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        <title>Disputatio Feed</title>
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            <title><![CDATA[Strong Alethic Pluralism and the Fragmentation of Logical Validity]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/disp-2024-0012</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Truth pluralism has been criticized for its difficulty to vindicate the traditional truththeoretic account of logical validity. In this paper, we argue that an underestimated version of this problem takes form in the fragmentation of logical validity induced by a plurality of truth properties. We briefly present the difficulty differentiating it from the similar one connected with mixed inferences, and we argue that joining forces with logical pluralism does not alleviate the burden from the truth pluralist shoulders. Accordingly, we review some solutions that have been proposed for mixed inferences, assessing whether they can also fix the fragmentation. We show that only some strategies are able to solve both problems.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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            <title><![CDATA[Communication in the Face of Mismatch]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/disp-2024-0011</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Communication seems to happen in the face of people’s (extremely) varying perspectives or understandings of subject matter. As many have noted, the presence of this communicative mismatch—what we may call ‘the mismatch problem’—puts a lot of pressure on a naïve model of communication. According to this model, communicative success is a matter of content match or sharing. Here I focus on the kind of non-naïve response that a theory of ‘triangulation’ makes available. I shall discuss several features of triangulation theory and critically examine a recent articulation based on the notion of ‘aboutness’ (Sandgren [2019, 2021, 2023]). This articulation proposes content-free triangulation conditions in our explanations of communicative success. By contrast, I will suggest that we can use triangulation theory to address the mismatch problem without neglecting content by appealing to a meta-representational notion of content similarity. This notion, I argue, allows us to capture the necessary coordination between subjects, as well as the differences in their understandings.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[How Not to See Pierre]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/disp-2024-0009</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[An absence is a puzzling object. In some sense, something which is absent is phenomenologically present to us. This paper discusses the metaphysical and epistemological problems of absences. After a short primer of mereology, it then presents a mereological account of absences. The absence of an object is its mereological complement. The paper then explains how this account resolves the metaphysical and epistemological problems. It ends by addressing some objections to the account.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[The Virtual as Personal]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/disp-2024-0010</link>
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            <pubDate>Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[In this paper, I examine the implications of Chalmers’ [2017, 2019] digital realism on personal identity, building on Floridi’s [2014] onlife concept and supporting the idea that persons extend in biological and virtual realms. By positing the physical existence of virtual entities within computer systems, digital realism suggests a relationship between individuals and their digital counterparts akin to that between two physical entities. I argue that fourdimensionalism, which conceives of objects as composed of temporal parts, offers a robust framework for understanding this relationship. By treating virtual entities as aggregates of virtual temporal parts, this framework brings two theoretical advancements. First, we would be able to account for the apparent paradox of simultaneous existence in biological and virtual spaces. Second, by maintaining the theoretical framework of digital realism, we can provide an account of personal identity that adequately captures the increasingly intimate relationship between ourselves and our digital counterparts.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[From LLMs to the Global Brain]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/disp-2024-0005</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This article advances the Global Brain Argument, contending that escalating hyperintelligent AI systems, from savant-level LLMs to superintelligences, will connect human users, cloud platforms and the internet-of-things to form one or more emergent global brain networks—planetary scale complex adaptive systems that process information, evolve goals and exhibit agential behaviors. I analyse the premises of the argument, contrast the notion of AGI with my notions of savant and hyperintelligent systems, and defend the claim that many humans are becoming d-nodes in a global brain network. I then raise the AI Megasystem Control Problem: the problem of how disparate proprietary AI services may self-organize into opaque, weakly emergent megasystems that elude traditional AI alignment techniques. I also delve into the ethical implications of the argument, such as surveillance capitalism, epistemic manipulation and dual-use risks and discuss the relationship between the argument and the extended mind hypothesis.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Belief, Certainty and Vagueness]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/disp-2024-0001</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[What is belief and how does it relate to certainty? This paper takes on some of the strongest arguments for views that identify belief with certainty, credence 1 or maximal confidence. It considers an influential version of the position on which the assignment of credences is context-dependent in crucial ways (especially Clarke [2013]), arguing that such a position is not viable. Examining these arguments and approaches in detail is shown to illuminate some key issues about credences and beliefs and the relation between them, as well as elucidating the role of representation in the understanding of beliefs. While rejecting the position that belief is certainty may seem to reopen the threat of arbitrariness and imprecision, I argue that it is essential to our understanding of beliefs to recognise that our belief-talk is vague. In the final section, I explore the nature and role of doxastic states that are borderline beliefs, which I call vague beliefs. Acknowledging the vagueness of the category of beliefs is necessary to reflect the rich and complex pattern of our doxastic states and commitments in the inevitable absence of certainty.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Against Evidential Preemption]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/disp-2024-0002</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Endre Begby [2021a, 2021b] identifies a phenomenon he refers to as evidential preemption whereby a testifier seeks to preemptively undermine future counter-testimony by noting extant disagreements while simultaneously asserting the claim under dispute. Such preemption is typified by claims of the form: “my opponents will tell you that q; but I say p” (Begby [2021b: 99]). Begby makes a plausible case that this strategy is often employed in ordinary and public discourse. Begby argues further that evidential preemption can often succeed in altering how a subject who has encountered such a preemptive statement ought to treat the future predicted counterevidence when they encounter it. Begby provides both intuitive and Bayesian arguments in favor of this position. I argue that, contra Begby, evidential preemption does not have epistemic force. I then distinguish my arguments from those presented by Kelly [2024] and show how my diagnosis of the failure of evidential preemption can be used to undermine the arguments Begby [2024] makes in response to Kelly’s criticisms.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[On the Modal Solution to the Problem of Moral Luck]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/disp-2024-0006</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[In this paper, I investigate the so-called modal solution to the problem of moral luck. I spend some time positioning the solution within the philosophical debate on moral luck. I follow Hartman [2017] in considering it a special case of the counterfactual view of the problem of moral luck. The modal solution was developed in order to block one of the main objections to the standard counterfactual position developed by Zimmerman. I defend the solution against four objections, which, I argue, are limited insofar as they involve a misapplication of the solution to cases it was not meant to cover. This should not be considered an argument for the modal solution, however, as I go on to present my own counterexample. This counterexample involves a proper application of the solution to the relevant case, which nevertheless leads to problems.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Irreducibility of Understanding-Why to Knowledge of Cause]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/disp-2024-0007</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Whether understanding-why is reducible to propositional knowledge of cause is among the most debated issues in the philosophy of understanding. Many anti-reductionists consider that understanding comprises a set of cognitive abilities and that it is different from having propositional knowledge. In contrast, one strategy that reductionists adopt is showing that such abilities constituting understanding are also required for propositional knowledge. This paper aims to show that this type of strategy fails because it confuses abilities prerequired for propositional knowledge with ones that are constituents of understanding. Undeniably, an agent is sometimes required to answer some type of ‘What-if’ questions in order to have propositional knowledge. However, this only shows that the agent is required to understand concepts that appear in a proposition in order to know the proposition. It is thus important to examine the “process”—how the agent has a belief when judging whether the agent has propositional knowledge—while it is important to examine the “achievement” when judging whether the agent understands the phenomenon at issue.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[The Virtual isn’t Real]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/disp-2024-0003</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[The suggestion that we might live in a giant computer simulation seems plausible in large part because the hypothetical sophistication of the hypothetical simulation can be increased to meet almost any objection. From an engineering standpoint, the technological increases required by this strategy may not always be feasible. Proceeding nevertheless from an idealization, David Chalmers argues that the virtual objects and worlds displayed in perfect and permanent computer simulations could be regarded as real because, on those terms (perfection and permanence), our own world could just as well be virtual. I counter that real reality, or RR, possesses (at least) five features that no VR simulation could ever reproduce: RR involves genuinely causal regularities, it is older than any machine, it will outlast any machine, it supports living bodies in ways that cannot be replaced, and thus belongs to an entirely different category than artifacts. These differences are especially robust, since they all grant the possibility of present-moment indistinguishability while halting any collapse or blurring of the virtual/real distinction.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Reconsidering Carnap vs Quine on Individuating Languages]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/disp-2024-0008</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Recent analytic metaphysics has seen a resurgence in deflationary approaches following in the footsteps of Rudolf Carnap. However, these views face unanswered questions: W. V. O. Quine is still widely held to have successfully rebutted Carnap’s deflationism in the 1950s by rejecting the analytic/synthetic distinction on which it was based. Both Quineans and Carnapians should accept a deflationary reading of the Quine-Carnap debate, since it turns on the ontological question of how to individuate languages. On this reading, whichever theory provides the best practical resources for individuating and discussing languages-as-entities should be accepted, by the lights of either theorist. I argue that Quine’s ontology of languages is problematic by his own reasoning, and that Carnap’s has better pragmatic utility, so should be preferred. I then sketch a way for the neo-Carnapian to extract analyticity from natural languages.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[An Account of Suspended Judgment as Suspended Acceptance]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/disp-2024-0004</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Recently, Jane Friedman has argued that what we call “suspension of judgment” is an interrogative attitude: If one suspends one’s judgment about the question Q, one is inquiring into Q. Many philosophers have criticised or developed Friedman’s idea by offering their own takes on suspended judgment. However, despite the differences we can find in the various accounts recently presented in the literature, there is a widespread idea in our theories of suspended judgment: What we call “suspension of judgment” implies a state of doxastic neutrality and is a condition that is doxastically incoherent and metaphysically or normatively incompatible with belief. In this paper, I propose a new conception of suspended judgment that is not committed to the previous widespread perspective. Following Cohen’s theory of acceptance, I will present a non-doxastic type of suspended judgment described as suspension of acceptance. Considering this new conception, I will first underline how this non-doxastic way of suspending our judgment can be regarded as an interrogative mental act. Then, against the widespread perspective, I will show that something we call “suspension of judgment” is a non-doxastic mental act that does not imply a state of doxastic neutrality and can doxastically cohere and be metaphysically and normatively compatible with belief.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Higher-Order Quantification and the Elimination of Abstract Objects]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/disp-2023-0017</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[There is a common practice of providing natural-language ‘glosses’ on sentences in the language of higher order logic: for example, the higher-order sentence ∃X(X Socrates) might be glossed using the English sentence ‘Socrates has some property’. It is widely held that such glosses cannot be strictly correct, on the grounds that the word ‘property’ is a noun and thus, if meaningful at all, should be meaningful in the same way as any other noun. Against this view, this paper argues that natural languages feature pervasive type-ambiguity, in such a way that the relevant English sentences have natural readings on which they are equivalent to the higher-order sentences of which they serve as ‘glosses’. It also responds to some objections that have often been taken to be fatal to such type-ambiguity, such as the challenge of accounting for the meaning of ‘mixed disjunctions’ like ‘Either Mars or the property of being red is interesting’.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Grounding and Analytic Explanations]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/disp-2023-0018</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This paper puts forward an argument against realist views of grounding, which hinges on explanations based on so-called ‘real definitions’. I will provide some essential background, then phrase the argument, and show some anti-realist conclusions that can be drawn from it. Finally, I will deal with some potential objections, and I will discuss Correia’s [2017] view of real definitions, in order to show that despite appearances, the notion of grounding does not have any actual theoretical role within it.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[What’s the Best Way to Resolve a Plausibility Paradox?]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/disp-2023-0019</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[A “plausibility paradox” has very plausible premises that seem to require acceptance of an implausible conclusion. Resolutions can reject a premise, accept the conclusion, or deny that either is necessary. Some general strategies, however, may in expectation be superior. This paper argues that if acceptance of the premises requires acceptance of the conclusion, then the best resolution would be to show that the paradox relies on a psychological framing effect. Specifically, the premises are accepted yet replaced with functionally equivalent ones where the conclusion is now no longer implausible. To illustrate, the paper provides such a resolution to Hempel’s ravens’ paradox and contrasts it with existing rivals.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Analytic Universalism]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/disp-2023-0020</link>
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            <pubDate>Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Under which conditions do some things compose a further thing? According to universalism, under any conditions whatsoever: whenever there are some things, there is something they compose. According to analytic universalism, this is an (unobvious, but still) analytic truth of mereology—just like certain other truths of logic, semantics, and indeed metaphysics. After presenting the situation in more detail, I consider a basic objection to analytic universalism, as voiced by Karen Bennett, Ross Cameron, and Ted Sider, according to which no such (universally quantified) conditional with existential consequent can be analytically true. I respond by considering suitably similar mereological principles that are widely regarded as analytic, despite sharing the relevant form with universalism. I end with some general remarks summarizing this result and its dialectical significance.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[A Conservative Approach to Group Inquiry]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/disp-2023-0015</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 23 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Recent years have seen an explosion of research on inquiry. However, there remains comparatively little work on the nature of group inquiry, which is surprising given that group inquiry is such a commonplace activity. According to this account, group inquiry cannot be explained using the standard approaches to theories of group action and belief, because these theories fail to explain the actions of large groups or the division of labor that large inquiries may require. If correct, it is a devastatingly powerful objection to many accounts of group action. It is surely a requirement of any plausible theory of group action that it be able to explain commonplace actions, and it would be bizarre and problematic if standard theories of group action could not explain group inquiry. Therefore, if the standard views cannot serve as the theoretical foundation for group inquiry, we would be right to question whether these theories should be accepted. I argue that we don’t have to accept this consequence because the objection fails, and I provide an account of group inquiry based on one of these approaches to group action, showing that we already have the tools we need to explain group inquiry. I end by arguing that using the mainstream approaches to group action as part of an explanation of group inquiry has an advantage over other approaches: it provides an explanation of what groups are.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[The Underlying Mechanisms of Implicit Bias A Multifaceted Account]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/disp-2023-0012</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 23 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This paper delves into the dark side of the mind. I am interested in the underlying mechanism of implicit bias. Implicit biases are implicit attitudes that conflict with our informed beliefs, leading to prejudiced feelings, stereotyped thoughts and ultimately discriminatory behaviours. Despite receiving much attention in philosophy and psychology, the mechanism by which these biases are formed is controversial. In this paper, I review the proposed models—association-based, belief-based and mental imagery-based—and suggest that these models can be reconciled in a multifaceted account. My argument relies primarily on debiasing interventions. If implicit biases are triggered by only one mechanism, experimental manipulations based on other mechanisms will fail to modify implicitly biased behaviour. However, manipulations involving each of the proposed models successfully modify biased behaviour. Thus, implicit bias has a multifaceted character, i.e., all three models have something to say in explaining the mechanisms hidden in the implicitly biased behaviour.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Let’s Get ‘Physical’ Clarifying the Concept and its Presuppositions]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/disp-2023-0013</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 23 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This paper argues that the current range of competing approaches to what it is to be physical provide only a partial account of the concept. The paper identifies the role that the concept of the physical has to play in discussions of physicalism and the mind/body debates, articulates that concept and explores its presuppositions. The account builds on empirical findings in cognitive development and on the pre-theoretic grasp of things in the world necessarily presupposed by any physical science (and thence by physicalism itself). It draws together the key elements of the existing accounts and presents a new account which meets the requirements for fruitful debate over physicalism and its rivals. This enables a discussion of the presuppositions of discourse around physicalism, with a crucial focus on the notion of the agent, and provides a platform for a future analysis of the necessary conditions of the possibility of both the concept of the physical and of physicalism itself.]]></description>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Universals Are Not Immanent and Constructors]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/disp-2023-0014</link>
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            <pubDate>Wed, 23 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[A modern and influential Aristotelian conception of universals combines two ideas: that a universal is immanent in its instantiations, and that its instantiations are partly constructed by this universal. I argue that these two ideas are inconsistent on weaker assumptions than previously recognized.]]></description>
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