| 1. |
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| 2. |
- Björklund, Fredrik, et al.
(författare)
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Recent Work on Motivational Internalism
- 2012
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Ingår i: Analysis. - Oxford, UK : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0003-2638 .- 1467-8284. ; 72:1, s. 124-137
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Reviews recent work on motivational internalism.
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| 3. |
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| 4. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-, et al.
(författare)
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A unified empirical account of responsibility judgments
- 2013
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Ingår i: Philosophy and phenomenological research. - : Wiley-Blackwell. - 0031-8205 .- 1933-1592. ; 87:3, s. 611-639
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Skeptical worries about moral responsibility seem to be widely appreciated and deeply felt. To address these worries—if nothing else to show that they are mistaken—theories of moral responsibility need to relate to whatever concept of responsibility underlies the worries. Unfortunately, the nature of that concept has proved hard to pin down. Not only do philosophers have conflicting intuitions; numerous recent empirical studies have suggested that both prosaic responsibility judgments and incompatibilist intuitions among the folk are influenced by a number of surprising factors, sometimes prompting apparently contradictory judgments. In this paper, we show how an independently motivated hypothesis about responsibility judgments provides a unified explanation of the more important results from these studies. According to this ‘Explanation Hypothesis’, to take an agent to be morally responsible for an event is to take a relevant motivational structure of the agent to be part of a significant explanation of the event. We argue that because of how explanatory interests and perspectives affect what we take as significant explanations, this analysis accounts for the puzzling variety of empirical results. If this is correct, the Explanation Hypothesis also provides a new way of understanding debates about moral responsibility.
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-
(författare)
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Alternatives
- 2008
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Ingår i: Philosophical communications. - 1652-0459. ; 49
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Discusses various attempts to define two key notions in consequentialist ethics, those of alternatives and consequences of actions, raises problems and proposes a solution. Hitherto unpublished manuscript from 1992.
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| 7. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-, et al.
(författare)
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Argumentationsanalys : Färdigheter för kritiskt tänkande
- 2009. - 2
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Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Ny reviderad utgåva.Att tänka kritiskt är att självständigt ta ställning till rimligheten i påståenden och argument. Det är en ovärderlig förmåga när vi ställs inför frågor där svaren är många och motstridiga och argumentationen pekar i olika riktningar. I sådana situationer kan det vara svårt att skaffa sig överblick över argumenten, ta ställning till deras styrka och göra en samlad bedömning av alternativen. Lyckligtvis är detta svårigheter som går att hantera med just sådana verktyg som Argumentationsanalys erbjuder. Genom att använda dem förbättrar vi vår förmåga att både identifiera argument i text och tal och bedöma deras beviskraft. Den som själv behöver skriva en argumenterande text eller göra ett argumenterande framförande har dessutom god hjälp av bokens metod att åskådliggöra hur olika argument i en viss fråga förhåller sig till varandra. Argumentationsanalys är en teoretisk och praktisk handledning med övningar. Boken riktar sig till studenter i humanistiska och samhällsvetenskapliga ämnen, men också till alla andra som konfronteras med komplicerade argumentationer.
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| 8. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-
(författare)
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Being Implicated : On the Fittingness of Guilt and Indignation over Outcomes
- 2021
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Ingår i: Philosophical Studies. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0031-8116 .- 1573-0883. ; 178, s. 3543-3560
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- When is it fitting for an agent to feel guilt over an outcome, and for others to be morally indignant with her over it? A popular answer requires that the outcome happened because of the agent, or that the agent was a cause of the outcome. This paper reviews some of what makes this causal-explanatory view attractive before turning to two kinds of problem cases: cases of collective harms and cases of fungible switching. These, it is argued, motivate a related but importantly different answer: What is required for fitting guilt and indignation is that the agent is relevantly implicated in that outcome: that the agent’s morally substandard responsiveness to reasons, or substandard caring, is relevantly involved in a normal explanation of it. This answer, it is further argued, makes sense because when an agent’s substandard caring is so involved, the outcome provides a lesson against such caring, a lesson central to the function of guilt and indignation.
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| 9. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-
(författare)
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Collective explanations, individual responsibility
- 2009
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Ingår i: Book of abstracts, International Conference on Moral Responsibility: Neuroscience, Organization & Engineering, Book of Abstracts. - Delft, Netherlands : 3TU.Centre for Ethics and Technology, Delft University of Technology. - 9789056382148 ; , s. 35-36
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Two philosophical discussions of moral responsibility run parallel. One is tightly connected to the debate about free will and its relation to determinism and indeterminism. Philosophical accounts of moral responsibility belonging to this discussion typically focus on individual agential responsibility, characterizing what must be true about individuals in order for them to be responsible for their actions. The other discussion is connected to normative ethics, and the question of when the normative status of an action is affected by the occurrence of some good or bad event. Accounts belonging to this discussion sometimes address questions of whether individuals can be responsible for outcomes of actions by collectives to which they belong or identify with, or for joint effects of a great number of similar actions. A branch of the normative debate about responsibility also concerns the responsibility of collective agents such as corporations and nations. The two discussions rarely meet, and for seemingly good reason, as they appear to be concerned with very different aspects of responsibility; one is concerned with the causes of actions and the conditions under which we decide to act, the other with the relation between actions and consequences of action. In this paper, however, I argue that the Explanation Account, a promising account of individual agential responsibility, extends naturally to both individual and collective outcome-responsibility, and suggests intuitively plausible answers to questions about the responsibility of collectives and their members. The crucial aspect of the Explanation Account is that for an agent to be responsible for an event is for some relevant aspect of the agent’s motivation or lack thereof to be part of a significant explanation of that event. In the paper, I discuss how this extends to cases where events are explained by the fact that, say, the US rejects an international treaty, or that affluent people keep flying more than necessary. Unlike many other accounts of responsibility in virtue of participation in collective action, this account does not presuppose that collectives are agents, or even that they are social or cultural units. What matters is whether the actions of these individuals are instances of a set of actions that explains the outcomes for which they are thereby responsible. References: * Björnsson, Gunnar and Persson, Karl “Judgments of Moral Responsibility: A Unified Account”, Society for Philosophy and Psychology, 35th Annual Meeting 2009, available at http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00004633/ * Björnsson, Gunnar and Persson, Karl “The Explanatory Component of Moral Responsibility”, forthcoming in Noûs
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| 10. |
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| 11. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-
(författare)
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Collective explanations, joint responsibility
- 2010
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Two philosophical discussions of moral responsibility run parallel. One is tightly connected to the debate about free will and its relation to determinism and indeterminism. Philosophical accounts of moral responsibility belonging to this discussion typically focus on individual agential responsibility, characterizing what must be true about individuals in order for them to be responsible for their actions. The other discussion is connected to normative ethics, and the question of when the normative status of an action is affected by the occurrence of some good or bad event. Accounts belonging to this discussion sometimes address questions of whether individuals can be responsible for outcomes of actions by collectives to which they belong or identify with, or for joint effects of a great number of similar actions. A branch of the normative debate about responsibility also concerns the responsibility of collective agents such as corporations and nations. The two discussions rarely meet, and for seemingly good reason, as they appear to be concerned with very different aspects of responsibility; one is concerned with the causes of actions and the conditions under which we decide to act, the other with the relation between actions and consequences of action. In this paper, however, I argue that the Explanation Account, a promising account of individual agential responsibility, extends naturally to both individual and collective outcome-responsibility, and suggests intuitively plausible answers to questions about the responsibility of collectives and their members. The crucial aspect of the Explanation Account is that for an agent to be responsible for an event is for some relevant aspect of the agent’s motivation or lack thereof to be part of a significant explanation of that event. In the paper, I discuss how this extends to cases where events are explained by the fact that, say, the US rejects an international treaty, or that affluent people keep flying more than necessary. Unlike many other accounts of responsibility in virtue of participation in collective action, this account does not presuppose that collectives are agents, or even that they are social or cultural units. What matters is whether the actions of these individuals are instances of a set of actions that explains the outcomes for which they are thereby responsible. References: * Björnsson, Gunnar and Persson, Karl “Judgments of Moral Responsibility: A Unified Account”, Society for Philosophy and Psychology, 35th Annual Meeting 2009, available at http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00004633/ * Björnsson, Gunnar and Persson, Karl “The Explanatory Component of Moral Responsibility”, forthcoming in Noûs
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| 12. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-
(författare)
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Collective Responsibility and Collective Obligations without Collective Agents
- 2020
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Ingår i: The Routledge Handbook of Collective Responsibility. - : Routledge. - 9781138092242 - 9781315107608 ; , s. 127-141
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- It is commonplace to attribute obligations to φ or blameworthiness for φ-ing to groups even when no member has an obligation to φ or is individually blameworthy for not φ-ing. Such non-distributive attributions can seem problematic in cases where the group is not a moral agent in its own right. In response, it has been argued both that non-agential groups can have the capabilities requisite to have obligations of their own, and that group obligations can be understood in terms of moral demands on individual group members. It has also been suggested that members of groups can share responsibility for an outcome in virtue of being causally or socially connected to that outcome. This paper discusses the agency problem and argues that the most promising attempts at solutions understand group obligations and blameworthiness as grounded in demands on individual agents.
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| 13. |
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| 14. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969
(författare)
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Commentary on Lycan's "Conditional-Assertion Theories of Conditionals"
- 2007
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Ingår i: Philosophical Communications, Web Series. - 1652-0459. ; :43, s. 1-8
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Argues (a) that Lycan underestimates the plausibility of analyses of interrogative and imperative conditionals in terms of conditional communicative intentions and deconstructs "the simple illocutionary theory" in ways that hides its main resources for handling the kind of difficulties that Lycan is raising, and (b) that the simple theory still fails because of its constitutional inability to deal with the multitude of communicative purposes for which declarative conditionals are normally used, something which is inherent in the nesting difficulties raised by Lycan.
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| 15. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969
(författare)
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Commentary on Lycan's "Conditional-Assertion Theories of Conditionals"
- 2006
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Ingår i: What if? Perspectives on Conditionals, University of Connecticut 2006.
-
Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Argues (a) that Lycan underestimates the plausibility of analyses of interrogative and imperative conditionals in terms of conditional communicative intentions and deconstructs "the simple illocutionary theory" in ways that hides its main resources for handling the kind of difficulties that Lycan is raising, and (b) that the simple theory still fails because of its constitutional inability to deal with the multitude of communicative purposes for which declarative conditionals are normally used, something which is inherent in the nesting difficulties raised by Lycan.
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| 16. |
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| 17. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969
(författare)
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Conceptual Spandrels
- 2010
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Ingår i: MMER Workshop on Metaethics and Empirical Methods, U. of Gothenburg Sep 4 2010.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The possibility of conceptual spandrels is used to make problematic traditional arm chair approaches to metaethics. An empirical model of judgments of moral responsibility is used to illustrate conceptual spandrels, and to indicate the sort of philosophical implications that empirical models of this sort can have.
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| 18. |
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| 19. |
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| 20. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-
(författare)
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Contextualism, assessment-relativity and content-insensitivity
- 2009
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Ingår i: Pragmatics, Semantics, and Systematicity; Stockholm 8-9 maj 2009.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Recently, a number of authors have argued that contextualist analyses of for example epistemic modals and matters of taste are inadequate and need to be recast in terms of assessment-relative truth or assessment-relative contents. The viability of such relativist proposals have been much discussed recently, but what has not been noted is that a minor adjustment of a standard non-relativist background assumption yields the same predictions of linguistic intuitions and behaviour as does the intrusive revisions called for by relativism. The evidence adduced to support assessment-relative accounts consists mostly in cases where the following seems to be true: EVIDENCE: The correctness of an utterance (or belief) is appropriately assessed without sensitivity to the truth-conditions assigned to that utterance by contextualist accounts. Such cases might seem to suggest that the content of the utterance, or the proposition it expresses, has assessment-relative truth-conditions, or that the utterance has its contents relative to contexts of assessment. From the non-relativist perspective, however, such cases can simply be understood as cases of appropriate content-insensitive assessments; the assessor is simply assessing a content other than (but related to) that expressed by the original speaker or accepted as true by the original believer. Instead of relativizing contents or truth-conditions to contexts of assessment, this perspective gives a contextualist account of the content of acts of assessment, where the content of utterances like "no", "yes" or of the form "[what he said/that] is [true/right/wrong]" depend on their context in ways corresponding exactly to the assessor-relativity proposed by critics of contextualist analyses. In my talk, which is based on joint work with Alexander Almér, I compare this contextualist interpretation with relativist alternatives and argue that it provides a theoretically preferable accommodation of various examples of EVIDENCE.
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| 21. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-, et al.
(författare)
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Contextualism, assessor relativism, and insensitive assessments
- 2009
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Ingår i: Logique et Analyse. - : Nationaal Centrum voor Navorsingen in de Logica. - 0024-5836 .- 2295-5836. ; 52:208, s. 363-372
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Recently, contextualism about epistemic modals and predicates of taste have come under fire from advocates of assessment relativistic analyses. Contextualism, they have argued, fails to account for what we call "felicitous insensitive assessments". In this paper, we provide one hitherto overlooked way in which contextualists can embrace the phenomenon by slightly modifying an assumption that has remained in the background in most of the debate over contextualism and relativism. Finally, we briefly argue that the resulting contextualist account is at least as plausible as the relativist alternative and should be carefully considered before contextualism is abandoned for relativism.
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| 22. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-
(författare)
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Contextualism for Conditional
- 2008
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Ingår i: Utterance Interpretation and Cognitve Models,2008.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Contextualism for Conditionals Consider the following sentences: (1) If Sarah has the measles, she will have a fever. (2) If Sarah has a fever, then she has the measles. (3) If Julia asks nicely, Bill still won-t help us. Intuitively, (1) would be used to communicate that the present case is of the kind in which having fever follows causally from having measles, (2) would be used to communicate that the case is one in which having the measles follows evidentially from having a fever, and (3) would probably be used to communicate that the case in question isn-t the kind in which asking nicely elicits helpful action. My question is through what processed these intuitive messages concerning causal and evidential relations are encoded and decoded given the conventional contribution of the -if P, Q- form. Standard philosophical theories of indicative conditionals - the material implication theory, the conditional probability theory, and versions of the possible world theory - take these intuitive messages to be pragmatically inferred from the utterance of a sentence the conventional meaning of which gives it more abstract truth- or acceptability conditions. Elsewhere, I have defended an alternative model: relational contextualism. It agrees that the intuitive messages are determined pragmatically, but denies that we identify the intuitive messages by first identifying more abstract truth- or acceptability conditions. Instead, the conventional contribution of if-clauses to the meaning of conditionals is that if-clauses introduce a proposition without asserting it so that the main clause can be understood in relation to it. When we decode the conditional form, our primary task is to identify the relevant relation between the content of the if-clause and the main clause. In the case of conditionals like (1), (2) and (3), that relation will typically be one of causal or evidential consequence or independence. There are several reasons to think that something like relational contextualism is correct. It gives a unified account of a wide variety of conditionals: apart from consequence conditionals like (1) and (2) and independence conditionals like (3), it covers relevance conditionals (-If anyone cares to ask, I do have views on celebrity couples-) as well as conditionals expressing conditional commands, questions and bets (-If it is snowing hard, stay with your car-). It explains both why conditionals embed systematically and why some embedding constructions nevertheless seem unintelligible. And it promises a unified account of indicative and subjunctive conditionals, as well as a straightforward explanation of the well-known context-relativity of the latter. My concern in this talk is to clarify how relational contextualism explains a phenomenon that appears to undermine standard theories of conditionals. Standard theories all take it that when the consequent is highly probable independently of the antecedent, we have good reasons to accept what the conditional says. But not all such conditionals seem acceptable. I am reasonably confident that both clauses of the following conditional are true, but I find the conditionals nonsensical rather than acceptable: (4) If Berne is the capital of Switzerland, John Lennon was killed in 1980. I am also reasonable confident that it will rain tomorrow, independently of what I do, but my first intuitive verdict about the following is false: (5) If I go to the movies tonight, it will rain tomorrow. Verdicts like these are very common, especially among people without background in logic and the theory of conditionals, and relational contextualism explains them easily: (4) comes off as unintelligible because no relation between antecedent and consequent has been identified; (5) comes off as false because it has been taking to convey a relation of causal consequence between
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| 23. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969
(författare)
-
Contextualism for Conditionals
- 2008
-
Ingår i: Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models II, Book of abstracts.
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Contextualism for Conditionals Consider the following sentences: (1)If Sarah has the measles, she will have a fever. (2)If Sarah has a fever, then she has the measles. (3)If Julia asks nicely, Bill still won’t help us. Intuitively, (1) would be used to communicate that the present case is of the kind in which having fever follows causally from having measles, (2) would be used to communicate that the case is one in which having the measles follows evidentially from having a fever, and (3) would probably be used to communicate that the case in question isn’t the kind in which asking nicely elicits helpful action. My question is through what processed these intuitive messages concerning causal and evidential relations are encoded and decoded given the conventional contribution of the “if P, Q” form. Standard philosophical theories of indicative conditionals – the material implication theory, the conditional probability theory, and versions of the possible world theory – take these intuitive messages to be pragmatically inferred from the utterance of a sentence the conventional meaning of which gives it more abstract truth- or acceptability conditions. Elsewhere, I have defended an alternative model: relational contextualism. It agrees that the intuitive messages are determined pragmatically, but denies that we identify the intuitive messages by first identifying more abstract truth- or acceptability conditions. Instead, the conventional contribution of if-clauses to the meaning of conditionals is that if-clauses introduce a proposition without asserting it so that the main clause can be understood in relation to it. When we decode the conditional form, our primary task is to identify the relevant relation between the content of the if-clause and the main clause. In the case of conditionals like (1), (2) and (3), that relation will typically be one of causal or evidential consequence or independence. There are several reasons to think that something like relational contextualism is correct. It gives a unified account of a wide variety of conditionals: apart from consequence conditionals like (1) and (2) and independence conditionals like (3), it covers relevance conditionals (“If anyone cares to ask, I do have views on celebrity couples”) as well as conditionals expressing conditional commands, questions and bets (“If it is snowing hard, stay with your car”). It explains both why conditionals embed systematically and why some embedding constructions nevertheless seem unintelligible. And it promises a unified account of indicative and subjunctive conditionals, as well as a straightforward explanation of the well-known context-relativity of the latter. My concern in this talk is to clarify how relational contextualism explains a phenomenon that appears to undermine standard theories of conditionals. Standard theories all take it that when the consequent is highly probable independently of the antecedent, we have good reasons to accept what the conditional says. But not all such conditionals seem acceptable. I am reasonably confident that both clauses of the following conditional are true, but I find the conditionals nonsensical rather than acceptable: (4)If Berne is the capital of Switzerland, John Lennon was killed in 1980. I am also reasonable confident that it will rain tomorrow, independently of what I do, but my first intuitive verdict about the following is false: (5)If I go to the movies tonight, it will rain tomorrow. Verdicts like these are very common, especially among people without background in logic and the theory of conditionals, and relational contextualism explains them easily: (4) comes off as unintelligible because no relation between antecedent and consequent has been identified; (5) comes off as false because it has been taking to convey a relation of causal consequence between antecedent and consequent. Defenders of standard theories try to explain this with reference to conversational implicature, but I have argued elsewhere that such explanations are problematic. The literal contents ascribed to conditionals by these theories would have to be much further removed from the conscious processing of sentences such as (4) and (5) than are literal contents in typical cases of conversational implicature, such as the literal content of conjunctive sentences that seem to imply causal or temporal relations between conjuncts, thus making it implausible that the mechanisms at work are the same. And there are reasons to think that relational contextualism better fits our ways of associating expressions with contents, ways that explain the rapid conventionalisation of conversational implicatures. But while it is clear that relational contextualism leaves room for typical reactions to (4) and (5), it will only provide an explanation of these reactions if supplied with an account of what factors we can expect to affect the conversational salience of various kinds of relations between antecedent and consequents, in particular relations of consequence and independence. What I will do in this talk is to sketch such an account, and begin offering an explanation. To do this, I sketch a general account of what it is to be aware of such relations, and discuss various factors that affect the salience of epistemic, causal, and logical consequence and independence relations of different degrees of abstractness. This account takes our awareness of consequence and independence relations to be central to our capacity to adapt to lawful regularities of various kind: epistemic, causal, logical, etc. Such awareness consists in the activation of what I call our concepts or regularities: mechanisms involving a capacity to recognize that a case falls within the domain of the regularity (smoke is only accompanied by fire under certain circumstances) as well as certain inferential tendencies (to infer the presence of fire from the presence of smoke, say) that differ depending on whether the regularities in question are consequence or independence regularities. Taken together with relational contextualism, this account lets us explain why concepts of consequence regularities will tend to be more easily activated than independence regularities, which in turn explains why conditionals typically need special linguistic markers to communicate independence relations. It also underpins an explanation of why concepts of regularities that track both consequence and independence regularities will be much less easily activated, thus explaining why many take (4) to be nonsensical rather than true or false. And it lets us explain why concepts of causal relations are particularly easy to activate, thus explaining why (5) can come out as false, even though relations that we take not to hold will tend to be much less salient than relations that we take to hold.
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| 24. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969
(författare)
-
Contextualism for Conditionals
- 2009
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Ingår i: CSU Summer school on Conditional, Budapest July 2009.
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 25. |
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| 26. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-
(författare)
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Contextualism for Indicative Conditionals
- 2009
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Ingår i: Semantics and Philosophy in Europe, London April 2009.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper argues that the conventional contribution of the If P, Q form to communicated contents is radically dependent on pragmatic factors that vary with context of utterance and contents of if-clause and main clause. That pragmatics play a considerable role in the understanding of conditionals is familiar, and although some accounts of conditionals exclude non-conditional conditionals, such as (1) There are biscuits on the table if you want some. and conditional bets or requests, others want to include those (Stephen Barker 1995, DeRose and Grandy 1999, David Barnett 2006, Smith and Smith 1988, Noh 1996), and all standard accounts are meant to cover all paradigmatic “conditional” conditionals, such as (2) If Sarah has the measles, she will be having a fever. (3) If you are really hungry, Bill still won’t share his food. Standard accounts can be represented by materialism, expressivism and credalism. According to materialism, indicative conditionals express material implications: asserting a conditional like (2) “if Sarah has the measles, she will be having a fever” is asserting that it isn’t both the case that Sarah has the measles and that she doesn’t have a fever. According to expressivism, conditionals lack truth-conditions, but asserting (2) is expressing a high subjective probability for Sarah’s having a fever conditional on her having the measles. (Adams 1975; Bennett 2003; Edgington 1995) And according credalism, asserting (2) is asserting that Sarah has a fever in all relevant possible worlds in which she has the measles and which matches the present world with respect to what we believe or know. (Nolan 2003; Stalnaker 1981; Weatherson 2001) Two things are notable about these accounts: (A) They all take the conventional contribution of conditionals to determine a truth- or assertability condition in a context according to some conventional rule. (Although assumptions about the relation between the semantics of conditionals and the process of interpretation are seldom detailed, I will assume that these theories take normal utterance interpretation to proceed by taking this content as input, to be modified by pragmatic processes.) (B) They take this content to be mute on whether the consequent would follow from or holds independently of the antecedent. When we sense that (2), unlike (3), communicates that the consequent would follow from the antecedent, we have added to the literal content of the conditional. If the argument of this paper is correct, neither (A) nor (B) is sustainable. What the arguments suggest, instead, is that the conventional contribution of the If P, Q form is restricted to the following: Non-assertoric Introduction: If-clauses introduce a proposition without presenting it as true it so that the main clause can be understood in relation to it. According to this hypothesis – relational contextualism – the content of conditionals could be represented as follows at the most abstract level: (4) If P, Q / Q if P =df R(P, Q) R would be supplied by context, and could take such values as (a) THE POSSIBILITY … MAKES THE ASSERTION OF … RELEVANT (b) UNDER CIRCUMSTANCES LIKE THE PRESENT, THE POSSIBILITY … HAS … AS A CONSEQUENCE where (a) would provide the relevant relation for normal interpretations of (1) and (b) the relation for (2), to provide two examples. (Notice that only parts of the content would be understood as asserted content: it is not asserted that the antecedent represents a possibility rather than the truth, and utterances of conditionals of form (a) typically assert their consequents.) In the paper, I pose three kinds of problem for standard accounts, and offer relational contextualism as the solution to these problems. The first problem is that neither of these accounts make good sense of how we learn to use sentences of the If P, Q form. A child who is learning to use and interpret conditionals will have to grasp non-assertoric introduction before understanding that conditionals convey the relation of material implication or any other relation postulated as the literal content by standard theories of conditionals. Furthermore, there are reasons to think that the relations that standard accounts take to provide the literal meaning of conditionals are too abstract to be grasped to be associated with the conditional form. Grasping these contents could only be the result of fairly sophisticated abstraction. For learners who have not reached that level of sophistication, interpretation would have to proceed along the very lines suggested by relational contextualism. The second problem is that even if such abstraction could take place, a child who has grasped non-assertoric introduction has nothing to gain but something to loose in interpretive effectiveness by assuming that the conditional form itself conveys any of these other relations. The third problem for standard accounts is that they fail to provide adequate explanations of why some conditionals that would be literally true or acceptable are normally perceived to be false or meaningless. For example, in the case of both of the following conditionals, I am right now fairly confident that the consequent is true, independently of the antecedent: (5) If I go to the movies tonight, it will rain tomorrow. (6) If Berne is the capital of Switzerland, John Lennon was killed in 1980. Their literal contents are obviously acceptable on both materialism, expressivism and credalism. Nevertheless, (5) seems false to me – tomorrow’s weather is independent of my cinematic activities – and (6) seems nonsensical. Studies of students of different backgrounds at different universities show that such verdicts are very common (even among people with some familiarity with logic). Proponents of standard accounts hope to explain such reactions with reference to conversational pragmatics, but it is unclear what principles would support these explanations. As I make clear, standard explanations in terms of Gricean maxims or relevance theoretic constraints seem to yield the wrong results. By contrast, relational contextualism can explain typical reaction to both (5) and (6) and standard epistemic constraints on indicative conditionals.
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| 27. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969
(författare)
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Contextualism in Ethics
- 2013
-
Ingår i: The International Encyclopedia of Ethics. - Hoboken, NJ, USA : Wiley. - 9781444367072
-
Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- ¨There are various ways in which context matters in ethics. Most clearly, the context in which an action is performed might determine whether the action is morally right: though it is often wrong not to keep a promise, it might be permissible in certain contexts. More radically, proponents of moral particularism (see particularism) have argued that a reason for an action in one context is not guaranteed to be a reason in a different context: whether it is a reason against an act that it breaks a promise or inflicts pain might depend on the particulars of the situation. In moral epistemology, Timmons (1999: Ch. 5) argues that whether a moral judgment is epistemically responsible depends both on the basic moral outlook of the moral judge and on whether the context of judgment is one of engaged moral thinking, or one of distanced, skeptical reflection. In the former, the judge’s basic moral outlook can serve to justify the judgment; not so in the latter (see epistemology, moral). Our focus here, however, will be on forms of metaethical, and more precisely semantic, contextualism in moral discourse and moral thinking. According to these forms of contextualism (henceforth “metaethical contextualism,” or just “contextu- alism”), the meaning or truth-conditions of a moral judgment depend not only on the properties of the act it concerns, but also on features of the context in which the judgment is made, such as the standards endorsed by the moral judge or the parties of the conversation. If metaethical contextualism is correct, it might be that when two persons judge that abortions must be banned, one person’s judgment might be true whereas the other person’s is false, because they accept different fundamental norms. This would undermine the idea that there are objectively correct answers to moral questions. Metaethical contextualism is supported from three directions. First, what is expressed by terms such as “good” and “ought” seems to be context-dependent when used outside ethics, being dependent on a variety of interests and concerns. One might therefore expect similar context dependence when these terms are used to express moral judgments, assuming a corresponding variety of interests and concerns in moral contexts. Second, many have thought that deep moral disagree- ments suggest that the interests and concerns behind moral judgments do vary in this way. Finally, contextualism promises to make sense of what seems to be an intrinsic yet defeasible connection between moral judgments and moral motivation, by tying the meaning or truth-conditions of moral judgments closely to interests and concerns of moral judges. At the same time, contextualism faces two broad kinds of problems: to make sense of the seemingly categorical or objective preten- sions of moral claims, and to explain why the parties to deep moral disagreement often behave as if they were disagreeing about substantive issues rather than talking past each other. In the sections that follow, we look closer at both sources of support and problems for contextualism.
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| 28. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-
(författare)
-
Contextualism in Ethics
- 2013
-
Ingår i: The International Encyclopedia of Ethics. - Oxford : Wiley-Blackwell. - 9781405186414
-
Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- There are various ways in which context matters in ethics. Most clearly, the context in which an action is performed might determine whether the action is morally right: though it is often wrong not to keep a promise, it might be permissible in certain contexts. More radically, proponents of moral particularism (see particularism) have argued that a reason for an action in one context is not guaranteed to be a reason in a different context: whether it is a reason against an act that it breaks a promise or inflicts pain might depend on the particulars of the situation. In moral epistemology, Timmons (1999: Ch. 5) argues that whether a moral judgment is epistemically responsible depends both on the basic moral outlook of the moral judge and on whether the context of judgment is one of engaged moral thinking, or one of distanced, skeptical reflection. In the former, the judge’s basic moral outlook can serve to justify the judgment; not so in the latter (see epistemology, moral).Our focus here, however, will be on forms of metaethical, and more precisely semantic, contextualism in moral discourse and moral thinking. According to these forms of contextualism (henceforth “metaethical contextualism,” or just “contextu- alism”), the meaning or truth-conditions of a moral judgment depend not only on the properties of the act it concerns, but also on features of the context in which the judgment is made, such as the standards endorsed by the moral judge or the parties of the conversation. If metaethical contextualism is correct, it might be that when two persons judge that abortions must be banned, one person’s judgment might be true whereas the other person’s is false, because they accept different fundamental norms. This would undermine the idea that there are objectively correct answers to moral questions.Metaethical contextualism is supported from three directions. First, what is expressed by terms such as “good” and “ought” seems to be context-dependent when used outside ethics, being dependent on a variety of interests and concerns. One might therefore expect similar context dependence when these terms are used to express moral judgments, assuming a corresponding variety of interests and concerns in moral contexts. Second, many have thought that deep moral disagree- ments suggest that the interests and concerns behind moral judgments do vary in this way. Finally, contextualism promises to make sense of what seems to be an intrinsic yet defeasible connection between moral judgments and moral motivation, by tying the meaning or truth-conditions of moral judgments closely to interests and concerns of moral judges. At the same time, contextualism faces two broad kinds of problems: to make sense of the seemingly categorical or objective preten- sions of moral claims, and to explain why the parties to deep moral disagreement often behave as if they were disagreeing about substantive issues rather than talking past each other. In the sections that follow, we look closer at both sources of support and problems for contextualism.
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| 29. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969
(författare)
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Contextualism, Relativism And The Pragmatics Of Insensitive Assessments
- 2009
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Ingår i: Abstract online. Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Studies, London Nov 2009.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Argues that the phenomenon highlighted by defenders of so-called Asessor Relativism is but one example of a wider sort of phenomena and is best accounted for by a pragmatic account of semantic assessments.
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| 30. |
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| 31. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-, et al.
(författare)
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Contextualizing Relativism
- 2009
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Ingår i: VAF 2009 Tilburg, Nederländerna.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Recently, a number of authors, in particular John MacFarlane, have suggested that evidence having to do with disagreement and retractions calls for abandonment of traditional contextualist analyses of some discourses, e.g., epistemic modals and taste judgments. Data, they argue, instead supports a new relativist notion of semantics, embracing that one and the same asserted proposition might vary in truth with context of assessment. We argue essentially two points with pertinence to adjudicate between this notion of relativism and contextualism. First, we point out that data only speaks in favour of relativism given certain general conceptions of semantics. Secondly, we argue that from within a certain well-known naturalistic semantic framework, the evidence suggests contextualist analysis of "true", "false" and cognates. We briefly sketch how such a non-standard contextualism would account for disagreement and retraction data in a way avoiding the objections from the relativist camp.
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| 32. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-, et al.
(författare)
-
Corporate Crocodile Tears? : On the Reactive Attitudes of Corporations
- 2017
-
Ingår i: Philosophy and phenomenological research. - : Wiley. - 0031-8205 .- 1933-1592. ; 94:2, s. 273-298
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Recently, a number of people have argued that certain entities embodied by groups of agents themselves qualify as agents, with their own (analogs of) beliefs, desires, and intentions; even, some claim, as moral agents. However, others have independently argued that fully-fledged moral agency involves a capacity for reactive attitudes such as guilt and indignation, and these capacities might seem beyond the ken of “collective” or “corporate” agents. Individuals embodying such agents can of course be ashamed, proud, or indignant about what the agent has done. But just as an entity needs to have its own beliefs, desires, and intentions to qualify as a bona fide agent, the required capacity for reactive attitudes is a capacity to have one’s own reactive attitudes. If fully-fledged moral agency requires reactive attitudes, the corporate agent must itself be capable of (analogs of) guilt and indignation. In this paper, we argue that at least certain corporate agents are. Or, more precisely, we argue that if there are bona fide corporate agents, these agents can have the capacities that are both associated with guilt and indignation and plausibly required for moral agency; in particular certain epistemic and motivational capacities.
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| 33. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-
(författare)
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Diagreement, correctness, and the evidence for metaethical absolutism
- 2015
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Ingår i: Oxford Studies in Metaethics. - Oxford : Oxford University Press. - 9780198738701
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Metaethical absolutism is the view that moral concepts have non-relative satisfaction conditions that are constant across judges and their particular beliefs, attitudes, and cultural embedding. Two related premises underpin the argument for absolutism: (1) that moral thinking and discourse display a number of features that are characteristically found in paradigmatically absolutist domains, and only partly in uncontroversially non-absolutist domains; and (2) that the best way of making sense of these features is to assume that absolutism is correct. This chapter defends the prospect of a non-absolutist explanation of these “absolutist” features, thus calling into question the second premise. The chapter proposes independently motivated general accounts of attributions of agreement, disagreement, correctness, and incorrectness that can explain both why absolutist domains display all “absolutist” features and why these non-absolutist domains display some, and thus provides preliminary reasons to think that these features of moral discourse can be given a non-absolutist explanation.
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| 34. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-
(författare)
-
Do ‘objectivist’ features of moral discourse and thinking support moral objectivism?
- 2012
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Ingår i: Journal of Ethics. - Nederländerna : Springer Netherlands. - 1382-4554 .- 1572-8609. ; 16:4, s. 367-393
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Many philosophers think that moral objectivism is supported by stable features of moral discourse and thinking. When engaged in moral reasoning and discourse, people behave ‘as if’ objectivism were correct, and the seemingly most straightforward way of making sense of this is to assume that objectivism is correct; this is how we think that such behavior is explained in paradigmatically objectivist domains. By comparison, relativist, error-theoretic or non-cognitivist accounts of this behavior seem contrived and ad hoc. After explaining why this argument should be taken seriously (recent arguments notwithstanding), I argue that it is nevertheless undermined by considerations of moral disagreement. Even if the metaphysical, epistemic and semantic commitments of objectivism provide little or no evidence against it, and even if the alternative explanations of ‘objectivist’ traits of moral discourse and thinking are speculative or contrived, objectivism is itself incapable of making straightforward sense of these traits. Deep and widespread moral disagreement or, rather, the mere appearance of such disagreement, strongly suggests that the explanations operative in paradigmatically objective discourse fail to carry over to the moral case. Since objectivism, no less than relativism, non-cognitivism and error-theories, needs non-trivial explanations of why we behave ‘as if’ objec- tivism were correct, such behavior does not presently provide reason to accept objectivism.
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| 35. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969
(författare)
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En arkimedisk punkt för metaetiken
- 2007
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Ingår i: Högre seminariet i Praktisk Filosofi, Stockholms universitet. ; 2007
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 36. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969, et al.
(författare)
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Enoch’s Defense of Robust Meta-Ethical Realism
- 2016
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Ingår i: Journal of Moral Philosophy. - : Brill. - 1740-4681 .- 1745-5243. ; 13:1, s. 101-112
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Taking Morality Seriously is David Enoch's book-length defense of meta-ethical and meta-normative non-naturalist realism. After describing Enoch's position and outlining the argumentative strategy of the book, we engage in a critical discussion of what we take to be particularly problematic central passages. We focus on Enoch's two original positive arguments for non-naturalist realism, one argument building on first order moral implications of different meta-ethical positions, the other attending to the rational commitment to normative facts inherent in practical deliberation. We also pay special attention to Enoch's handling of two types of objections to non-naturalist realism, objections having to do with the possibility of moral knowledge and with moral disagreement.
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| 37. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-
(författare)
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Essentially shared obligations
- 2014
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Ingår i: Midwest studies in philosophy. - : Philosophy Documentation Center. - 0363-6550 .- 1475-4975. ; 38:1, s. 103-120
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)
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| 38. |
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| 39. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-, et al.
(författare)
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Ethics Discussions at PEA Soup: Gunnar Björnsson and Stephen Finlay, "Metaethical Contextualism Defended
- 2010
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Annan publikation (populärvet., debatt m.m.)abstract
- We are pleased to announce the next installment of our collaboration withEthics, in which we host a discussion of one article from each issue of the journal. The article selected from Volume 121, Issue 1 is Gunnar Björnssonand Stephen Finlay, "Metaethical Contextualism Defended." We are very pleased that Ralph Wedgwood will be providing a précis of the article to introduce the discussion.Professor Wedgwood's précis will appear, and discussion of the article will begin, on Monday, December 13. The open-access version of Björnsson and Finlay's article is here. Abstract:We defend a contextualist account of normative judgments as relativized both to (i) information and to (ii) standards or ends against recent objections that turn on practices of normative disagreement. Niko Kolodny and John MacFarlane argue that information-relative contextualism cannot accommodate the connection between deliberation and advice. In response, we suggest that they misidentify the basic concerns of deliberating agents, which are not to settle the truth of particular propositions but to promote certain values. For pragmatic reasons, semantic assessments of normative claims sometimes are evaluations of propositions other than those asserted. Other writers have raised parallel objections to standard-relative contextualism, particularly about moral claims; we argue for a parallel solution.
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| 40. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-
(författare)
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Experimental Philosophy and Moral Responsibility
- 2022
-
Ingår i: Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility. - : Oxford University Press. - 9780190679309
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Can experimental philosophy help us answer central questions about the nature of moral responsibility, such as the question of whether moral responsibility is compatible with determinism? According to reasoning behind the Condorcet Jury Theorem, it might: if individual judges independently track the truth with even modest reliability, this reliability can quickly aggregate as the number of judges goes up. This paper asks whether preconditions for such aggregation hold with respect to folk attributions of responsibility to deterministic scenarios, and whether it has consequences for philosophical method. Section 1 introduces the basic assumptions behind the CJT. Section 2 looks at the distribution of responsibility attributions in recent empirical studies. Section 3 looks at evidence concerning folk reliability, including evidence supporting two error theories for folk compatibilism—the No Matter What and Indeterminist Intrusion hypotheses—and one error theory for folk incompatiblism—the Bypassing hypotheses. It is argued that data undermines the first two error theories and suggests that only a limited class of judgments are subject to the third. Section 4 explains how conditional error theories can change the support of a position without begging the question. Section 5 asks whether the intricacies of the compatibilism question should lead us to deny that the folk are even modestly reliable in their judgments. Section 6 suggests that even if they are, their judgments will often not be independent enough to add much to the judgments of professional philosophers. Section 7 concludes.
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| 41. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-
(författare)
-
Explaining away epistemic skepticism about culpability
- 2017
-
Ingår i: Oxford studies in agency and responsibility. - Oxford : Oxford University Press. - 9780198805618 - 9780191843563 - 9780198805601
-
Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Recently, a number of authors have suggested that the epistemic condition on moral responsibility makes blameworthiness much less common than we ordinarily suppose, and much harder to identify. This paper argues that such epistemically based responsibility skepticism is mistaken. Section 2 sketches a general account of moral responsibility, building on the Strawsonian idea that blame and credit relates to the agent’s quality of will. Section 3 explains how this account deals with central cases that motivate epistemic skepticism and how it avoids some objections to quality of will accounts recently raised by Gideon Rosen. But an intuitive worry brought out by these objections remains. Section 4 spells out this remaining worry and argues that, like traditional metaphysical responsibility skepticism, it has its source in a non-standard explanatory perspective on action, suggesting that strategies for explaining away the intuitive pull of traditional skepticism are applicable in this case too.
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| 42. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-
(författare)
-
Explaining (Away) the Epistemic Condition on Moral Responsibility
- 2017
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Ingår i: Responsibility. - Oxford : Oxford University Press. - 9780198779667 - 9780191824715 ; , s. 146-162
-
Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This chapter combines the familiar Strawsonian idea that moral blame and credit depend on the agent’s quality of will with an independently motivated account of responsibility as grounded in a normal explanatory relation between agential qualities and objects of responsibility. The resulting “explanatory quality of will condition” on moral responsibility is then further motivated by being shown to account for the effects on moral blame and credit of justifications, excuses, and undermined control in cases where agents are fully aware of what they are doing. Having been independently motivated, the explanatory quality of will condition is then applied to cases involving lack of awareness. Though this condition involves no explicit epistemic condition on responsibility, it is shown how it accounts for the degrees to which lack of awareness can excuse.
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| 43. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969
(författare)
-
Expressivism without Internalism
- 2011
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Ingår i: The Relevance of Motivational Internalism, the University of Gothenburg 17-18 August 2011.
-
Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 44. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969, et al.
(författare)
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Free Will Skepticism and Bypassing
- 2014
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Ingår i: Moral Psychology, vol 4: Free Will and Moral Responsibility / ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. - Cambridge, MA : MIT Press / A Bradford Book. - 9780262525473 ; , s. 27-35
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Reply to Eddy Nahmias' “Is Free Will an Illusion?”
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| 45. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-, et al.
(författare)
-
Free Will Skepticism and Bypassing
- 2014
-
Ingår i: Moral Psychology, vol 4. - : MIT Press. - 9780262525473 ; , s. 27-35
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 46. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-
(författare)
-
Gemensamma skyldigheter
- 2018
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Ingår i: Tidskrift för politisk filosofi. - 1402-2710 .- 2002-3383. ; 22:2, s. 69-79
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Vi tillskriver ofta skyldigheter till grupper av agenter. Det kan tyckas problematiskt, då grupperna inte själva uppfyller vanliga krav på moraliskt agentskap, och då skyldigheterna i fråga inte direkt motsvarar skyldigheter hos gruppens medlemmar. Här argumenterar jag emellertid för att problemet kan lösas om vi förstår gruppers plikter som helt analoga med individuella plikter att göra någonting som bara kan göras som ett resultat av andra, mer basala, göranden. Enligt förslaget så ligger skillnaden mellan individuella plikter gällande sådana "resulterande göranden" och gemensamma plikter enbart i att de mer basala görandena i det senare fallet fördelas på flera agenter.
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| 47. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969-
(författare)
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Group Duties without Decision-Making Procedures
- 2020
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Ingår i: Journal of Social Ontology. - : Walter de Gruyter GmbH. - 2196-9655 .- 2196-9663. ; 6:1, s. 127-139
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Recension (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Stephanie Collins’ Group Duties offers interesting new arguments and brings together numerous interconnected issues that have hitherto been treated separately. My critical commentary focuses on two particularly original and central claims of the book: (1) Only groups that are united under a group-level decision-making procedure can bear duties. (2) Attributions of duties to other groups should be understood as attributions of “coordination duties” to each member of the group, duties to either take steps responsive to the others with a view to the group’s doing what is said to be its duty or to express willingness to do so. In support of the first claim, Collins argues that only groups that can make decisions can bear duties, and that the ability to make decisions requires the relevant sort of decision-making procedure. I suggest that both parts of this argument remain in need of further support. I furthermore argue that Collins’ account of coordination duties gets certain kinds of cases wrong, and suggest that attributions of duties to groups without decision-making procedures are more plausibly understood as attributing shared duties grounded in demands on the group’s members to care about the values at stake.
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| 48. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969
(författare)
-
How Effects Depend on Their Causes, Why Causal Transitivity Fails, and Why We Care about Causation
- 2007
-
Ingår i: Philosophical Studies. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0031-8116 .- 1573-0883. ; 133:3, s. 349-390
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Despite recent efforts to improve on counterfactual theories of causation, failures to explain how effects depend on their causes are still manifest in a variety of cases. In particular, theories that do a decent job explaining cases of causal preemption have problems accounting for cases of causal intransitivity. Moreover, the increasing complexity of the counterfactual accounts makes it difficult to see why the concept of causation would be such a central part of our cognition. In this paper, I propose an account of our causal thinking that not only explains the hitherto puzzling variety of causal judgments, but also makes it intelligible why we would employ such an elusive concept.
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| 49. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969
(författare)
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How Effects Depend on Their Causes, Why Causal Transitivity Fails, and Why We Care about Causation
- 2006
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Ingår i: Department of Philosophy, Harvard University.
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Despite recent efforts to improve on counterfactual theories of causation, failures to explain how effects depend on their causes are still manifest in a variety of cases. In particular, theories that do a decent job explaining cases of causal preemption have problems accounting for cases of causal intransitivity. Moreover, the increasing complexity of the counterfactual accounts makes it difficult to see why the concept of causation would be such a central part of our cognition. In this paper, I propose an account of our causal thinking that not only explains the hitherto puzzling variety of causal judgments, but also makes it intelligible why we would employ such an elusive concept.
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| 50. |
- Björnsson, Gunnar, 1969
(författare)
-
If you believe in positive facts, you should believe in negative facts
- 2007
-
Ingår i: Hommage à Wlodek. Philosophical Papers Dedicated to Wlodek Rabinowicz. - : Filosofiska Institutionen, Lunds Universitet.
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Substantial metaphysical theory has long struggled with the question of negative facts, facts capable of making it true that Valerie isn’t vigorous. This paper argues that there is an elegant solution to these problems available to anyone who thinks that there are positive facts. Bradley’s regress and considerations of ontological parsimony show that an object’s having a property is an affair internal to the object and the property, just as numerical identity and distinctness are internal to the entities that are numerically identical or distinct. For the same reasons, an object’s lacking a property must be an affair internal to the object and the property. Negative facts will thus be part of any ontology of positive facts.
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