Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

The currently mainstream view is that, in normal conditions, our perceptual representations are largely accurate, as natural selection tends to favor epistemically reliable perceptual systems. This latter assumption has been questioned by Donald Hoffman and his collaborators by drawing on the formal tools of evolutionary game theory. According to their model, an organism whose visual system were tuned to objective reality would be driven to extinction. We argue that their model fails to take environmental modifications into due account, and we show that, once such changes are incorporated into the…

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).

The role of intention in criminal law stands in stark contrast to that of motive. While intention’s significance for criminal liability is hardly ever contested, motive’s relevance is most frequently relegated to the peripheries. This is, I believe, a mistake, and I hope to amend it by providing a novel argument in favour of motive’s relevance to criminal liability: an argument premised not on normative considerations, but on the very nature of motive itself. An agent’s motives, I will argue, are her ‘focal desires’. Desires, as I will illustrate in…

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…

A turn is taking place in analytic philosophy of mind. This article attempts to flesh out this claim by providing an overview of what may be called ‘analytic phenomenology’. The first section gives some reasons why this overview may be useful. The overview itself takes up the second section, which is divided into five sub-sections that address some of the central themes of analytic phenomenology. The third section draws a ‘family portrait’ of the movement, and assesses its general cultural significance. A brief appendix distinguishes analytic phenomenology from ‘4E-phenomenology’.

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…