According to alethic pluralism, there are different ways of being true, that is, there is a plurality of truth properties, each of which pertains to a specific domain of discourse. This paper shows how such a plurality can be represented in a coherent formal framework by means of a Kripke-style construction that yields intuitively correct extensions for distinct truth predicates. The theory of truth we develop can handle at least three crucial problems that have been raised in connection with alethic pluralism: mixed compounds, mixed inferences, and semantic paradoxes.

Fregean accounts of indirect sense hold that ¡°Kripke¡± expresses its ordinary sense in ¡°Kripke was a remarkable philosopher¡±, but its indirect sense in propositional attitude reports such as ¡°Only fools deny that Kripke was a remarkable philosopher¡±. The idea that there are indirect senses, distinct from ordinary ones, has struck many as troublesome. Indeed, following Donald Davidson, the possibility of generating infinitely many indirect senses for each expression with an ordinary sense has motivated skepticism even further. In response, Kripke has offered an influential ¡°acquaintance model¡± of indirect senses. The first aim of this paper is to argue that Kripke¡¯s argument for his model fails: it relies on an unavailable ¡°backward road¡± from reference to sense. The second aim is to vouchsafe Kripke¡¯s model differently. I provide a job description for indirect senses, and argue that any account which fits this description will end up looking very similar to Kripke¡¯s.

According to generalism, the world is fundamentally general ¨C¨C ultimately, there are no individuals. I distinguish two versions of this view. ¡®Permissive generalism¡¯ holds that facts involving individuals are non-basic: they are generated by purely general basic facts. I argue that permissive generalists will struggle to provide suitably systematic and non-arbitrary explanations for facts involving individuals. These problems are avoided by switching to ¡®strict generalism¡¯: the view that truths about individuals are non-perspicuous, and reduce to purely general perspicuous truths. I illustrate this alternative approach by proposing a metaphysical semantics for individualist truths in general terms. This serves both as a recommendation to generalists and, more broadly, as a case study in two different approaches to metaphysical explanation: one centered on generation, the other on reduction.

Anna Mahtani describes a puzzle meant to show that the Ex Ante Pareto Principle is incomplete as it stands and, since it cannot be completed in a satisfactory manner, decades of debate in welfare economics and ethics are undermined. In this paper, we provide a better solution to the puzzle which saves the Ex Ante Pareto Principle from this challenge. We also explain how the plausibility of our solution is reinforced by its similarity to a standard solution to an analogous puzzle in quantified epistemic logic. We also show that even if the puzzle were to remain unsolved, its impact on welfare economics and ethics would be limited.

Contractualism and rule consequentialism both hold that whether a moral principle is true depends on what would happen if it were generally adopted as a basis for conduct. This paper argues that theories with this feature face a profound epistemic problem. The question of what would happen if different moral principles were generally adopted is a complex empirical question, comparable in difficulty to the question of what would happen if a nation adopted different laws, or if humanity had evolved different traits. Reflection on the epistemic demands of this question shows that we have no clue what would happen if different moral principles were generally adopted, and thus no clue what moral principles contractualism and rule consequentialism endorse. The only way to avoid cluelessness is to test principles on groups small enough to be epistemically tractable, which requires accepting an implausibly extreme form of moral relativism. I conclude that we must reject contractualism, rule consequentialism, and any other moral theory that entails that the truth of a moral principle depends on what would happen if it were generally adopted.

In "Nothing Is True," Will Gamester defends a form of alethic nihilism that still grants truth-talk a kind of legitimacy: an expressive role that is implemented via a pretense. He argues that this view has all of the strengths of deflationism, while also providing an elegant resolution of the Liar Paradox and its kin. For the alethic nihilist, Liar and related sentences are not true, and that is the end of the story. No contradiction arises because it does not thereby follow that any of these sentences are also true, since nothing is. Gamester concludes that the simplicity of this response to the semantic paradoxes makes alethic nihilism an attractive approach. We disagree. In addition to providing insurmountable obstacles for his form of alethic nihilism, we contend that a certain form of non-nihilist deflationism is better placed to deal with the paradoxes and to account for truth-talk more generally.

Despite recent controversies surrounding the principle that knowledge entails truth (KT), this paper aims to prove that the principle is true. It offers a proof of (KT) in the following sense. It advances a deductively valid argument for (KT), whose premises are, by most lights, obviously true. Moreover, each premise is buttressed by at least two supporting arguments. And finally, all premises and supporting arguments can be rationally accepted by people who don¡¯t already accept (KT).

Rehabilitating an argument originally proposed by Leibniz, Michael Della Rocca has offered a new argument for the Principle of Sufficient Reason. A crucial element of this argument is that, for every x, the fact that x does not brutely fail to exist is an untrivial requisite of x¡¯s existence. Criticising this claim, I show that the new argument for PSR fails.

A reasoning process is more than an unfolding causal chain. Although some thoughts cause others in virtue of their contents, paradigmatic cases of personal-level inference involve something more, some appreciation that the conclusion follows from the premises. Both first-order processes and second-order beliefs have proven problematic or inadequate to account for the phenomenon. Thus, here I argue for an intermediate position, according to which an epistemic feeling, a form of procedural metacognition, plays this role. Extensive psychological research has shown that epistemic feelings are involved in monitoring many kinds of cognitive process, affecting how the processes unfold. Inferences may be no different. Inferences are also plausibly accompanied by an epistemic feeling, in particular a feeling of reliability or unreliability. Such a feeling accounts for the phenomenological datum. It can also play a significant epistemic role for the thinker.

In light of the problem of logical omniscience, some scholars have argued that belief is question-sensitive: agents don¡¯t simply believe propositions but rather believe answers to questions. Hoek (2022) has recently developed a version of this approach on which a belief state is a ¡°web¡± of questions and answers. Here, we present several challenges to Hoek¡¯s question-sensitive account of belief. First, Hoek¡¯s account is prone to very similar logical omniscience problems as those he claims to address. Second, the link between belief and action he proposes is too rigid. We close by sketching a generalization of the account that can meet these challenges.