Relative Necessity Reformulated with Jessica Leech

2020 ◽  
pp. 149-172
Author(s):  
Bob Hale

This chapter discusses some serious difficulties for what it calls the standard account of various kinds of relative necessity, according to which any given kind of relative necessity may be defined by a strict conditional—necessarily, if C then p—where C is a suitable constant proposition, such as a conjunction of physical laws. It is argued, with the help of Humberstone (1981), that the standard account has several unpalatable consequences. It is argued that Humberstone’s alternative account has certain disadvantages, and another—considerably simpler—solution is offered. The proposed alternative takes seriously the idea that the standard account omits crucial information which, if suitably replaced, allows the problems to be solved.

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 703-726
Author(s):  
Alexander Roberts

AbstractFollowing Smiley’s (The Journal of Symbolic Logic, 28, 113–134 1963) influential proposal, it has become standard practice to characterise notions of relative necessity in terms of simple strict conditionals. However, Humberstone (Reports on Mathematical Logic, 13, 33–42 1981) and others have highlighted various flaws with Smiley’s now standard account of relative necessity. In their recent article, Hale and Leech (Journal of Philosophical Logic, 46, 1–26 2017) propose a novel account of relative necessity designed to overcome the problems facing the standard account. Nevertheless, the current article argues that Hale & Leech’s account suffers from its own defects, some of which Hale & Leech are aware of but underplay. To supplement this criticism, the article offers an alternative account of relative necessity which overcomes these defects. This alternative account is developed in a quantified modal propositional logic and is shown model-theoretically to meet several desiderata of an account of relative necessity.


1998 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-278
Author(s):  
David Fertig

During much of the Early New High German period, a small group of verbs with stem-initialg− and k− commonly formed their past participle without the prefixge-.The standard account attributes this development to Upper German syncope. Quantitative data from a large collection of Nuremberg texts strongly suggests that this account is untenable, and a careful examination of the modern dialects shows that it is in fact the nonsyncopating Central German dialects that most strongly resemble the Early New High German situation. This paper proposes an alternative account involving inflectional haplology as the mechanism responsible for the loss of the prefix in theg-lk-verbs. This analysis answers many questions that the standard account raises, as well as explaining some striking patterns that the previous literature does not mention.


2021 ◽  
pp. 009182962110117
Author(s):  
David E Fitch

This article examines the relationship of worship to mission in the life of the church. How does worship shape the Christian for mission and the work of God’s justice in the world? The article sketches what the author contends to be “the standard account” of how worship works within North American mainstream evangelical Protestantism, drawing on several authors who write on spiritual formation, liturgy, and cultural engagement. Exemplary of this standard account is the influential theology of church and culture found within neo-Calvinism. By parsing the social architecture of these authors, this article reveals its strengths and weaknesses—an analysis that can be applied more widely to Protestantism as a whole in North America. Then, the article moves on to propose an alternative account for the relationship of worship to mission that overcomes the weaknesses of the standard account. This alternative approach is labeled “faithful presence,” an approach which has affinities with an Anabaptist approach to worship and mission.


Utilitas ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 286-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
DOUGLAS W. PORTMORE

On the standard account of supererogation, an act is supererogatory if and only if it is morally optional and there is more moral reason to perform it than to perform some permissible alternative. And, on this account, an agent has more moral reason to perform one act than to perform another if and only if she morally ought to prefer its outcome to that of the other. I argue that this account has two serious problems. The first, the latitude problem, is that it has counterintuitive implications in cases where the duty to be exceeded is one that allows for significant latitude in how to comply with it. The second, the transitivity problem, is that it runs afoul of the plausible idea that the one-reason-morally-justifies-acting-against-another relation is transitive. I argue that both problems can be overcome by an alternative account: the maximalist account.


2020 ◽  
pp. 104-123
Author(s):  
Bob Hale

What makes true universal statements true? For example, what makes the statement that all aardvarks are insectivorous true? In addressing this question, this chapter focuses especially on how it is to be answered within the framework of what Kit Fine calls exact truthmaker semantics. The main aim is to promote an alternative account of the truthmakers for quantified propositions. This chapter also gives some attention to two closely-related questions: first, when, and why, we should favour an alternative to the standard account, and second, whether the alternative account proposed can be accommodated within the framework of exact truthmaker semantics, in Fine’s sense.


2021 ◽  
pp. 23-32
Author(s):  
Una Stojnić

This chapter introduces the standard account of context-sensitivity, focusing on true demonstratives, the model for most context-sensitive expressions. The account involves an idealization that utterances are interpreted in a single, unchanging context. But this is problematic: it has a consequence that demonstratives are either indefinitely lexically ambiguous, or indefinitely ambiguous at the level of logical form. The chapter argues this is theoretically problematic. Relaxing this idealization, we could let the context change between occurrences of demonstratives. A demonstrative could then have an unambiguous meaning, selecting the prominent interpretation in the current context. However, if prominence is determined extra-linguistically, as the traditional model assumes, we would still lack a systematic account of context-change, facing much of the same problems. An alternative account is outlined, which the chapter argues avoids the problems: the context is shifty, but the mechanisms of context-change are linguistic, and so the content of demonstratives is fully linguistically determined.


Disputatio ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (53) ◽  
pp. 45-62
Author(s):  
André J. Abath

Abstract Experiences of absence are common in everyday life, but have received little philosophical attention until recently, when two positions regarding the nature of such experiences surfaced in the literature. According to the Perceptual View, experiences of absence are perceptual in nature. This is denied by the Surprise-Based View, according to which experiences of absence belong together with cases of surprise. In this paper, I show that there is a kind of experience of absence—which I call frustrating absences—that has been overlooked by the Perceptual View and by the Surprise Based-View and that cannot be adequately explained by them. I offer an alternative account to deal with frustrating absences, one according to which experiencing frustrating absences is a matter of subjects having desires for something to be present frustrated by the world. Finally, I argue that there may well be different kinds of experiences of absence.


Author(s):  
Yogesh Awasthi

Agriculture is the backbone of the developing country. In old era agriculture was based on the experience which was shared by people to people but in this digital era technology play a very important and significant role in agriculture. Now agriculture become a business hub therefore farmers are focusing on precision farming. They introduced the technology in agriculture to define the accurate information about seed, soil, weather, disease and all factors which affecting the farming. Artificial Intelligence uses predictive analysis, image analysis, learning techniques and Pattern analysis to declare the best cost effective and maximum gain for the agriculturist. The aim of this paper is to provide the crucial information with the help of technology which a farmers can use to harvest the variety of crops as per the demand in world so that they can get maximum benefits.


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