De Re Belief and Cumming’s Puzzle∗

Contradictions, objects, and belief

We show how some model-theoretical devices (local reasoning, modes of presentation, an additional accessibility relation) can be combined in first-order modal logic to formalize the consequence relation that includes de dicto and de re contradictory beliefs. Instead of special " sense objects " , appearances of objects in an agent's belief are introduced and presented as ordered pairs consistin...

Kaplan's Puzzle, Dynamic Senses, and Diachronically Individuated Propositions

KAPLAN’S PUZZLE, DYNAMIC SENSES, AND DIACHRONIC PROPOSITIONS ! by ! Jack Kingston !! The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2014 Under the Supervision of Professor Michael N. Liston ! The Fregean encounters a few interconnected problems in his account of indexical sentences, each posed in one way or another by Kaplan’s puzzle of cognitive dynamics. For one, there’s a problem defending the doctr...

De re and De dicto Modality in Islamic Traditional Logic

Confidence intervals and tests are two sides of the same research question

Cumming’s (2014) article was commissioned by Psychological Science to reinforce the journal’s 2014 publication guidelines. It exhorts substituting confidence intervals (CIs) for Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST) as a way of increasing the scientific value of psychological research. Cumming’s article is somehow biased, hence the aims of my commentary: to balance out the presentation of...

A pragmatic solution to Ostertag’s puzzle

Gary Ostertag (Philos Stud 146:249–267, 2009) has presented a new puzzle for Russellianism about belief reports. He argues that Russellians do not have the resources to solve this puzzle in terms of pragmatic phenomena. I argue to the contrary that the puzzle can be solved according to Nathan Salmon’s (Frege’s puzzle, 1986) pragmatic account of belief reports, provided that the account is prope...