Abstract Communication can be risky. Like other kinds of actions, it comes with potential costs. For instance, an utterance can be embarrassing, offensive, or downright illegal. In the face of such risks, speakers tend to act strategically and seek ‘plausible deniability’. In this paper, we propose an account of the notion of deniability at issue. On our account, deniability is an epistemic phenomenon. A speaker has deniability if she can make it epistemically irrational for her audience to reason in certain ways. To avoid predictable confusion, we distinguish deniability from a practical correlate we call ‘untouchability’. Roughly, a speaker has untouchability if she can make it practically irrational for her audience to act in certain ways. These accounts shed light on the nature of strategic speech and suggest countermeasures against strategic speech.

Abstract There is a long-standing gap in the literature as to whether Gödelian incompleteness constitutes a challenge for Neo-Logicism, and if so how serious it is. In this paper, I articulate and address the challenge in detail. The Neo-Logicist project is to demonstrate the analyticity of arithmetic by deriving all its truths from logical principles and suitable definitions. The specific concern raised by Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem is that no single sound system of logic syntactically implies all arithmetical truths. I set out some responses that initially seem appealing and explain why they are not compelling. The upshot is that Neo-Logicism either offers an epistemic route only to some truths of arithmetic; or that it has to move from a syntactic to a semantic notion of logical consequence, which risks undermining its epistemic goals. I conclude by considering Crispin Wright’s recent attempt to address Gödelian incompleteness, which I argue is not satisfactory.

How can philosophy and literature helpfully interact? The so-called 'Jesus fictions' of J. M. Coetzee raise the issue in acute form because they drive readers apart on the question of what these works are ultimately designed to show. That philosophy should essentially get out of the way, allowing literature to fulfil the tasks that philosophy considers itself primed for but fails conspicuously to perform? Or that literature can only assist in these tasks if it is informed by philosophy so that it is our appreciation of the two in creative conjunction that matters? In Metaphysical Exile, Robert Pippin sides with the latter view. This is in the face of strong critical support for the former which can draw on apparently encouraging comments by Coetzee himself, as well as on the powerfully sceptical line that the fictions themselves seem to express−at least if we identify that line with the attitudes of the one character (Simón) through whom we get almost all our information.

In his excellent new book, Rational Powers in Action (page references in the following to this book, unless stated otherwise), Sergio Tenenbaum develops a theory of instrumental rationality which goes fundamentally against the dominant approaches in the contemporary debate. It does so by rejecting a set of basic assumptions most current views, as Tenenbaum argues, share to some extent, explicitly or implicitly (p. 3): namely, (i) that the issue of instrumental rationality primarily concerns the relations between mental states, (ii) that these states have sufficiently determinate objects, (iii) that the assessment of whether an agent is instrumentally rational is, basically, a 'snapshot' one (that is, we ask about whether her mental states or decisions at one moment fit a certain standard), and (iv) that the attitudes which provide the standard for assessing an agent's instrumental rationality have an essentially graded or comparative dimension (such as preferences or desires, which come with different strengths).

From the perspective of a certain kind of physicalist naturalism, both mathematical and moral discourse look problematic. Our knowledge of the world is via causally mediated observations; our theories of the world are developed to explain those observations. But how can such tools lead us to knowledge of (abstract, non-spatiotemporal) mathematical objects? And how can our observations of what is the case get us any way towards knowledge of what ought to be done? Naturalists are faced with what Huw Price (2011, p. 8) has called a placement problem, the problem ‘of “placing” various kinds of truths in the natural world’. The dual challenge of placing mathematical and moral knowledge in a broadly naturalistic framework has unsurprisingly led many in debates over mathematical and moral realism to reflect on parallels (and disanalogies) between the cases. For many who are unconvinced by moral realism, the case of mathematics is...

The philosophical questions that arise in relation to our engagement with fiction are multifaceted. Fiction is often seen as a source of metaphysical and semantic puzzles, such as how fictional names like ‘Frodo Baggins’ can be meaningful if they lack referents. Such questions are often (if not always) pursued in relative isolation from the kinds of questions that have typically been of interest to aestheticians, such as how works of fiction differ from works of nonfiction and how our emotional and cognitive engagement with fiction should be understood. In contrast to such a piecemeal methodology, Catharine Abell’s agenda in Fiction: A Philosophical Analysis is broad and ambitious, aiming to offer a novel institutional account of the nature of fiction which in turns supports answers to a wide range of philosophical questions about the metaphysical, semantic, and epistemic aspects of our engagement with fiction. Given her broad and integrative remit, a...

What makes an event an action rather than a mere happening? What makes us agents rather than non-agents? What does being in control amount to? And in virtue of what are our actions skilled? These are among the deepest and hardest questions in the philosophy of action. They are also particularly timely, as the field is revisiting them both in connection with a study of intentional action and with a renewed interest in skilled action. In The Shape of Agency, Joshua Shepherd aims to offer a mostly original perspective on these questions. My discussion will cover three crucial components of Shepherd's views: his theory of controlled behaviour (§1), his theory of intentional action (§2) and his theory of skills (§3). While a lot of contemporary literature in action theory focuses on the difference between intentional action and non-intentional action, in chapter 1, Shepherd takes a step back and asks...

Abstract Among the virtues of relationist approaches to Frege’s puzzle is that they put us in a position to outline structural features of the puzzle that were only implicit in earlier work. In particular, they allow us to frame questions about the relation between the explanatory roles of sense and sameness of sense. In this paper, I distinguish a number of positions about that relation which have not been clearly distinguished. This has a few pay-offs. It allows us to shed light on recent controversies about the ‘essential indexical’, and it also allows us to see what’s at stake between relationists and their opponents. When we see what’s at stake, we can see that we have reason to adopt an account of cognitive significance that incorporates elements of both relationist and Fregean approaches.

Journal Article Conditionals, Paradox, and Probability: Themes from the Philosophy of Dorothy Edgington, Lee Walters and John Hawthorne (eds.) Get access Conditionals, Paradox, and Probability: Themes from the Philosophy of Dorothy Edgington, Lee Walters John Hawthorne (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. ix + 268. Keith Hossack Keith Hossack Birkbeck College, University of London, UK Email: k.hossack@bbk.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Mind, Volume 133, Issue 529, January 2024, Pages 294–303, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzab083 Published: 22 November 2021

Barristers in England are obliged to follow the ‘cab rank rule’, according to which they must take any case offered to them, as long as they have time in their schedule and can agree on fees. This rule is designed to ensure that unpopular people and causes can get legal representation. In philosophy, by contrast, we know we need no structural rule to ensure that seemingly hopeless causes receive representation from the brightest minds. And so we find Timothy Williamson, who famously defended epistemicism about vagueness over a quarter of a century ago, turning in his new book to another unpopular cause, the view that the meaning of ‘if’ is given by the material conditional. The material conditional view of ‘if’ is the idea that linguistic expressions of the form ‘if A, then C’ (which I'll write ‘A → C’) are false if A is true and C is false, and true otherwise. This makes A → C equivalent to ‘not A or C’ (‘¬ A ∨ C’). To take an example, ‘If Lena has wings, she is an angel’ is false, on the material conditional view, only if Lena has wings and is not an angel; the sentence also means the same as the sentence, ‘Either Lena has no wings or she's an angel’. The material conditional is, of course, the standard conditional connective in propositional and first-order logic. It is reasonable to hope that the material conditional might correspond to the natural language conditional, as this connection would strengthen the ties between natural language and logic.1