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Several critics of contextualism claim that this view cannot consistently maintain its advertised neutrality between skepticism and anti-skepticism. Some critics contend that contextualists are forced to side with the skeptic, since any defense of contextualism unavoidably puts in place the skeptic's high requirements for knowledge; others hold that the contextualists' claim to have knowledge of what their own view entails forces them to reject the skeptic's knowledge denial. I show that these arguments misconstrue the role of context in contextualism, and explain how we are to understand the contextualist's proposed agreement with both the skeptic's knowledge denial and the anti-skeptic's knowledge attribution.

Metaphysicians of modality are increasingly critical of possible-worlds talk, and increasingly happy to accept irreducibly modal properties – and in particular, irreducible dispositions – in nature. The aim of this paper is to provide the beginnings of a modal semantics which uses, instead of possible-worlds talk, the resources of such an 'anti-Humean' metaphysics. One central challenge to an anti-Humean view is the context-sensitivity of modal language. I show how that challenge can be met and a systematic modal semantics provided, given an independently plausible metaphysics of dispositional properties or potentialities.

Causation is extrinsic. What an event causes depends not just on its own nature and the laws, but on the environment in which it occurs. Had an event occurred under different conditions, it may have had different effects. Yet we often want to say that causation, in at least some respect, is not extrinsic. Events exert an influence on the world themselves, independently of what other events do or do not occur in their surroundings. This paper develops an account of such influence and argues that it provides a solution to the causal exclusion problem. By locating that solution largely within the metaphysics of causation, we can solve the exclusion problem without taking on a commitment to a theory of mind.

I deny that the world is fundamentally causal, deriving the skepticism on non-Humean grounds from our enduring failures to find a contingent, universal principle of causality that holds true of our science. I explain the prevalence and fertility of causal notions in science by arguing that a causal character for many sciences can be recovered, when they are restricted to appropriately hospitable domains. There they conform to loose and varying collections of causal notions that form folk sciences of causation. This recovery of causation exploits the same generative power of reduction relations that allows us to recover gravity as a force from Einstein's general relativity and heat as a conserved fluid, the caloric, from modern thermal physics, when each theory is restricted to appropriate domains. Causes are real in science to the same degree as caloric and gravitational forces.

It is a commonplace that there are limits to the ways we can permissibly treat people, even in the service of good ends. For example, we may not steal someone’s wallet, even if we wish to donate the contents to famine relief, or break a promise to help a col-league move, even if we encounter someone else on the way whose need is somewhat more urgent. In other words, we should observe constraints against mistreating people, even when violating a constraint is the only way to prevent further, similar violations or other, greater evils. But, despite its intuitive appeal, the view that there are constraints has drawn considerable criticism, and at-tempts to provide a rationale for constraints have been, at best, substantially incomplete. In this paper, I develop a novel rationale for constraints that fills important gaps left by views in the literature: put roughly, observing constraints is a condition for being worthy of a certain form of trust, which I call civic trust, and being worthy of such trust is an essential part of living with others in the kind of harmony that characterizes morally permissible interaction. By focusing, in ways that other accounts do not, on the role that observing constraints plays in our psychological lives, this approach not only makes the structure of constraints more intelligible, but also helps us better appreciate the reason-giving force of constraints, and better understand the kind of moral community to which we should aspire.

Many philosophers, especially in the wake of the 17th century, have favored an inegalitarian view of shape and color, according to which shape is mind-independent while color is mind-dependent. In this essay, I advance a novel argument against inegalitarianism. The argument begins with an intuition about the modal dependence of color on shape, namely: it is impossible for something to have a color without having a shape (i.e. without having some sort of spatial extension, or at least spatial location). I then argue that, given reasonable assumptions, inegalitarianism contradicts this modal-dependence principle. Given the plausibility of the latter, I conclude that we should reject inegalitarianism in favor of some form of egalitarianism—either a subjective egalitarianism on which both shape and color are mind-dependent or an objective egalitarianism on which both shape and color are mind-independent.

The Church-Turing Thesis is widely regarded as true, because of evidence that there is only one genuine notion of computation. By contrast, there are nowadays many different formal logics, and different corresponding foundational frameworks. Which ones can deliver a theory of computability? This question sets up a difficult challenge: the meanings of basic mathematical terms (like "set", "function", and "number") are not stable across frameworks. While it is easy to compare what different frameworks say, it is not so easy to compare what they mean. We argue for some minimal conditions that must be met if two frameworks are to be compared; if frameworks are radical enough, comparison becomes hopeless. Our aim is to clarify the dialectical situation in this bourgeoning area of research, shedding light on the nature of non-classical logic and the notion of computation alike.

The paper takes an expressivistic perspective, i.e., it takes conditionals of all sorts to primarily express (features of) conditional beliefs. Therefore it is based on what it takes to be the best account of conditional belief, namely ranking theory. It proposes not to start looking at the bewildering linguistic phenomenology, but first to systematically study the various options of expressing features of conditional belief. Those options by far transcend the Ramsey test and include relevancies of various kinds and in particular the so-called “circumstances are such that” reading, under which also all conditionals representing causal relations can be subsumed. In this way a unifying perspective on the many kinds of conditionals is offered. The final section explains the considerable extent to which truth conditions for conditionals, which may seem lost in the expressivistic or epistemic perspective, may be recovered.

This paper contributes to our formal understanding of the common law — especially the nature of the reasoning involved, but also its point, or justification, in terms of social coordination. I present two apparently distinct models of constraint by precedent in the common law, establish their equivalence, and argue for a perspective according to which courts are best thought of, not as creating and modifying rules, but as generating a social priority ordering on reasons through a procedure that is piecemeal, distributed, and responsive to particular circumstances.

This paper examines the interplay of semantics and pragmatics within the domain of film. Films are made up of individual shots strung together in sequences over time. Though each shot is disconnected from the next, combinations of shots still convey coherent stories that take place in continuous space and time. How is this possible? The semantic view of film holds that film coherence is achieved in part through a kind of film language, a set of conventions which govern the relationships between shots. In this paper, we develop and defend a new version of the semantic view. We articulate it for a pair of conventions that govern spatial relations between viewpoints. One such rule is already well-known; sometimes called the "180° Rule," we term it the X-Constraint; to this we add a previously unrecorded rule, the T-Constraint. As we show, both have the effect, in different ways, of limiting the way that viewpoint (or camera position) can shift through space from shot to shot over the course of a film sequence. Such constraints, we contend, are analogous to relations of discourse coherence that are widely recognized in the linguistic domain. If film is to have a language, it is a language made up of rules like these.

Evidence is univocal, not equivocal. Its implications don't depend on our beliefs or values, the evidence says what it says. But that doesn't mean there's no room for rational disagreement between people with the same evidence. Evaluating evidence is a lot like polling an electorate: getting an accurate reading requires a bit of luck, and even the best pollsters are bound to get slightly different results. So, even though evidence is univocal, rationality's requirements are not "unique." Understanding this resolves several puzzles to do with uniqueness and disagreement.

There may be two and a half bagels on the table. When there are two and a half, it is false that there are exactly two. As obvious as these claims are, they can’t be accounted for on the most straightforward and familiar views of counting and the semantics of number words. I develop a view on which counting is a type of measuring. In particular, counting involves a specific measure function. I then analyze that function and show how it can account for the cases in which counting is sensitive to partiality, e.g. partial bagels.

This paper explores Hume's relationship to skepticism — and, in particular, his relationship to the skeptical arguments outlined in Part 1.4 of the Treatise. Following recent work on these issues, I give a broadly non-skeptical interpretation of these passages. But this leaves us with the question of why Hume endorses such a response. I consider and criticize a popular answer to this question: the Practical Reading, according to which Hume's positive evaluation of some forms of reasoning at the close of Book 1 is based on purely practical grounds. Although I agree with one version of this interpretation that Hume's evaluation of his own reasoning in 1.4.7 has deep structural similarities with Humean moral evaluation, I argue that the former mode of evaluation is best thought of as concerned — not with narrowly practical considerations — but instead with a form of epistemic virtue. I then go on to outline the theory of epistemic virtue that I take to be implicit in Hume's account — one which focuses on the role of the "intellectual" passions of curiosity and ambition in epistemic evaluation.