The paper combines a truthmaker semantics with a dispositional view of beliefs according to which they are dispositions of agents to act as if truthmakers obtain. This has a number of virtues in that it gives us (i) an exact semantics for belief reports; as well as plausible accounts of both (ii) epistemic closure and (iii) contradictory beliefs. In particular, it allows us to analyze knowledge in terms of explanatory connections between truthmakers and beliefs, on the one hand; and between truthmakers and successful actions based on the belief, on the other. The analysis shows promise, not just in that it enables us to avoid Gettier-style counterexamples, but also in that it gives a contextualist solution to, among other things, the argument from ignorance and the lottery paradox in terms of contrastive explanations.

I offer two novel theories of our nature: volitional phase animalism, which holds that we are essentially organisms with volitions; and narrative phase animalism, which holds that we are essentially organisms that produce self-narratives. Both theories agree with the standard versions of animalism’s claim that we are essentially living organisms but deny that we are essentially human. I examine the implications of these theories for the categorisation of artificial intelligence: I discuss whether certain AI systems might eventually qualify as some of us if they function as organisms with the relevant volitional or narrative capacities.

A metaphysical view called mathematical social constructionism states that the abstract structures and objects studied in mathematics are socially constructed entities; they are produced by and depend on the human practices of mathematics that are social, historically developed, and shared among communities. Yet, it is not quite clear what it means for mathematical entities to exist in virtue of practices. This paper aims to answer this question by employing the notion of metaphysical grounding. I develop a dual grounding model that analyses the metaphysical relation between concrete mathematical practices and abstract mathematical entities as two relations of partial grounding: (1) specific patterns of using epistemic resources (axioms and theorems, proof methods, notations, etc.) ground the features of mathematical entities, and (2) social patterns of mathematical communities (learning, using shared meanings and aims, mutual responsiveness, etc.) ground the existence of mathematical entities. I argue that the grounding model where mathematical entities are grounded in social practices has important benefits, because it fits with actual mathematical practice and explains why mathematical social constructions are real entities. By offering a clarified, more detailed picture of the metaphysics behind mathematical social construction, the dual grounding model helps to explain how we can make up mathematical reality by doing mathematics together.

When a large language model receives a prompt, it computes a probability distribution over all possible continuations before sampling produces a single output. This paper examines the ontological and ethical status of ungenerated completions (i.e. texts that were mathematically present in the distribution but never actualized). I argue that these ungenerated texts occupy a novel ontological category since they are neither merely possible nor fully actual. Therefore, they exist as computationally determinate potentials that are precisely weighted, semantically meaningful, and accessible in principle, although not in practice. On this basis, I advance three claims. First, standard metaphysical categories fail to capture the mode of being proper to probability distributions over meaningful strings, and hence, a new category of computational abstracta is required. Second, the structured space of ungenerated completions is metaphysically more fundamental than any particular generated completion because it carries most of the probability mass, encodes more of the model’s structure, and preserves a richness of potential responses that any single realization necessarily truncates. Third, I sketch initial implications for what I term modal ethics. Insofar as the distribution assigns nontrivial probability to completions of moral significance, our practices of prompting and sampling are subject to normative assessment. What remains ungenerated can matter morally because foreclosing or enabling particular possibilities has consequences for actual agents, and this reveals a broader class of philosophical problems that could not have been formulated before the advent of large language models.

There has been increasing attention given to epistemic injustice in different relational contexts. This paper adds to this literature by providing a novel argument for the claim that epistemic injustice in close friendship is distinctively bad. That is, while it is bad to be epistemically unjust to anyone, it can be distinctively bad to be epistemically unjust to one’s close friends. The friendship, at least in some cases, must figure in the explanation for why the injustice is bad. I argue that there are three reasons friendship gives us that we can appeal to in explaining this. Being friends with someone (especially, close friends) gives us reasons to support them emotionally, create conditions in which they can comfortably self-disclose, and to promote their self-esteem, including their epistemic self-confidence, especially when this is unduly undermined. Perpetrating epistemic injustice against our friends compromises our ability to respond to those reasons appropriately. The paper begins by setting out the initial intuition - that we do feel that epistemic injustice is distinctively bad in friendship, at least in some cases. It responds to some initial objections. It examines the empirical evidence on testimonially unjust microaggressions in friendship, which suggests they are an unfortunately common occurrence with significant effects on those who experience them, thus, worthy of philosophical attention. It gives an account of the three salient reasons friendship gives us, that epistemic injustice compromises. And it examines two cases of epistemic injustice being perpetrated against friends in detail, illustrating how this injustice undermines the ability of the perpetrator to live up to these reasons.