Retributivist Arguments against Presuming Innocence

Two Arguments against Realism

Over the last 20 years or so, Hilary Putnam has developed a series of arguments which use basic theorems of model theory to undermine semantic realism. Here, I discuss two generalizations of these arguments. The first employs some new forms of model theory to generate substantially stronger conclusions than Putnam’s original arguments generated. The second illustrates a method for replacing the...

Physicalist arguments against emergence

We should not accept standard anti-emergentist arguments that rest on assuming the correctness of physicalism. Standard strategies that are intended to block the possibility of emergent properties come at a high cost. This paper argues that they rule out a range of ways that the world could be that are, at least prima facie, scientifically acceptable prior to scientific inquiry. The paper is in...

Against Arguments from Reference

It is common in various quarters of philosophy to derive philosophically significant conclusions from theories of reference. In this paper, we argue that philosophers should give up on such ‘arguments from reference.’ Intuitions play a central role in establishing theories of reference, and recent cross-cultural work suggests that intuitions about reference vary across cultures and between indi...

Arguments Against IPSEC

Fifteen Arguments Against Hypothetical Frequentism

This is the sequel to my ‘‘Fifteen Arguments Against Finite Frequentism’’ (Erkenntnis 1997), the second half of a long paper that attacks the two main forms of frequentism about probability. Hypothetical frequentism asserts: The probability of an attribute A in a reference class B is p iff the limit of the relative frequency of A’s among the B’s would be p if there were an infinite sequence of ...