Abstract In a recent paper, Sprenger advances what he calls “suppositional” answer to the question of why Bayesian agent’s degrees belief should align with probabilities found in statistical models. I show that Sprenger’s account trades on an ambiguity between hypothetical and subjunctive suppositions cannot succeed once we distinguish two.

A uniform theory of conditionals is one which compositionally captures the behavior of both indicative and subjunctive conditionals without positing ambiguities. This paper raises new problems for the closest thing to a uniform analysis in the literature [83] and develops a new theory which solves them. I also show that this new analysis provides an improved treatment of three phenomena (the im...

The logic of conditionals (and, especially, of subjunctive or counterfactual conditionals) is a long-standing problem for the theory of common sense reasoning and philosophical logic. In this paper, I explore commonalities between the logical accounts of the conditional involving “closeness” relations over possible worlds and work in the logic of action and change that attempts to characterize ...

The above dictionary characterization of alethic modalities states the central notions of alethic modal logic: necessity, and other notions that are usually thought of as being definable in terms of necessity and Boolean negation: impossibility, contingency, and possibility. The syntax of modal propositional logic is inductively defined over a denumerable set of sentence letters p0, p1, p2, . ....

In a series of publications, which appeared in the last 3 years 1 Jerry Fodor launched an attack at what many believe is the core of Darwinian theory of evolution – the theory of natural selection. Fodor complains that the theory of natural selection “can’t explain the distribution of phenotypic traits in biological populations” (Fodor, 2008, p.11) and his main argument, slightly simplified 2 ,...

At the beginning of section 2, there is a conflation of different concepts of possibility. If we grant that imaginability is conceivability (in the sense of being describable without any logical contradictions), if we pass over “practical” possibility as a non-defined term, and grant that by “physically” possible Zahavi very likely means “nomologically” possible, it still would present a major ...

Truthmakers for Modal Truths: You could be going for a walk right now. This seems true—but what makes it true? Many have proposed that it is true in virtue of the existence of some possible world (beyond the actual world) where you are going for a walk now; or else, because there is some abstract, representational entity which represents you as going for a walk now. I think this is mistaken. I ...