This paper fortifies and defends the so called Sufficiency Argument (SA) against Classical Invariantism. In Sect. 2, I explain the version of the SA formulated but then rejected by Brown (2008a). In Sect. 3, I show how cases described by Hawthorne (2004), Brown (2008b), and Lackey (forthcoming) threaten to undermine one or the other of the SA’s least secure premises. In Sect. 4, I buttress one ...

Two things are striking about this medieval definition. The first is that it is very close to the modern conception of formal consequence one finds in Bolzano and Tarski3. The second is that although Buridan and the other fourteenth-century logicians state these distinctions with a great deal of precision, they say almost nothing about the point of the distinctions. Why are these distinctions d...

Derived varieties were invented by P. Cohn in [4]. Derived varieties of a given type were invented by the authors in [10]. In the paper we deal with the derived variety Vσ of a given variety, by a fixed hypersubstitution σ. We introduce the notion of the dimension of a variety as the cardinality κ of the set of all proper derived varieties of V included in V. We examine dimensions of some varie...

This paper develops a probabilistic reconstruction of the No Miracles Argument (NMA) in the debate between scientific realists and anti-realists. The goal of the paper is to clarify and to sharpen the NMA by means of a probabilistic formalization. In particular, I demonstrate that the persuasive force of the NMA depends on the particular disciplinary context where it is applied, and the stabili...