Polish Journal of Philosophy

The paper analyses three versions of skepticism: (1) the attitude of a general withholding of belief; (2) the attitude of general doubt and (3) the view that all beliefs are unjustified. It is shown on the basis of epistemic logic that only the first of these versions can be deemed not to be self-contradictory.

This paper examines theories of first person authority proposed by Dorit Bar-On (2004), Crispin Wright (1989a) and Sydney Shoemaker (1988). What all threeaccounts have in common is that they attempt to explain first person authority by reference to the way our language works. Bar-On claims that in our language selfascriptions of mental states are regarded as expressive of those states; Wright says that in our language such self-ascriptions are treated as true by default; and Shoemaker suggests that they might arise from our capacity to avoid Moore-paradoxical utterances. I argue that Bar-On’s expressivism and Wright’s constitutive theory suffer from a similar problem: They fail to explain how it is possible for us to instantiate the language structures that supposedly bring about first person authority. Shoemaker’s account does not suffer from this problem. But it is unclear whether the capacity to avoid Moore-paradoxical utterances really yields self-knowledge. Also, it might be that self-knowledge explains why we have this capacity rather than vice versa.

Investigating the metaphysical problem of nature requires engaging with philosophy of science. Arguments in this field, combined with metaphysical underdetermination problems in fundamental physics, have given rise to a sophisticated form of scientific realism called ontic structural realism; and the reconceptualisation of metaphysics in terms of structures. This transforms the problem of nature into the dissolution of the distinction between mathematical andphysical structures (what we shall call the “blurring problem”). To date, there has been an insufficient exploration of this problem in the literature because it has been deemed unscientific. This essay demonstrates that the problem is legitimate, important, and connects with a wider issue in the philosophy of mathematics—namely, the problem of applicability of mathematics to the sciences’ investigation of nature (the Wigner Puzzle).

In this paper, we argue that Forrester’s paradox, as he presents it, is not a paradox of standard deontic logic. We show that the paradox fails since it is the result of a misuse of (ROM), a derived rule in the standard systems. Before presenting Forrester’s argument against standard deontic logic, we will briefly expose the principal characteristics of a standard system Δ. The modal system KD will be taken as a representative. We will then make some remarks regarding (ROM), pointing out that its use is restricted to the standard system’s theorems, and cannot be applied to contingent conditionals. Finally, we will show that Forrester’s paradox is not a paradox of standard deontic logic, at least not in the sense he intended it to be. We show that the paradox cannot arise in KD since its semantical model is not rich enough to represent the intuitive (informal) validity of the conditional within Forrester’s paradox. We show that the paradox arises within a system that has a finer semantics.

Many interesting philosophical principles include two kinds of modalities, e.g. epistemic and doxastic, alethic and epistemic, or alethic and deontic modalities.The purpose of this essay is to describe a set of bimodal systems, i.e. systems that include two kinds of modal operators, in which it is possible to investigate some formalizations of such principles. All in all we will consider 4,194,304 logics. All logics are described semantically and proof theoretically. We use possible world semantics to characterize the logics semantically, and both axiomatic systems and semantic tableaux to characterize them proof theoretically. We show that all systems are sound and complete with respect to their semantics and we consider some relationships between the various systems.

According to Williamson’s epistemology of modality, we know metaphysical necessities by means of our knowledge of some specific counterfactualconditionals. In particular, Williamson’s idea is that we come to have knowledge of metaphysical necessities—which have the form □A—via our knowledge ofcounterfactual conditionals which have the form ~A□→┴. In this paper I claim that there are two different ways in which Williamson’s position can plausibly bearticulated, and that both ways lead to circularity.