Continued:

Björnsson & Persson. "The Explanatory Component of Moral Responsibility." First, we will present and motivate a psychological hypothesis about judgments of moral responsibility, a hypothesis according to which such judgments are a species of explanatory  judgments. Second, we will show how this model can account not only for factors that affect the degrees to which we assign moral responsibility in ordinary life, but also for the sometimes contradictory judgments that people make in response to two of the most important skeptical arguments in the philosophical debate. Put briefly, the model can account for these phenomena because explanatory judgments are relative to explanatory interests and perspectives, and because explanatory perspectives are affected by changes in focus.

Wray. "Epistemic Privilege and the Success of Science." Realists and anti-realists disagree about whether contemporary scientists are epistemically privileged. Because the issue of epistemic privilege figures in arguments in support of and against theoretical knowledge in science, it is worth examining whether or not there is any basis for assuming such privilege. I show that arguments that try to explain the success of science by appeal to some sort of epistemic privilege have, so far, failed. They have failed to give us reason to believe (i) that scientists are prone to develop theories that are true, (ii) that our current theories are not apt to be replaced in the future, and (iii) that science is nearing its completion.

Glick. "A Modal Approach to Intentional Identity." (1) "Hob thinks a witch has blighted Bob’s mare, and Nob thinks she killed Cob’s sow." This sentence illustrates the phenomenon of intentional identity, so-called by Geach because it appears to require an identity between mere objects of thought — Hob and Nob are thinking about the same witch, even if there are no witches. [...] My aim here is to sketch a strategy for capturing the truth-conditions of (1) within the familiar framework of counterpart theory.

Sher. "Talents and Choices." Most luck egalitarians believe that it is unjust for some to have less than others for reasons that are beyond their control. Most believe, as well, that a person's native talents, but not his choices, are beyond his control. From these premises, it is often inferred that economic inequalities are always unjust when they are due to differences in talent, but are not always unjust when the more advantaged parties have chosen to work harder or to take greater risks. However, in the current paper, I will argue that the distinction between choice and talent is far harder to sustain than this argument suggests.

Lin. "Rationalism and Necessitarianism." Metaphysical rationalism, the doctrine which affirms the Principle of Sufficient Reason (the PSR), is out of favor today. The best argument against it is that it appears to lead to necessitarianism, the claim that all truths are necessarily true. Whatever the intuitive appeal of the PSR, the intuitive appeal of the claim that things could have been otherwise is greater. This problem did not go unnoticed by the great metaphysical rationalists Spinoza and Leibniz. Spinoza’s response was to embrace necessitarianism. Leibniz’s response was to argue that, despite appearances, rationalism does not lead to necessitarianism. This paper examines the debate between these two rationalists and concludes that Leibniz has persuasive grounds for his opinion. This has significant implications both for the plausibility of the PSR and for our understanding of modality.

Graham. "Epistemic Entitlement." [T]here are two ways a functional device might go right, and two ways it may go wrong. The unhappy cases are malfunction (bad transmission) and failure to fulfill a function (you’re not able to go where you want). [...] I will rely on this distinction to explicate a kind or source of epistemic entitlement. Epistemic entitlement, I argue, consists in correct or proper performance – on normal functioning – for belief-forming processes that have reliably forming true beliefs as an etiological function.

Baker. "'The Experience of Left and Right' Meets the Physics of Left and Right." I consider an argument, due to Geoffrey Lee, that we can know a priori  from the left-right asymmetrical character of experience that our brains are left-right asymmetrical. Lee's argument assumes a premise he calls relationism, which I show is well-supported by the best philosophical picture of spacetime. I explain why Lee's relationism is compatible with left-right asymmetrical laws. I then show that the conclusion of Lee's argument is not as strong or surprising as he makes it out to be.

Wearing. "Metaphor, Idiom, and Pretense." Imaginative and creative capacities seem to be at the heart of both games of make-believe and figurative uses of language. But how exactly might cases of metaphor or idiom involve make-believe? In this paper, I argue against the pretense-based accounts of Walton (1990, 1993), Hills (1997), and Egan (this journal, 2008) that pretense plays no role in the interpretation of metaphor or idiom; instead, more general capacities for manipulating concepts (which are also called on within the use of pretense) do the real explanatory work.

Ney. "The Status of our Ordinary Three Dimensions in a Quantum Universe." There are now several, realist versions of quantum mechanics on offer. On their most straightforward, ontological interpretation, these theories require the existence of an object, the wavefunction, which inhabits an extremely high-dimensional space known as configuration space. This raises the question of how the ordinary three-dimensional space of our acquaintance fits into the ontology of quantum mechanics. Recently, two strategies to address this question have emerged. First, Tim Maudlin, Valia Allori, and her collaborators argue that what I have just called the ‘most straightforward’ interpretation of quantum mechanics is not the correct one. Rather, the correct interpretation of realist quantum mechanics has it describing the world as containing objects that inhabit the ordinary three-dimensional space of our manifest image. By contrast, David Albert and Barry Loewer maintain the straightforward, wavefunction ontology of quantum mechanics, but attempt to show how ordinary, three-dimensional space may in a sense be contained within the high-dimensional configuration space the wavefunction inhabits. This paper critically examines these attempts to locate the ordinary, three-dimensional space of our manifest image “within” the ontology of quantum mechanics. I argue that we can recover most of our manifest image, even if we cannot recover our familiar three-dimensional space.

Moss. "On the Pragmatics of Counterfactuals." Von Fintel 2001 and Gillies 2007 present a problem for the standard semantics [for counterfactuals]: they claim that it fails to explain the infelicity of certain sequences of counterfactuals, namely reverse Sobel sequences. [...] I will argue that we can explain the infelicity of reverse Sobel sequences without giving up the standard semantics.

Camp. "Sarcasm, Pretense, and The Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction." Traditional theories of sarcasm treat it as a case of a speaker's meaning the opposite of what she says. Recently, ‘expressivists’ have argued that sarcasm is not a type of speaker meaning at all, but merely the expression of a dissociative attitude toward an evoked thought or perspective. I argue that we should analyze sarcasm in terms of meaning inversion, as the traditional theory does; but that we need to construe ‘meaning’ more broadly, to include illocutionary force and evaluative attitudes as well as propositional content. I distinguish four subclasses of sarcasm, individuated in terms of the target of inversion. Three of these classes raise serious challenges for a standard implicature analysis.

Armour-Garb & Woodbridge. "The Story About Propositions." It is our contention that an ontological commitment to propositions faces a number of problems; so many, in fact, that an attitude of realism towards propositions—understood the usual “platonistic” way, as a kind of mind- and language-independent abstract entity—is ultimately untenable. The particular worries about propositions that we shall marshal here, in arguing against a sort of propositional realism, parallel problems that Paul Benacerraf has raised for mathematical platonists, viz., for those who believe that mathematical objects such as numbers exist as abstract, mind-independent, non-spatiotemporal, causally inert entities.