Stuart Brock

The Prospects for If-Thenism

Yablo [2017: 115] calls calibration problems in philosophy ‘hostage crises’ because in philosophy they tend to ‘involve a (relatively) thin, innocent claim and a (relatively) weighty, debatable one; the first is hostage to the second in that the second must hold or the first fails’. Calibration problems are not unique to philosophy. Perhaps the most well-known calibration problem was introduced by the social psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Tversky and Kahneman [1982] call their particular calibration problem ‘the conjunction fallacy’ and illustrate it with the following vignette about Linda.

Time in Fiction, by Craig Bourne and Emily Caddick Bourne

We care about the truth, yet this includes more than just actual truth. We also care about what is possible or possible truth. But this is puzzling. ‘Clinton won the 2016 U.S. election’ is actually false—but its possible truth still matters, even though it fails to describe our world. Yet, if so, what informational value does this have? Its possible truth seems informative of something important, but of what? Borghini’s book is a stellar introduction to these and other modal matters. It will be accessible to upper-level undergraduates, yet it is the most up-to-date guidebook around, making it worthwhile for specialists as well. But one highlight is the chapter on the history of modal philosophy (starting with Parmenides, ending with C.I. Lewis). A chapter-length piece on the history is found nowhere else, as far as I know. Appropriately enough, however, the book is focused on contemporary views, featuring coverage of modal realism, ersatzism, modal fictionalism, modalism, and the new modal actualism (including the ‘powers’metaphysics of modality), among others. Naturally, one can raise objections. As an organizational matter, it is unclear why modal expressivism is grouped with modal scepticism (ch. 2), why modal agnosticism is grouped with modal fictionalism (ch. 6), and why propositional ersatzism is typed as a kind of pictorial ersatzism (ch. 5). More seriously, chapter 5 is odd in that it makes no mention of Cresswell in the ‘combinatorialism’ subsection, focusing exclusively on Armstrong. Given his greater influence, Armstrong deserves more air-time. But the book may be misleading here; after all, Armstrong is not a paradigm combinatorialist—he’s partly a fictionalist as well. (For what it’s worth, sometimes Armstrong strikes me as an out-and-out ficitonalist, where his ‘modal fiction’ is not the closure of Lewis’s theory, as in standard modal fictionalism, but is the closure of a Cresswell-style theory.) Regardless, the book has much to recommend it. Borghini’s discussion of Quine in chapter 2 is especially admirable in that Quinean modal scepticism is carefully distinguished from ‘radical modal scepticism’. Quine’s views are more moderate than is usually thought, and Borghini’s sensitivity here is much appreciated. I am also grateful to the attention given to Meinong and neo-Meinongians in chapter 8, since those views are often brushed aside. And generally the book is a clear and authoritative roadmap to modal metaphysics, which should be welcomed by students and professionals alike.

Lying, Misleading, and What Is Said: an Exploration in Philosophy of Language and in Ethics, by Saul Jennifer Mather

and replying to 19 explicit objections. They are likely to encounter many more objections, however. Consider MEAT (fifteenth century: anything edible) and MEAT (currently: flesh). The authors prefer the view that the same concept MEAT can have different contents over time. The rejected alternative, that a new concept was introduced at some point expressed by a word spelled the same way, is also consistent with originalism. But other alternatives are available, e.g. that the word ‘meat’ is simply a label whose applicability has changed. Once it was applicable to something edible but now is applicable only to flesh—two distinct concepts. This thought-provoking book is compact and intense but certainly worth the read.