibrium between a universal thermal radiation spectrum and matter where the matter phase space depends only upon the ratio mc 2/k B T. The observations and qualitative suggestions made here run counter to the ideas of currently accepted quantum physics. (shrink)