Uneventful: Event Semantics for 'Qua'
to appear in
Philosophical Perspectives.
[abstract]
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Event semantics promises a straightforward account of the truth-conditions of qualifications with 'as' or 'qua', as well as the inferences such qualifications license. I argue that such promises are difficult to keep. On natural ways of developing the view, an event semantics of qualification yields either the wrong predictions about the truth-conditions and logic of qualification, or next to no predictions. Qua-qualifictions, I conclude, are sensitive to the meanings of the qualifying and qualified predicates in a way which resists all but a very schematic general analysis.
Intersectional Disadvantage
2024,
Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 102(4): 857–878.
[abstract]
Persons
2024,
The Routledge Handbook of Essence in Philosophy, Kathrin Koslicki & Michael Raven (eds).
[abstract]
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Like everything, I am something. I am also someone, a person. Many philosophers think that this additional fact about me is of great importance. Some think that by virtue of being a person I have a distinctive moral standing. Some think that by virtue of being a person I could, at least in principle, survive death. Claims such as these are naturally interpreted as being about the nature or essence of persons. In this chapter, I’ll explore various themes in the literature on persons, how they interact with one another, and what implications, if any, they have for wider debates in metaphysics and beyond.
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When people simultaneously occupy multiple social identities, ascriptions of disadvantage and advantage, as well as our reasoning with them, need to be handled with care. For instance, as various US-American courts have come to acknowledge, we cannot in general reason from the premise that someone has neither been discriminated against as a woman nor as a Black person to the conclusion that they have not been discriminated against as a Black woman. In this article, I show how, by systematising such qualified ascriptions of disadvantage (and advantage), as well as the patterns of reasoning involving them, we can articulate and defend central theses of intersectionality theory in remarkably general terms, and we can do so without having to commit to a particular metaphysics of intersectional identities.
Agentive Duality Reconsidered (with Julia Zakkou)
2022,
Philosophical Studies, 179: 3771–3789.
[abstract]
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A growing consensus in the literature on agentive modals has it that ability modals like `can' or `able to' have a dual , i.e. interpretations
of `must' or `cannot but' which stand to necessity as ability stands to possibility . We argue that this thesis (which we call `Agentive Duality')
is much more controversial than meets the eye. While Agentive Duality follows from the orthodox possibility analysis of ability given natural assumptions, it sits
uneasily with a wide range of alternative proposals which are unified by the idea that ability requires control . In particular, we show that against the
background of a control requirement on ability, Agentive Duality can be used to derive absurd predictions featuring this dual. Far from being a purely definitional
thesis, Agentive Duality thus affords a new lens through which to assess the long-standing debate between possibility analyses of ability and their discontents.
Choice Points for a Theory of Normality
2022,
Mind, 131(521): 159–191.
[abstract]
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A variety of recent work in epistemology employs a notion of normality to provide novel theories of knowledge or justification.
Such theories are often advertised as affording particularly strong epistemic logics, supporting among others the controversial KK
principle according to which knowledge iterates freely. However, underlying such stronger epistemic logics are often substantive assumptions
about the background notion of normality and its logic. This article takes recent normality based defences of KK as a case
study to submit such assumptions to scrutiny. After highlighting a disconnect between the logical forms of normality claims in natural
language and those assumed in the literature, I propose a natural way of regimenting normality claims and use that regimentation to isolate
a number of choice points regarding the role of contingency, context-sensitivity and similarity in our theorising with normality.
While both weaker and stronger logics of normality can be motivated depending on how such choices are resolved, securing logics of normality
strong enough for normality to play its envisaged role in epistemology may have unwelcome downstream consequences for the resultant epistemic theories.
Die allgemeinste objektive Möglichkeit. Replik auf Vetter.
2022,
Philosophisches Jahrbuch
[abstract]
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Barbara Vetter proposes that certain epistemic and metasemantic challenges to our theorising about metaphysical modality can be met by an approach which generalizes from every day paradigms of
objective modality—notably the abilities and dispositions familiar to us "from the context of action"—to give content to the more abstract notion of a most general objective modality: metaphysical modality.
I argue that the ability ascriptions which are central to our day to day practical reasoning are permeated with opacity and therefore make for problematic paradigms of an objective modality. While Vetter could
retrospectively “purify” her sample of paradigms, this would leave her in a similar position as those who seek to restrict a particularly broad modality, e.g. a priori conceivability, to its objective core. I conclude
by taking on Vetter’s pessimistic conjecture that proponents of different approaches to the metasemantic challenge operate under assumptions so dramatically different that we should not expect them to even share a subject matter.
Qua Qualification
2021,
Philosophers' Imprint 21(27): 1-24.
[abstract]
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Qualifications with 'as' or 'qua' are widely used in philosophy. Yet, how precisely such qualifications work is poorly understood.
While extant work on the topic is rife with revisionary assumptions about the nature of individuals, truth, and identity, this article
shows that no baroque theory is required to account for such qualifications. I develop and defend a simple theory on which qua-qualifications
ascribe relational properties to individuals, and show that the proposal affords a clear metaphysical analysis of the puzzle cases of interest.
Moreover, the theory makes adequate predictions about the linguistic behaviour and inferential profile of qua-qualifications. Since this is more
than any extant competing theory could claim, the proposal offers the best account of qua-qualification to date.
Qua Objects and their Limits
2021,
Mind, 130(518): 617-638.
[abstract]
-
It is both a matter of everyday experience and a tenet of sociological theory that people often
occupy a range of social roles and identities, some of which are associated with mutually incompatible properties.
But since nothing could have incompatible properties, it is not clear how this is possible. It has been suggested,
notably by Kit Fine (1982, 1999, 2006a), that the puzzling relation between a person and their various social roles
and identities can be explained by admitting an ontology of social qua-objects--objects constituted by,
yet distinct from the persons on which they are based. This article argues that admitting even a rich ontology of
such qua-objects does not suffice to explain the puzzle cases of interest.
Instead, alternative resources are required, which, once available, diminish the motivation for adopting an ontology
of social qua-objects in the first place. The paper concludes by considering whether there remains work for social
qua-objects in explaining differences in persistence conditions between a person and the social individuals
to which they may give rise, but reaches a negative verdict.
Social qua-objects, if they exist, have little work to do in our theorising about the relation between a person and
their various social roles and identities.
IN PROGRESS
Inexact Ability (R& R
, The Journal of Philosophy )
[abstract]
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Puzzles of inexact ability are meant to show that ability does not have a normal modal logic. In this paper, I present a new quantified formulation of the puzzle which suggests that this argument is too quick.
Puzzles of inexact ability can be generated without invoking any principles specific to a normal modal logic. In view of this observation, I newly map out the space of possible solutions to the puzzle, and
I argue for one particular solution which explains the inexactness of ability via the inexactness of intentional action. This solution is compatible with a normal modal logic for ability; in that sense it is logically conservative.
In addition, the proposal affords fresh insight into the ways in which ability plays with luck.
General Ability, Genericity, and Grain
[abstract]
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Many people in the literature on ability distinguish two kinds of ability: the ability to do something in a particular situation (specific ability) and the ability to do something across a wider range of possible situations (general ability). Recently, Mandelkern, Schultheis, and Boylan (2017) have proposed a compositional implementation of this idea. On their view, general ability reports are just specific ability reports in the scope of a generic operator. I argue that this view is committed to either an implausible account of general ability or an implausible account of specific ability. I propose an alternative unified picture on which there is just one kind of ability, possibility for doing more or less fine-grained actions, and I show how the contrasts people have tried to draw in the literature can be recovered on this view in a metaphysically perspicuous manner. Relativizing ability ascriptions to situations emerges as merely a communicatively efficient proxy for ascribing of certain fine-grained abilities.
Possibility Plenitude (with Alex Roberts)
[abstract]
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According to the influential thesis of material plenitude, each individual is coincident with a vast array of distinct individuals with different modal profiles. In this paper, we develop a systematic alternative to this thesis, which we call possibility plenitude. For any individual a and any modal profile, material plenitude posits an individual coincident with a which has that profile. In contrast, possibility plenitude implies that for any modal profile, there is a modality with respect to which a itself has that modal profile. After making this vision precise, we argue that possibility plenitude is not just a salient alternative to material plenitude, but also natural to study in its own right. We then investigate how possibility plenitude fares with one of the most important applications of material plenitude: handling the paradoxes of modal variation. We contend that possibility plenitude can offer a treatment of those paradoxes which is comparable to that of the best version of material plenitude.
Fission for Anti-Essentialists
[abstract]
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It is widely assumed in the literature on personal identity that people are essentially members of some kind, e.g., people are essentially persons or people are essentially human animals. I argue that two answers to fission puzzles which are usually set aside as unworkable look a lot more compelling once we drop such essentialist assumptions, and I argue that a lot can be learned from this exercise about what matters in survival.