It is widely held that semantic facts are determined by the physical facts. In this paper, I argue that this thesis is false. By ‘semantic fact’, I mean for instance the fact that the English word ‘water’ and its mental counterpart, the concept water refer to H2O. By ‘physical fact’ I mean not just the facts of microphysics, but also the chemical, biological, geological and even (non-intentional) psychological facts which are generally thought to supervene on the microphysical facts. There are three kinds of physical fact that are typically thought to be relevant to the determination of meaning: 1. facts about use, broadly construed, including facts about actual linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour, as well as behavioural dispositions, and all of the facts about the circumstances in which the behaviour occurs, causal relations to the environment, and so forth; 2. Facts about the objective naturalness of properties or objects; 3. Facts about interpretations, such as their simplicity, scope and charity. I present a case which shows that no facts about use, broadly construed, could uniquely determine the truth of the intended interpretation of ‘water’ as referring to H2O, and rule out as false a range of crazy interpretations of ‘water’. I then argue that naturalness considerations and theory level considerations do not determine the truth of the intended interpretation either. I conclude that the intended interpretation is underdetermined by the physical facts. Since the intended interpretation is so obviously true, and the alternative interpretations so bizarrely false, it is difficult to deny that these are semantic facts. This suggests that we need to reconsider the view—often summarily dismissed—that some semantic facts are fundamental.

Let us agree that everything that there is exists. Does everything that there is exist to the same degree? Or do some things exist more than others? Perhaps no view is more despised upon analytic metaphysicians than that there are degrees of being. But what if, unbeknownst to them, they have helped themselves to the doctrine that being comes in degrees when formulating various metaphysical theories or conducting metaphysical disputes? What if degree of being is already playing a significant role in their theorizing, albeit under a different guise?

Suppose that after looking around for a while for red things (in a reasonably sized display),you only saw red squares, and concluded that all the red things in the display were square.You overlooked some red circles and triangles, because you hoped that all the red things would be square,and this hope (unbeknownst to you) systematically prevented you from experiencingany other red shapes. Do your red-square experiences give you as much reason to think all the redthings in the display are square, as they would if your hope didn't imposethis selection effect, and you just happened to overlook the red circles by chance?Evidentialism might seem to say Yes: if perceptual experiences are (or provide) evidence, thenthe evidential force of your experiences is not affected by experiences youdon't have. Only the evidence you do have is relevant. I'll arguethat the answer is No, but that this answer is compatible with evidentialism.

What is the value of democracy? Not, I think, that it gives people what they want. Not that it realizes anything like autonomy or self-government. Not that it lets people pursue valuable activities of civic engagement. Not (at least in the first instance) that it avoids insulting or disrespecting people. Instead, the value of democracy is that it is a constituent of a society in which people are related to one another as social equals, as opposed to social inferiors or superiors. In short, the concern for democracy is rooted in a concern about anyone else being above (or, for that matter, below) one.

The topic of this paper is Kant’s account of propositional knowledge (Wissen), its relationship to his account of cognition (Erkenntnis), and its role in motivating the famous prohibition on knowledge of things-in-themselves. I offer a reading of the prohibition that is motivated not so much by Kant’s anti-soporific encounter with Hume as by his new view of the distinction between “real” and “logical” modality, a view that developed out of his reflection on the rationalist tradition in which he was trained. In brief: at some point in the 1770’s, Kant comes to hold that a necessary condition on knowing a proposition is that the items it refers to be provably located in a certain partition of “real” modal space. Things-in-themselves, in turns out, do not meet this condition. I conclude by suggesting that we can interpret Kant’s modal condition as placing a specific kind of coherence constraint on knowledge.

Philosophers frequently distinguish between causal responsibility and moral responsibility, but that distinction is either ambiguous or confused. We can distinguish between causal responsibility and a "deeper" kind of responsibility, and we can distinguish between holding people accountable for their moral qualities and holding people accountable for their nonmoral qualities. But, because we sometimes hold people deeply responsible for nonmoral qualities, these distinctions are not the same. By reflecting on the character and legitimacy of our reactive attitudes toward nonmoral behavior and character traits, we may be able to make better progress in understanding the nature of responsible agency.

(1) Much developmental evidence based on the so-called “standard false belief task” shows that when asked to predict where an agent with a false belief about an object’s location will look for it, children who know the location of the object fail until they are well into their fifth year. (2) However, several more recent experiments based on the violation-of-expectation paradigm also show that 8 month old preverbal human infants are able to reliably represent an agent’s false beliefs. The puzzle is: how to reconcile (1) and (2)? Until recently there were two main strategies for solving the puzzle. One strategy is to take the data on preverbal human infants at face value and show why it is so hard for 3-year-olds to pass the standard false belief task. The other strategy is to offer low-level explanations for the data on preverbal human infants and deny that they are able to represent another’s false beliefs. Recently, a third strategy has emerged based on a so-called “two-systems” approach to belief-ascription. On behalf of the first strategy, I will argue that there is decisive evidence against the second strategy and that the third strategy cannot really get off the ground.

The paper is a critical examination of the transparency of content thesis: The thesis that subjects can tell a priori, on the basis of introspection, whether two thoughts or thought constituents have the same content. It is widely agreed that transparency is a significant thesis, both by proponents and opponents of the thesis. Proponents claim that the thesis is presupposed if content is to play a role in assessments of rationality and the explanation of action, along the lines suggested by Frege, while opponents suggest that rejecting transparency undermines the need for Fregean contents. I argue that both sides of this debate are mistaken. On both sides it is assumed that subjects have meta-level beliefs about the contents of their own thoughts, and that these beliefs (whether true or false) play a central role in explaining the subject’s cognitive perspective. This assumption is my target, and my argument proceeds in two steps. First, I consider a common construal of these meta-beliefs, and argue that it is very problematic to ascribe such beliefs to subjects. Second, I turn to an alternative construal, and argue that it renders the transparency thesis insignificant when it comes to accounting for the subject’s cognitive perspective. I conclude that mental content is not transparent in the sense required, but also that it does not matter for the debate between Fregeans and Millians. The real controversy, I suggest, does not turn on whether content is transparent, but on whether there are rationality constraints on content ascriptions.

I argue for a theoretical link between the development of an extended period of immaturity in human evolution and the emergence of powerful and wide-ranging causal learning mechanisms, particularly the use of causal models and Bayesian learning. In fact, young children may actually be more wide-ranging and effective causal learners than adults. I argue that, particularly in the course of play, children perform more “high-temperature” searches of hypothesis spaces than adults do. In one empirical study 4 year olds were better able to learn a low probability higher-order causal hypothesis from data than adults were. In a second empirical study preschool children given new information about a causal system made very similar inferences both when they considered counterfactuals about the system and when they engaged in pretend play about it. Counterfactual cognition and causally coherent pretence were also significantly correlated even when age, general cognitive development and executive function were controlled for. In a third study we found that children in pretend play made distinctive “surgical intervention” inferences which they did not make in less playful counterfactual contexts, when they were more likely to make “backtracking” inferences.

"It is a tempting idea that one's inevitable reliance on one's own basic intellectual equipment engenders a requirement to place trust in the output of others' intellects - their beliefs and reports thereof - on pain of inconsistency. Richard Foley ('Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others', Cambridge University Press 2001) . and Linda Zagzebski ('Epistemic Authority', Oxford University Press, 2012) develop arguments of this kind. I offer a rigorous account of what self-trust and other-trust amount to, and investigate what rational link - permissive or mandatory - there may be from the first to the second. I discover that the tempting idea turns out to be an illusion: there is no apriori linkage from the fact of reliance on one's own faculties to a rational requirement to trust any specific others; instead what epistemic pressure there is on any given thinker to rely on specific others turns on the contingencies of the world she finds herself in. In some cases analogy may play a part in the basis she has for trusting others on some topics, but this is contingent, and more often who else is and is not worthy of trust is simply one part of the empirically-based broader theory she develops of the world around her, including the nature of herself and others."