In this paper, I defend fictional creationism, the view that fictional objects are abstract artifacts, from the objection that the apparent truth of fictional negative existentials, such as “Sherlock Holmes does not exist,” poses a serious problem for creationism. I develop a sophisticated version of the pragmatic approach by focusing on the inconsistent referential intentions of ordinary speakers: the upshot would be that creationism is no worse—perhaps even in a better position—than anti-realism, even if we restrict our linguistic data to fictional negative existentals.

A too rarely emphasized feature of modern deontological ethics is the structure of its directives. Faced with alternatives, the question for the moral agent is “which, if either, must I perform (or avoid)?” Getting it right, one is, morally speaking, done…until the next set of freighted options presents. We should wonder whether this makes sense: whether there is not a more complex structure to deontological requirements that resists the “one and done” idea. Rehabilitating the Kantian idea of duty as a value-based deliberative principle, I argue for a more plausible deontology whose requirements are often temporally extended and interpersonally complex.

This paper presents some impossibility results for certain views about what you should do when you are uncertain about which moral theory is true. I show that under reasonable and extremely minimal ways of defining what a moral theory is, it follows that the concept of expected moral choiceworthiness is undefined, and more generally that any theory of decision-making under moral uncertainty must generate pathological results.

Theoreticians that defend a form of realism regarding natural kinds minimally entertain the belief that the world features divisions into kinds and that the natural kind concept is a useful tool for philosophy of science. The objective of this paper is to challenge these assumptions. First, we challenge realism toward natural kinds by showing that the main arguments for their existence, which rely on the epistemic success of natural kinds, are unsatisfactory. Second, we show that, whether they exist or not, natural kinds are expendable when it comes to describing and analyzing scientific explanations accurately.

I provide a unified account of hope and fear as propositional attitudes. This “mirror account” is based on the historical idea that the only difference between hope and fear is the conative attitude involved, positive for hope and negative for fear. My analysis builds on a qualified version of the standard account of hope. The epistemic condition is formulated in terms of live possibility and the conative according to a non-reductive view on desire and aversion. The account demonstrates the theoretical fruitfulness of accepting Jack M. C. Kwong’s distinction between hope and fear as propositional attitudes and experiential states.

According to Action-First theorists, like Jonathan Dancy, reasons for action explain reasons for intentions. According to Intention-First theorists, like Conor McHugh and Jonathan Way, reasons for intentions explain reasons for action. In this paper, I introduce and defend a version of the Action-First theory called “Instrumentalism.” According to Instrumentalism, just as we can derive, using principles of instrumental transmission, reasons to ψ from reasons to ϕ (provided there’s some relevant instrumental relation between ψ-ing and ϕ-ing), we can derive reasons to intend to ϕ from reasons to ϕ (provided there’s some relevant instrumental relation between intending to ϕ and ϕ-ing). After providing some defense of Instrumentalism, I turn to two recent, important arguments for the Intention-First theory advanced by McHugh and Way, and I argue that neither of them succeed. I conclude that we should reject the Intention-First theory and that we have grounds for optimism about the Action-First theory.

The “No Miracle Argument” for scientific realism contends that the only plausible explanation for the predictive success of scientific theories is their truthlikeness, but doesn’t specify what ‘truthlikeness’ means. I argue that if we understand ‘truthlikeness’ in terms of Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, the resulting realist thesis (RKL) is a plausible explanation for science’s success. Still, RKL probably falls short of the realist’s ideal. I argue, however, that the strongest version of realism that the argument can plausibly establish is RKL. The realist needs another argument for establishing a stronger realist thesis.

The problem of unwelcome epistemic company refers to the problem of encountering agreement with your beliefs from an unwelcome source, such as someone who is known to form unreliable beliefs or have values you reject. Blanchard (2023) and Levy (2023) argue that when we encounter unwelcome agreement, we may have reason to reduce our confidence in our matching beliefs. I argue that unwelcome epistemic company rarely provides reasons to reduce our confidence, and apparent successes at improving our beliefs using unwelcome company are explained by extraneous factors. Seeing why unwelcome agents are rarely evidence our belief is false requires making a distinction between two kinds of agents who regularly form false beliefs: unreliable agents and anti-reliable agents. While unreliable agents are common, they are uninformative. While anti-reliable agents would be informative, they are incredibly rare. Unwelcome agents are also rarely evidence that we have formed our own beliefs via an unreliable process, unless we have independent evidence that we are relevantly similar to them. This is hard to obtain given that unwelcome agents, by definition, have values and methods of forming beliefs that we do not find appealing. Moreover, attempts to use unwelcome company to improve our beliefs are likely to make our beliefs worse off in a number of ways. I argue we should adopt a policy of ignoring unwelcome company, letting them have little impact on our confidence in our beliefs.

The purpose of this paper is to reject what I call the entitlement model of directed obligation: the view that we can conclude from X is obligated to Y that therefore Y has an entitlement against X. I argue that rejecting the model clears up many otherwise puzzling aspects of ordinary moral interaction. The main goal is not to offer a new theory of obligation and entitlement. It is rather to show that, contrary to what most philosophers have assumed, directed obligation and entitlement are not the same normative concept seen from two different perspectives. They are two very different concepts, and much is gained by keeping them distinct.

In this article, I argue that because co-nationals have an intrinsically valuable relationship, they have a presumptive claim against interference in their collective affairs. My argument from the claim that co-nationals have an intrinsically valuable relationship to the presumptive claim against interference is threefold, and I set it out in section “From Intrinsic Value to Self-Determination”: firstly, parties to an intrinsically valuable relationship have a respect-based claim to autonomy. Secondly, the relationship between co-nationals realizes some important goods, and collective autonomy is internally related to these. Finally, the fact that co-nationals have an intrinsically valuable relationship, and affective attachments means that they have a strong interest in carrying out certain activities together, without interference from outsiders. In section “Grounding the Presumptive Claim,” I argue that these three grounds cumulatively amount to a presumptive claim to collective autonomy. I outline the implications for the issue of secession.

Deep neural networks are said to be opaque, impeding the development of safe and trustworthy artificial intelligence, but where this opacity stems from is less clear. What are the sufficient properties for neural network opacity? Here, I discuss five common properties of deep neural networks and two different kinds of opacity. Which of these properties are sufficient for what type of opacity? I show how each kind of opacity stems from only one of these five properties, and then discuss to what extent the two kinds of opacity can be mitigated by explainability methods.

This paper explains how an assertion may be understood despite there being nothing said or meant by the assertion. That such understanding is possible is revealed by cases of the so-called “felicitous underspecification” of demonstratives: cases where there is understanding of an assertion containing a demonstrative despite the interlocutors not settling on one or another object as the one the speaker is talking about (King 2014a, 2017, 2021). I begin by showing how Stalnaker’s ([1978] 1999) well-known pragmatic principles adequately permit and constrain the felicitous underspecification of demonstratives. I then establish a connection between the satisfaction of Stalnaker’s principles and understanding, and show how that connection sheds further light on the relevant cases. After developing and motivating my proposal, I address some objections to it, then briefly discuss the felicitous underspecification of expressions other than demonstratives alongside contrasting my proposal with a similar one from Bowker (2015, 2019) that concerns definite descriptions.

In this paper, I consider the objection that unilateral secession by a national group (e.g., the Scots) from a legitimate, nonusurping state would wrong minority nationalities within the seceding territory. I show first that most proponents of this objection assume that the ground of the right to national self-determination is the protection of the group’s culture. I show that there are alternative justifications available. I then set out a version of this objection that does not rely on this claim; on this objection, a national minority that seceded and created its own state would commit an expressive wrong against minorities within the territory over which it claimed jurisdiction. I show that this objection is undermotivated: only under a specific set of circumstances would the minorities of the secessionist region be subject to an expressive wrong. Finally, I show that the correct way to think about the claims of minorities in secessionist regions is in terms of a claim to secure access to equal civic status such that they are not at risk of becoming justifiably alienated from their new state. If a secessionist group cannot provide this guarantee to the minority residents of their territory, then their seceding would commit wrongful harm, and the presumption in favour of collective autonomy is defeated. I call this defeater the ‘Alienation Defeater.’

With this in hand, we are now in a position to explain why nations are normatively special. Responding to the objections broached by Allen Buchanan and others, I show that even if other kinds of groups, such as religious groups, have the features in virtue of which nations have a claim to self-determination, this does not entail that those groups also have the right to secede. This is because an account of self-determination needs a list of ‘defeaters’—features in virtue of which a group’s claim to self-determination is defeated. I argue that religious groups are the strongest candidate for having a claim to collective autonomy in virtue of sharing many features with nations. I then argue that religious groups will run afoul of the Alienation Defeater; religious identity is too narrow to be the basis of the dominant collective identity of a state. This does not apply to nationality. This, I explain, is because of qualitative differences between religious groups, qua religious groups, and nations.

I focus on an overlooked aspect of the challenge of irrelevant influences. The challenge is often framed in terms of whether recognizing the presence of irrelevant factors in the pedigree of a belief provides a defeater. I argue that the epistemic significance of irrelevant factors goes beyond their status as defeaters. I focus on what I call gray cases, where learning about such factors causes epistemic worry without justifying giving up the belief. I argue that in gray cases, the subject finds a commendatory epistemic practical reason to engage in an activity intended to assuage that epistemic worry.

Within collective epistemology, there is a class of theories that understand the epistemic status of collective attitude ascriptions, such as “the college union knows that the industrial action is going to plan” as saying that a sufficient subset of group member attitudes has the relevant epistemic status. I will demonstrate that these summativist approaches to collective epistemology are incompatible with epistemic permissivism, the doctrine that a single body of evidence may rationalize multiple doxastic attitudes. In particular, we can use epistemic permissivism to generate so-called divergence cases, which demonstrate situations in which rationality requires group-level and member-level attitudes to diverge.

Recently, there have been attempts at offering new justifications of the Rawlsian idea of public reason. Blain Neufeld has suggested that the ideal of political autonomy justifies public reason, while R.J. Leland and Han van Wietmarschen have sought to justify the idea by appealing to the value of political community. In this paper, I show that both proposals are vulnerable to a common problem. In realistic circumstances, they will often turn into reasons to oppose, rather than support, public reason. However, this counterintuitive result can be avoided if we conceive of autonomy and community differently.

This article argues that Hume is committed to the cognitive phenomenology of believing. For Hume, beliefs have some distinctively cognitive phenomenology, which is different in kind from sensory phenomenology. I call this interpretation the “cognitive phenomenal interpretation” (“CPI”) of Hume. CPI is coherent with, and supported by, the textual evidence from A Treatise of Human Nature as well as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. In both texts, Hume talks about the distinctive “manner” of believing, and CPI provides us with the best explanation of Hume’s remarks on this distinctive “manner.”

According to certain views about human ontology, the way we seem is very different from the way we are. The appearances are a threat to such views. Here I take up and defuse the threat to one such view.

Pure immaterialism says that each of us is wholly immaterial. The appearances suggest otherwise. I argue that despite the fact that we might sometimes appear to be at least partly material, and that we can be perceptually justified in believing something solely on the basis of having a perceptual experience as of its being the case, none of us is ever perceptually justified in believing that we are even partly material (or that we’re not). Bottom line: we might be able to know whether we’re material, but we can’t know just by looking.

It is widely accepted that parents have a fundamental moral obligation to consider and treat their children as each other’s equals. Yet the question of what grounds the equality of status among children in the eyes of their parents has so far been largely neglected in the literature on the philosophy of childhood and the ethics of parenthood. This paper fills this gap by developing a novel theory of the basis of filial equality: it argues that parents ought to consider and treat their children as equals by virtue of loving them. Parental love is the basis of filial equality.

In A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume claims that causes must temporally precede their effects. However, his main argument for this claim has long puzzled commentators. Indeed, most commentators have dismissed this argument as confused, but beyond this dismissal, the argument has provoked relatively little critical attention. My aim in this paper is to rectify this situation. In what follows, I (i) clarify the argument’s interpretive challenges, (ii) critique two existing interpretations of it, and (iii) offer my own improved interpretation. More generally, I hope to throw new light on this puzzling aspect of Hume’s philosophy.