A Puzzle About Ineffable Propositions

A Puzzle about Truth and Singular Propositions 1 1 . Singular Propositions

My dissertation consists of three essays in the Metaphysics of Modality: In "A Puzzle about Truth and Singular Propositions," I consider two theses that seem to be true and then an argument for the conclusion that they form an inconsistent pair. One thesis is that a proposition that is singular with respect to a given object implies that the object exists. This is so because the proposition pre...

A puzzle about withholding

This paper presents a puzzle about justification and withholding. The puzzle arises in a special case where experts advise us to not withhold judgment. My main thesis is simply that the puzzle is genuinely a puzzle, and so leads us to rethink some common assumptions in epistemology, specifically assumptions about the nature of justification and doxastic attitudes. Section 1 introduces the commo...

The Story About Propositions

Talking even about rather ordinary circumstances appears to implicate directly certain metaphysically loaded identifications. For example, if Dr. Gustav Lauben is a doctor then it seems to follow that he has the property of being a doctor; just as if he is injured, he has the property (or the characteristic) of being injured. Moreover, if Frege should come to believe that the good doctor is inj...

A puzzle about belief updating

In recent decades much literature has been produced on disagreement; the puzzling conclusion being that epistemic disagreement is, for the most part, either impossible (e.g. Aumann (Ann Stat 4(6):1236–1239, 1976)), or at least easily resolvable (e.g. Elga (Noûs 41(3):478–502, 2007)). In this paper I show that, under certain conditions, an equally puzzling result arises: that is, disagreement ca...

A Puzzle About Ontological Commitments