Friday, October 30, 2009

A Brief Objection to the Conjunction of Schaffer's Contrastivisms

To begin, I want to consider a sentence that I think I understand.

S. Jones knows that Suzy’s throwing the rock caused the window to break.

By claiming to understand this sentence, I do not mean to suggest I have complete and fully worked out views providing informative analyses of knowledge or causation. I simply claim that the sentence makes sense to me. A helpful comparison is to a sentence like this:

S’. Jones knows that Suzy’s throwing rather than tossing the rock caused the window to break rather than shatter, rather than that Billy’s throwing rather than tossing the rock caused the window to break rather than shatter.

While I don't claim that I am outright unable to parse such a sentence, S seems comprehensible to me in a way that S' does not. And this is the basis of one concern I have surrounding the conjunction of Jonathan Schaffer's contrastivisms.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Ross's Paradox, "ought", and "wants"

Ross's Paradox is a problem arising in Standard Deontic Logic. On the SDL interpretation of "ought", obligations survive weakening, in the sense that, if P entails Q, and it ought to be that P, then it follows that it ought to be that Q. Ross's paradox involves an instance of this commitment.

1) Jones ought to mail the letter.
2) Jones ought to mail the letter or burn the letter.

According to SDL, (1) entails (2), but, intuitively, (2) seems false in situations where (1) is true. Intuitively, (2) suggests that it is permissible to either mail the letter or to burn it, while (1) would seem to rule out the permissibility of burning the letter (it being assumed that you cannot both mail it and burn it).

I recently noticed a parallel between (2) and the following sentence:*

3) Jones wants a dog or a cat.