A Theory Of Metaphysical Indeterminacy

Barnes, Elizabeth; Williams, John

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199603039.003.0003

Cited by 162 publications

(107 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…Barnes & Cameron's view is part of a broader family of views that draw inspiration from supervaluational accounts of indeterminacy but retain a bivalent semantics. For more work in this direction, see, among many, McGee & McLaughlin (1995); Dorr (2003); Barnes & Williams (2011). We contribute to this tradition by showing that it makes openness compatible with a standard Kaplanian picture of context and illuminates the division of labour between the semantics and the metaphysics of the open future.…”

Section: Epistemic Readings Of Willmentioning

confidence: 89%

Will done Better: Selection Semantics, Future Credence, and Indeterminacy

Cariani¹,

Santorio

2017

Mind

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Statements about the future are central in everyday conversation and reasoning. How should we understand their meaning? The received view among philosophers treats will as a tense: in 'Cynthia will pass her exam', will shifts the reference time forward. Linguists, however, have produced substantial evidence for the view that will is a modal, on a par with must and would. The different accounts are designed to satisfy different theoretical constraints, apparently pulling in opposite directions. We show that these constraints are jointly satisfied by a novel modal account of will. On this account, will is a modal but doesn't work as a quantifier over worlds. Rather, the meaning of will involves a selection function similar to the one used by Stalnaker in his semantics for conditionals. The resulting theory yields a plausible semantics and logic for will and vindicates our intuitive views about the attitudes that rational agents should have towards future-directed contents.

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Section: Epistemic Readings Of Willmentioning

confidence: 89%

Will done Better: Selection Semantics, Future Credence, and Indeterminacy

Cariani¹,

Santorio

2017

Mind

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“…It does not suffice to ensure that the proposition has a settled truth value, since, of course, it is still chancy. I therefore acceptalong with others (Barnes and Cameron 2009;Barnes and Williams 2011;Greenough 2008) -the possibility of unsettled truth. Unlike them, I offer a relatively mundane case of it: chancy truth.…”

Section: Determinism and Classical Unsettlednessmentioning

confidence: 96%

Chance, determinism, and unsettledness

Eagle

2018

Philos Stud

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Abstract.A previously unrecognised argument against deterministic chance is introduced. The argument rests on the twin ideas that determined outcomes are settled, while chancy outcomes are unsettled, thus making cases of determined but chancy outcomes impossible. Closer attention to tacit assumptions about settledness makes available some principled lines of resistance to the argument for compatibilists about chance and determinism. Yet the costs of maintaining compatibilism may be higher with respect to this argument than with respect to existing incompatibilist arguments. §1. Chance, Determinism, and Possibility

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“…This indeterminacy can then be cashed out in terms of your favourite bivalence-preserving theory of vagueness 13 ; appealing options might include epistemicism (Williamson [1994]), contextualism (Fara [2000]), semantic indeterminacy (in the sense of Dorr [2003]), and primitive metaphysical indeterminacy (Barnes and Williams [2010]). Indeterminacy of this general sort in the reference of our terms is in fact already fairly widely accepted; it has often been embraced in order to solve the Problem of the Many.…”

Section: Objection 4 -Pairs Are Arbitrarymentioning

confidence: 99%

Macroscopic Ontology in Everettian Quantum Mechanics

Wilson¹

2010

The Philosophical Quarterly

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Simon Saunders and David Wallace have proposed an appealing candidate semantics for interpreting linguistic communities embedded in an Everettian multiverse. It provides a charitable interpretation of our ordinary talk about the future, and allows us to retain a principle of bivalence for propositions and to retain the Law of Excluded Middle in the logic of propositions about the future. But difficulties arise when it comes to providing an appropriate account of the metaphysics of macroscopic objects and events. In this paper, I evaluate various metaphysical frameworks which might be combined with the SaundersWallace semantics. I conclude that the most appropriate metaphysics to underwrite the semantics renders Everettian quantum mechanics a theory of non-overlapping worlds.2

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A Theory Of Metaphysical Indeterminacy

Cited by 162 publications

References 35 publications

Will done Better: Selection Semantics, Future Credence, and Indeterminacy

Will done Better: Selection Semantics, Future Credence, and Indeterminacy

Chance, determinism, and unsettledness

Macroscopic Ontology in Everettian Quantum Mechanics

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