We’re happy to report that Stephan’s paper Web Consequence Untangled has been accepted for publication in Topoi! The paper explores the notion of web consequence recently proposed by Benjamin Schnieder. It considers a range of natural variations on that notion, develops a simple truthmaker semantics for them, and determines their propositional logics in the form of tableau based proof procedures. Preprint here.

We are guest editing a special issue in Philosophical Studies on the topic of “Difference-Making and Explanatory Relevance“. So far, seven excellent papers have been published online as part of this collection:

1. Josh Hunt, Expressivism about Explanatory Relevance
2. Nicholas Emmerson, Plumbing Metaphysical Explanatory Depth
3. Harjit Bhogal, Moral Principle Explanations of Supervenience
4. Salim Hirèche, Grounding, Necessity, and Relevance
5. Carolina Sartorio, A Good Cause
6. Hans Rott & Eric Raidl, Towards a Logic for ‘Because’
7. Gerhard Schurz, Relevance as Difference-Making: A Generalized Theory of Relevance and its Applications

Stay tuned for more; you can access all the papers (mostly open access) once they’ve appeared using the link above.

We are delighted to report that Martin and Stephan’s paper The Logic of Contingent Actuality has been accepted for publication in Ergo! The paper explores the logic of the actuality operator under Actuality Contingentism, the view that some propositions are actually true, but could have been actually false, and gives some reasons for accepting that view. Preprint available for download here.

We’re delighted to announce that Singa’s paper “A Semantics for Moral Error Theory” is now forthcoming in Analysis. Moral error theory has been criticized on formal grounds for lacking a coherent semantics of moral sentences. In this paper, it is shown that moral error theory can avoid this objection by adopting a truthmaker-based semantics of moral sentences. A central upshot of the paper is that moral error theory is compatible with a classical logic of moral notions.

Penultimate version available for download here.

Nils’ paper “Imagining in Oppressive Contexts, or ‘What’s Wrong with Blacking Up?’”, co-written with Robin Zheng, has now been published open access in Ethics. The paper investigates the moral permissibility of merely fictive imaginings—roughly, imaginings carried out ‘just for fun’—that deploy unethical attitudes. It articulates three ways that such imaginings can be oppressive. Read it here.

The Relevance Project is delighted to announce that Singa has successfully defended her PhD Thesis “On the Autonomy of the Normative. Logical and Metaphysical Interpretations of the Is-Ought Gap” with the best possible grade of summa cum laude.

As if that weren’t enough, we’re also congratulating Singa on her new, fantastic postdoc position at the University of Bielefeld!

We’re pleased to announce that Stephan’s paper “That’s It! Hyperintensional Total Logic” (open access) has been published in the Journal of Philosophical Logic.

Abstract: Call a truth complete with respect to a subject matter if it entails every truth about that subject matter. One attractive way to formulate a complete truth is to state all the relevant positive truths, and then add: and that’s it. When the subject matters under consideration are non-contingent, a non-trivial conception of completeness must invoke
a hyperintensional conception of entailment, and of the completion operation denoted by ‘that’s it’. This paper develops two complementary hyperintensional conceptions of completion using the framework of truthmaker semantics and determines the resulting logics of totality.

We’re pleased to announce that Nils’ paper “Imagining in Oppressive Contexts, or ‘What’s Wrong with Blacking Up?’”, co-written with Robin Zheng, is now forthcoming in Ethics. The paper investigates the moral permissibility of merely fictive imaginings—roughly, imaginings carried out ‘just for fun’—that deploy unethical attitudes. It articulates three ways that such imaginings can be oppressive. Pre-print here.

We’re delighted to report that Stefan’s contribution “Metaphysically Understanding Why” will receive a Best Paper Award at the GAP.11 conference in Berlin!