Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

At the commonsensical level of the manifest image, we seem to take for granted logical laws of all sorts, including classical logic (CL) and naive principles of truth and predication (TP), which, however, generate logical paradoxes such as the liar, Russell’s paradox and Curry’s paradox. The formal logic of the scientific image comes to the rescue by proposing many competing formal systems that restore consistency, by sacrificing either principles of CL or principles of TP. We wish to explore a different path, which aims at saving both CL and TP,…

I start from Evans’ criticism of temporalism, based on the claim that it does not “provide for the stable evaluation of utterances”. I try to show that, with suitable qualifications, assuming the possibility of evaluations yielding different truth-values at different times is not an “eccentric” move (as suggested by Evans). I briefly consider Prior’s metaphysical arguments in favour of the asymmetry between past and future and I suggest that, independently of these arguments, there are linguistic reasons in support of such an assumption. In particular, there are some future-oriented statements…

This paper critically discusses Patrick Todd’s book, The Open Future: Why Future Contingents Are All False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

I argue that the semantic route to the revisability of the future indicated by Bonomi disappoints the expectations. Bonomi makes a lot of a confessed peculiar use of ‘no longer’. The use is indeed peculiar, not to say out of the question. Any statement of “The F is no longer G” is about a change in a subject. Bonomi sets up a scenario in which there is a change of subject and the new subject does not have the property that the old subject had. A scenario in which a…

There are two prominent theses in Bonomi’s 2023 paper “Non-Persistent Truths”, here labelled the two-levels and the changing background theses. According to the former, both semantic eternalism and temporalism are right, in that our ordinary natural language utterances may be taken to express both anchored propositions with a fixed truth value and floating propositions with a changing truth value. According to the changing background thesis, there are future-tensed propositions that change truth value, for reasons that have to do with change in background information available to ordinary speakers, rather than…

Evans claims that a sentence should always be considered correct or incorrect at the time of its utterance, to preserve what is called the “stability principle”. To introduce the debate, I refer to some remarks by Kamangar and Perry, who show how Frege could have treated future contingents in a way that would contrast Evans’ claim. I then discuss the more traditional contrast between Frege and Prior on different conceptions of propositions that lies at the core of Evans’ view, and I show how Dummett seems to find a compromise…

This paper is intended to show that, at least in a considerably wide class of cases, indicative conditionals are adequately formalized as strict conditionals. The first part of the paper outlines three arguments that support the strict conditional view, that is, three reasons for thinking that an indicative conditional is true just in case it is impossible that its antecedent is true and its consequent is false. The second part of the paper develops the strict conditional view and defends it from some foreseeable objections.  

Constitutive rules are traditionally conceived as defining what does count as a move within a practice and what does not (Williamson 1996). In the context of games, this means that constitutive rules define what counts as playing the given game. Thus, it follows that a player who intentionally breaks the rules of the game is not playing the game.

Finean essentialists take metaphysical necessity to be metaphysically explained by essence. But whence the explanatory power of essence? A recent wave of criticism against the Finean account has put pressure on essentialists to answer this question. Wallner and Vaidya (2020) have responded by offering an axiomatic account of the explanatory power of essence. This paper discusses their account in light of some recent criticism by Bovey (2022). Building on work by Glazier (2017), Bovey succeeds in showing that Wallner and Vaidya’s account is in need of modification and clarification. In…

On what I call absolutist essentialism about modality (AE), the metaphysical necessities are the propositions that are true in virtue of the essence (i.e. Aristotelian, absolute essence) of some entities. Other kinds of necessity can then be defined by restriction—e.g. the conceptual necessities are the propositions that are true in virtue of the essence of conceptual entities specifically. As an account of metaphysical modality and some other kinds (e.g. logical, conceptual), AE may have important virtues. However, when it comes to accounting for further important kinds, like natural or normative…