Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

In his fascinating paper on non-persistent truths, Andrea Bonomi makes the case that the truth value of propositions may shift over time, and he takes issue with Gareth Evans’ criticism of such a view. Some of the linguistic evidence provided by Bonomi may strike philosophers as suspect, but I build a case for the legitimacy of such evidence under a principle that I call “alethic charity,” which governs folk truth attributions. I also speculate that some of Bonomi’s judgments may reflect the hidden presence of epistemic modality.

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…

In my paper I focus on psychologism in the theory of mental content and critically consider a variety of it—“intentional psychologism” (Pitt 2009)—that has recently entered the stage in the philosophy of mind literature. My aim is twofold. First, I want to provide a critical evaluation of this new variety of psychologism, considering in particular whether it is immune from (some of) the most famous classical criticisms. Secondly, I want to provide a diagnosis of what ultimately motivates the current revival of the “psychologistic attitude”. My aim in so doing…

This dialogue explores the question of whether intentionality––the “ofness”, “aboutness”, or “directedness” of mental states––is a relation. We explore three views: the Naive View, on which intentionality is a relation to ordinary, everyday objects, facts, and other such items; the Abstract Contents View, on which intentionality is a relation to mind-independent abstract entities; and the Aspect View, on which intentionality is a matter of having intentional states with particular (non-relational) aspects that are our contents. We consider the challenges facing these views, which include empirical challenges in accounting for all…

I extend the Higher-Order View of Undermining Defeat (HOVUD) defended in Melis (2014) to account for the defeat of propositional justification. In doing so, I also clarify the important notion of higher-order commitment, and I make some considerations concerning the defeat of externalist epistemic warrants.

The main purpose of the paper is to present and discuss Bernard Suits’ account of constitutive rules presented in his opus magnum—The Grasshopper. Games, Life and Utopia—and in several minor contributions, which supplement or modify his original position. This account will be regarded as a crucial part of Suits’ theory of ludic activities, mainly game-playing. The stress will be put on peculiarities of constitutive rules—their relation to ends in games, players’ attitudes and their limitative nature. The analysis of the consequences of breaking a rule in different types of actions…

In this paper, I connect J.R. Searle’s concept of constitutive rules and H.L.A. Hart’s concept of internal point of view and look for an extension of this joint paradigm in institutional ontology. I make a distinction between five different perspectives about an institution—structural, teleological, axiological, strategic, and sociological—and connect these perspectives to three kinds of concepts: institutional, meta-institutional, and para-institutional. In the light of these distinctions, I submit that an explanation of institutional phenomena requires a three-dimensional ontology consisting of a structure (framed by constitutive rules), a conceptual background, and…

Presentism is the view that only present temporal entities (tenselessly) exist. A widely-discussed problem for presentism concerns causation and, more specifically, the supposed cross-temporally relational character of it. I think that the best reply to this problem can already be found in the literature on temporal ontology: it consists, roughly, in showing that (at least) some of the main approaches to causation can be rephrased so as to avoid commitment to any cross-temporal relation, including the causal relation itself. The main purpose of this paper is to extend this reply…