# Week 7 – White on the principle of indifference

Handout here; original paper here. Unfortunately we ended up discussing a slightly out-of-date version of the paper – sorry not to have checked on whether a more recent version existed.

Summary – White makes a fairly compelling attack on ‘mushy credence views’ with the simple but ingenious example of the coin which has been painted p on one side, and not-p on the other, with whichever is correct going on the ‘heads’ side. If your credence in p starts out mushy, mushy credence views seem to predict either that your credence in ‘heads came up’ should go mushy, or that your credence in p should go precise. But either option seems to conflict with some fairly obvious premises. I was convinced by this side of the argument – and it does give us good reason to go back to the principle of indifference and see what was wrong with it.

We wondered whether the coin argument would work for unknowable p – as White states the argument, it relies on the person running the coin toss knowing whether p. But it seems we could replace ‘knows whether p” in the example with ‘has credence 1 either in p or in not-p”, and the same sort of objection recurs for the mushy credence view.

The problems for the mushy credence responses take us back to the multiple partitions problem, and to cases like van Fraassen’s cube factory. Given that a mystery cube is less than 2 feet wide, what should our credence be that it’s less than 1 foot wide? The answer given by the principle of indifference depends on whether we partition its state space by surface area, by volume, or by side length.

White says he ‘doesn’t really have an answer’ as to what to say about cases like this. But an answer can be extracted from what he says next, and I think it’s a plausible one. This is that our evidence does in fact tell on the question of which partition to use (or which weighted combination of partitions, perhaps) – it’s just that we’re not generally in a position to know what partition our evidence supports. This seems a good response to me, and also a promising direction for further enquiry. Principles governing rational choice of state-space partition for simple chance set-ups seem like viable topics of study – it seems at least plausible that we incorporate some such principles into folk theory, even if we don’t know precisely which ones they are.

The obvious question to ask in this connection is ‘what determines appropriateness for a choice of state space’? Different answers to this question look like giving different strengths of normativity for the rationality of applying them. For example, assume an indeterministic world – the ideal choice of state-space partition for some system’s state-space consists in a measure given by the laws over the state space given by the laws and the whole past history. But the norm ‘match credences to probabilities given by this ideal partition’ is very demanding to satisfy. To do it, we’d have to at least know the true laws and the whole past history, and be able to do the number-crunching. No existing rational being can get close. Compare this with norm ‘believe only the truth’ for rational belief in general.

A less demanding norm would say that the rational choice for state-space partition is the one based on the measure given by the laws over the state-space given by the laws and our evidence about the past history. That’s a lot less restrictive, so the state-space would be a lot larger. This seems to correspond better to our epistemic state. But it’s still absurdly demanding – we can weaker the norm further, and say that the rational choice for state-space partition is the one given by current best scientific theory over the state-space given by current best scientific theory and our evidence about the past history.

This final norm – appealing to evidence about the past plus current best scientific theory – seems to me like an appropriate candidate for the rational norm governing state-space partition choices in applications of the principle of indifference. It still, in a sense, requires logical omniscience to know what exactly is rational according to it – because we don’t in general know how the factors determining the partition determine it in detail. That requires accurate modelling of the system in question. But we can say something basic about which factors have an influence.

One thing that stood out for me is that White uses a non-Lewisian notion of objective chance throughout. For him chances seem to be (roughly) probabilities conditionalized on our actual evidence, where our priors are the ones a rational agent who knew the laws of nature would have. This means that the chance of a coin already tossed but not revealed can be 1/2 – Lewisian chances, which are conditionalized on the whole history, don’t allow for this. So White may have been thinking of one of the less demanding norms, perhaps the second of the three mentioned above.

# Week 6 – King on semantic values

Sorry – no presentation or write-up this week!

# Week 5 – Kelly on disagreement

A lively discussion today of Tom Kelly’s ‘The epistemic significance of disagreement’. The presentation is here. Some thoughts follow.

It wasn’t entirely clear to us what kinds of disagreement was meant to be modelled by the proposal in the paper. Any disagreement, or only ones which persist over long periods and are resistant to resolution after lengthy discussion between peers? And are we to think of disagreement as stemming from differences in prior conditional credences (as Elga does), or from failures of logical omniscience, or from an arbitrary combination of the two? In what follows, I will assume the proposal is meant to apply to all disagreements, whatever their nature and their source, both for maximum generality, and because it will not always be clear from which source a particular disagreement stems.

We noted that the proposal didn’t generalize straightforwardly to a Williamsonian conception of one’s evidence as identical to one’s knowledge. That conception allows for an extra way in which two people could fail to be epistemic peers, in that they could have all the same credences but (due to environmental factors) have wildly different evidence. It seems that we won’t be able to rule out failures of peerhood due to this issue, so it will be even hard to identify epistemic peers if we make the identification E=K.

There was some discussion of Elga’s ‘bootstrapping’ argument in ‘Reflection and Disagreement‘ (p.15) against Kelly’s view, which Elga calls the ‘right-reasons’ view. Our consensus was that the argument simply doesn’t work – it’s not at all absurd that if you continue to stick to your ground in many cases of disagreement with a particular peer, and in fact in all those cases you had reasoned correctly and the peer had reasoned incorrectly, then you can legitimately come to consider that person no longer a peer. Of  course, this depends on appealing to a sense of ‘legitimacy’ which lines up with the notion of rationality Kelly is interested in – more on this below.

We found it a bit mystifying why Kelly initially presents the asymmetry which refutes the symmetry argument as a perspectival asymmetry. The asymmetry which really matters is surely the non-perspectival asymmetry that one agent has reasoned correctly and one has not.

The assumption that in all relevant cases of disagreement one agent is correct and one is not is a deniable one. It seems to rely on a) objective bayesianism and b) the assumption that at least one agent has reasoned correctly. So Kelly’s view is silent on what we should think if we are inclined to subjective bayesianism, or on what should happen in cases where both agents have reasoned incorrectly and reached different conclusions.

It wasn’t obvious why the right-reasons view only applies to epistemic peers, rather than to anyone who shares my evidence. Surely, if I have in fact reasoned correctly and reached the correct conclusion, then in the relevant sense I shouldn’t defer to anyone, even people who have the same evidence but have much higher degrees of epistemic virtue than myself.

Now for the main issue. It seemed plausible to us that Kelly and Elga are simply talking past each other, because they are interested in different kinds of ‘epistemic norms’.

Kelly is interested in a kind of epistemic norm which is hard to follow (to follow it in all cases we would have to know which of us and our peer has in fact reasoned correctly), but if in fact followed correctly will always lead to the epistemically best results (that is, having our credences perfectly proportioned to the evidence). Elga, in contrast, is interested in a kind of epistemic norm which we can always know how to follow. However, it is quite possible that following Elga’s norm will in some unfortunate cases actually lead us to epistemically worse results.

Suppose that we have in fact reasoned correctly about something, but we defer to many peers all of whom agree with one another and all of whom have reasoned incorrectly. Then doing what Elga advises will in fact lead to an epistemically worse result, whereas doing what Kelly advises will in fact lead to the epistemically best result. However, we will not generally be in a position to know what precise credences Kelly’s view does advise, whereas Elga’s view always gives us a recipe for our new credences.

This line of thought leads us to think that Elga and Kelly have just been talking past each other, because they are referring to different norms when they ask what we should do in cases of disagreement. Elga’s norm obeys ought-implies-can, while Kelly’s does not. Elga’s norm will not always lead to the epistemically best result, while Kelly’s will. If this is right, then we can reconstruct the disagreement between Elga and Kelly as whether Elga’s norm counts as an epistemic norm. Perhaps Kelly’s view is that Elga’s norm should not count as an epistemic norm, but at most as a purely practical norm. And perhaps Elga’s view is that Kelly’s norm is unfollowable in some cases and therefore cannot be the most explanatory candidate for a ‘primary’ epistemic norm.

# Week 4 – Dorr on abstracta

This week we discussed Cian Dorr’s ‘There are no abstract objects’, which isn’t currently available online, but is in ‘Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics’. Here’s the handout instead.

As we had Cian on the spot for this meeting, the discussion mostly took a question-and-answer format. So here are what I recorded of some questions and some answers, with a few that I didn’t get time to ask thrown in at the end.

Q: What about people who would resist the paraphrase strategy (p.37) because they think that counterpossibles are all vacuously true (Williamson takes this line in The Philosophy of Philosophy).
A: Nominalism/anti-nominalism are both contingent theses. But even if you think that nominalism is necessary if true, there will be certain kinds of truths like ‘there are possibly some things with a number-like structure’ which can be used to ground the relevant counterfactuals, along the lines of modal structuralism.

Q: Why require systematicity in our paraphrases?
A: Because we want to make straightforward sense of statements which mix different cases, such as ‘there are various different kinds of abstract objects’ – numbers, properties, sets, etc’

Q: Aren’t tables and numbers in the same boat according to the strategy applied here? What does this do for the nominalist intuition that tables are better known than numbers? How would the world look different if either existed
A: Bite the bullet – chairs do not differ from numbers in any interesting way.  If they did exist, things would look just the same, but there’s still no good reason for us to suppose they do.

Q – Is the regress vicious (p.44)?
A – Yes, though it’s a little bit unclear why. One possible reason is that if denial of brute necessities is to get us anywhere, we’d better not have circular or regressive accounts of metaphysical primitives. For example, the following analysis does not get rid of brute necessities at any stage:
The necessity of ‘All fs are gs’ is explained by ‘to be an f is to be an f1 that is g.’ But why are all f1s gs? This is explained by ‘To be an f1 is to be an f2 that is g’… and so on.

Q: If we take property essences seriously, Kit Fine style, can we posit an essence of the instantiation relation that rules out pathological cases of instantiation?
A: The problematic cases can still be described in purely structural terms, so the problem has not completely gone away.

Q: Is this fictionalism?
A: Not if fictionalism is characterised by the literal falsity of claims about the domain one is fictionalist about.

Q: Why think that 6a or 7a in the fundamental sense do not analytically entail 6b and 7b in the fundamental sense? Isn’t it just the neo-Fregean project to defend these analytic entailments? What conception of analyticity makes it obvious that the entailment fails? Admittedly, a conception of analyticity which supports the entailment would have to have it analytically false that nothing exists.

Q:  ‘Fundamental way’ – ‘ultimate furniture’ – ‘final analysis’ (p.34) – it seems like there are two ideas mixed up in the motivating metaphors. One is about the ideal science at the end of enquiry – but it’s not at all obvious (to me) that numbers won’t feature in this ideal science, if it’s formulated in the most natural way. Another  involves ‘metaphysical explanatoriness’ – in this view, fundamental means something like ‘best trade off between simplicity and metaphysical explanatoriness’.

Q: Does it make a difference to the Alien Particulars Objection (p.49) whether we are committed to haecceitism?  It looks like an anti-haecceitist can’t even express the objection.

# Week 3 – Gillies on ‘if’ (part 2)

[Note: I don't normally do the write up for the MLE seminar, so this is probably going to be a break from the normal format. In particular, I don't remember what people said and who said what, and all I have are my notes from when I read the paper, so I'm going to base it on that. -- Andrew]

Last week we read Gillies paper “On the truth conditions for ‘if’“. I had been meaning to work out what this view was about for a while so it was good to get an idea.

In the paper, Gillies argues that a dynamic view of conditionals can reconcile two apparently inconsistent claims. The first is that the English conditional does not have the truth conditions of material implication, and the second is the premises of Gibbards famous argument that the truth conditions of the English conditional must be that of the material conditional. Two notable premises are import-export, i.e., that the following two sentences are equivalent (where $\rightarrow$ represents the English conditional.)

• $(p \rightarrow (q \rightarrow r))$
• $(p \wedge q \rightarrow r)$

Since Gibbards argument is classically valid, either some classical laws must be rejected, or the step from mutual entailment to sameness of truth conditions must be bad. And, indeed, both of these lines are open – for example, Cian pointed out in the seminar the conjunction elimination fails on Gillies favoured account (see post below), and that the entailment relation displays some other rather odd behaviour (e.g., I don’t think it contraposes.) But also, it is not clear on the “information preservation” view of entailment, that you can infer sameness of truth conditions from mutual entailment. I expect this is how Gillies dodges the argument, but its not made clear.

But there were some things that still puzzled me about the paper, especially the stuff towards the end. The first was the central claim that the conditional could be given truth conditions. I wasn’t quite sure what the truth conditions were on the dynamic view; after all, all there is to the meaning of a sentence is its ‘context change potential’, or, the transformation it performs on information, and it’s not clear how one gets truth conditions out of this. You could, of course, define it in terms of idling on a singleton index, but that’s not a notion that plays any role in the entailment relation, which I thought was supposed to be a relation between the truth conditions of the relata.

On a related point, another issue I had with it was I couldn’t quite see how it engaged with the Gibbard argument. I guess you can consistently assign the conditional a non-extensional semantics, and retain import-export and other related inferences, but only at the cost of severing the tie between entailment and truth conditions.

That is, we seem to have two notions of entailment: entailment1, which is cashed out, roughly, in terms of preservation of truth, and entailment2 which is roughly preservation of information (if you assert the premises in the right order, then you’ll be in a context where the conclusion sounds good when you assert it.) Accepting the Gibbard premises, we get that $\rightarrow$ and $\supset$ mutually entail1 each other. But entailment1 involves necessary preservation of truth, so we get that $\rightarrow$ and $\supset$ have the same truth conditions. On the other hand, if we accep the Gibbard premises, $\rightarrow$ and $\supset$ may mutually entail2 each other (perhaps, I haven’t checked.) But this notion of entailment, as it were, abandons truth conditions altogether. So I can see there’s a precisification of the ‘It’s a truth conditional account where the Gibbard entailments hold’ on which Gibbards entailments hold, and a precisification with a thoroughly truth-conditional account of ‘if’, but I can’t get both claims together?

Finally two minor things I didn’t get: (1) what IS the material conditional on the (second) dynamic view? Is it $(\neg p \vee q)$ or $\neg(p \wedge \neg q)$ (which aren’t equivalent) or something else? Because we need to know this if we’re to evaluate the claim that the English conditional is not a material conditional. (2) On the first view, if c is a context, there’s no guarantee that c+P is a context, (it won’t be well behaved if P is false for example), in fact, this situation will be very common, so what should the view be?

# Week 3 – Gillies on ‘if’ (part 1)

This paper has a pretty complicated argument and had us all scratching our heads at times.  So a disclaimer – we may have missed something obvious in the handout and in the following comments.

Cian pointed out that Conjunction Elimination fails to be valid on Gillies’ favoured account of entailment. On this notion of entailment (‘Entailment v.2.1′, p. 16), P entails Q just in case, for any context s, Q is true in the updated context s[P], that is, just in case:

s[P] = s[P][Q].

But on this account, when T is a tautology, and q an atom, ¬(if T)(q)&q doesn’t entail ¬(if T)(q) (although q&¬(if T)(q) does).

For consider a context s containing both q-worlds and not-q-worlds. The test (if T)(q) has us perform fails, returning the empty context, in s, but passes, yielding the whole updated context, in s[q]. Consequently:

s[¬(if T)(q)&q]

= s[¬(if T)(q)][q]

= (s\s[(if T)(q))[q]

= s[q] (≠ Ø);

whereas:

s[¬(if T)(q)&q][¬(if T)(q)]

= s[q][¬(if T)(q)]

= s[q]\s[q][(if T)(q)]

= s[q]\s[q] = Ø.

So the entailment fails.

This leaves some doubt about the intended interpretation of material implication on Gillies’ account. Given the semantics for ¬ and &, we cannot rely on the usual paraphrases, such as ¬(P&¬Q) or ¬(¬Q&P), to give us the semantics of material implication; for on this account, these need not be equivalent.

Hopefully, there will soon be a part 2 to this post with our other thoughts.

# Week 2 – Weatherson on pragmatics

The paper we discussed this week is here, and the handout is here.

Cian had a lot to say about this paper. Most of our discussion stemmed from certain kinds of counter-example that he suggested. I hope I’m not misrepresenting him in what follows:

The first kind of case is meant as a counterexample to the left-right direction of principle (1), which says roughly that you believe P if and only if conditionalizing on P doesn’t change any conditional preferences over things that matter. Weatherson says that the L-R direction ‘seems trivial’, but what about the following simple case:

I’m considering whether to buy insurance against meteor strikes. I believe my house won’t be struck by a meteor tomorrow; but I still buy the insurance just in case. Conditonal on my house not being struck by a meteor tomorrow, however, I prefer not to buy the insurance.

I guess what Weatherson would have to say is that your choosing to buy the insurance is incompatible with your believing that your house won’t be struck. Is this really that plausible? Perhaps it could be motivated by the following line of thought: a) if I don’t believe that it might be struck, I won’t buy the insurance. But b) if I believe that it won’t be struck, I don’t believe it might be struck. So c) if I believe it won’t be struck, I won’t buy the insurance.

The weak point here seems to be b). If we can’t believe that something won’t happen unless we believe that it’s not true that it might happen, then it’s hard to maintain we have many beliefs at all.

(It’s not essential to the case that the striking is in the future. Consider instead a kind of insurance which pays out if, unbeknownst to you, the house has already been struck.)

The second kind of case is also directed against the left-right direction of 1). Let q be a conspiracy theory which says that the real president of the US is chosen randomly by aliens, and the election is just a sham. Let p be that Obama is president. It seems coherent that we could prefer armed rebellion to acquiescence conditional on q, but prefer acquiescience conditional on p & q (reasoning that in this case, since the aliens by chance picked the right man for the job, we don’t need to bother rebelling).  Then the left-right direction of 1) tells us that we don’t believe p. But this seems silly – of course we believe that Obama is president.

Can Weatherson appeal to his restriction to live and salient options or to relevant and salient propositions to deflect these counterexamples? It seems not – presumably there is no problem with describing cases where armed rebellion and insurance-buying are possible for us, and we’re seriously considering them while still retaining our beliefs that the house won’t be struck by a meteor and that Obama is president. Similarly, presumably we can retain these beliefs even while taking seriously the conspiracy theory and meteor-striking possibilities, and/or currently considering them.

One way out would be to deny that, if we take the conspiracy theory or the meteor-striking possibility seriously, then we can’t believe that Obama is president or that the house won’t be struck. But what justifies this restriction? We worried that any sense of ‘taking seriously’ that would do the job would end up being parasitic on belief and therefore unavailable for use in characterising it. For example, the proposal that a necessary condition for taking something seriously consists in not believing that it’s false seems to fall prey to circularity.

The third kind of case Cian suggested was meant as a counterexample to the set of principles on page 10. In particular, he didn’t like the consequence that believing that p entails that conditionalizing on it can’t move you from believing q to believing ¬q. Suppose you have credence 0.5 in a coin landing heads, and credence 0.5 in it landing tails. Let q be ‘the coin lands heads’, and p be ‘there is no goblin that will make the coin land tails’. Now conditional on there being no goblin which will make the coin land tails, your credence in q should go up a tiny bit (after all, you’re still leaving the option open that there’s a goblin to make it land heads.) But if the threshold for belief is 1/2 as these principles suggest, then conditionalizing on p is enough to shift you from not believing q to believing q. So in normal cases of coin tossing we don’t believe that there is no goblin which will make the coin land tails. This isn’t good.

We had plenty of other thoughts, but that’s probably enough to be going on with!

# Week 1 – Fine on ontology

A good turnout this week and an interesting paper. The handout is here and the original paper is here. Kit Fine has a habit of packing a lot into papers and I found it quite hard to absorb everything in this one. Anyway, these were our main thoughts:

- Fine seems sure that we philosophers have a good intuitive grip on what we ask when we ask the ontological question, and we just have problems working out how to express or formalize the question. I’m not convinced – the lack of agreement or consensus on how to express the question is surely prima facie evidence that our intuitive grip on it isn’t strong, and that there may in fact be no consensus on what question is being asked.

- Fine presents the way that the Quinean formulation of the ontological question fails to separate philosophical from scientific concerns as a problem for it (the problem of autonomy). Many Quineans see this not as a problem but as a merit – and Fine just completely fails to engage with them.

- Cian pointed out what seems a big problem with Fine’s approach – on his logic of commitment, ‘people are real’ entails ‘people with superpowers are real’ – and indeed – ‘things are real’ entails ‘things with any properties whatsoever’ are real. Of course, Fine can explain this away by saying that in the bad cases, the reality of the problematic entities is vacuous, and there is merely a pragmatic rule against asserting their reality. But there is still a problem here – we just don’t think that the entailments in question hold.

- It’s an interesting question whether merely possible objects are counted as real or unreal. If Fine wants to count actuality as playing the role of a restriction G(x) on which entities we are to be real about, then we get the result that there are both merely possible people and actual people, but only the actual ones are real. We weren’t sure whether Fine would want to endorse this.

- It wasn’t clear what the force of Fine’s complaint was against those who want to use fundamentality instead of reality to do similar theoretical work. He argues that in a world where everything is water, and water is infinitely divisible, no quantity of water is fundamental despite it being real. But can’t the fundamentalist just say that in such a world it is water itself which is fundamental, rather than some particular quantity of water?

- I was very unimpressed by Fine’s complaints against the philosopher who disagrees with the Democritean principle that there are only atoms by pointing out that there are also chairs. He says they are ‘either guilty of a crass form of metaphysical obtuseness or else too sophisticated for their own good’. They might legitimately say that they are just too sophisticated to agree with Fine!

- Finally, Cian instituted a poll, the result of which was overwhelmingly that we didn’t think we had a good enough grasp on the notion of metaphysical reality which Fine spends the end of the paper trying to persuade us we do understand. Clearly Fine has more work to do…

# Hilary term schedule

Michaelmas term, and the last paper of term which I didn’t report on (oops), are distant memories now and we’ve fixed a schedule for Hilary term. We have Cian Dorr with us this time, which is exciting. The papers are as follows:

Week 1 (21st January):
Kit Fine, ‘The question of ontology’
http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/1160/ontology.pdf

Week 2 (28th January):
Brian Weatherson, ‘Can we do without pragmatic encroachment?’
http://brian.weatherson.org/cwdwpe.pdf

Week 3 (4th February):
Anthony Gillies, ‘On truth-conditions for “if” (but not quite only if)’
http://www.umich.edu/~thony/note-on-if-finalish-preprint.pdf

Week 4 (11th February):
Cian Dorr, ‘There are no abstract objects’
Available on Weblearn, or in Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics, ed. John Hawthorne, Theodore Sider and Dean Zimmerman (Blackwell, 2007).

Week 5 (18th February):
Tom Kelly, ‘The epistemic significance of disagreement’
http://www.princeton.edu/~tkelly/papers/disfinal.pdf

Week 6 (25th February):
Jeff King, ‘Tense, modality & semantic values’ (skip Section 3 & appendix)
http://www-rcf.usc.edu/%7Ejeffreck/my_papers/Tense_Modality.pdf

Week 7 (4th March):
Roger White, ‘Evidential Symmetry and Mushy Credence’
http://www.fitelson.org/few/few_08/white.pdf

Week 8 (11th March)
Agustin Rayo, ‘Ontological commitment’
http://web.mit.edu/arayo/www/ontcom.pdf

(note the last two weeks have been switched as of Feb 12th)

# Week 7 – Cappelen and Lepore on unarticulated constituents.

The original paper for this week is here; the handout is here. Some even-more-inchoate-than-usual comments follow.

I knew virtually nothing about this debate before the meeting and found the paper very helpful in setting out the landscape. My biggest concern with the main argument is that the authors don’t say enough to rule out a ‘location-general’ reading of utterances like ‘it’s raining’, according to which the semantic content of the utterance is true if and only if it is raining anywhere in the world at the context of utterance. They focus instead on a ‘location-neutral’ reading of the utterance, according to which the semantic content of the utterance is true if and only if it is raining at the context of utterance (forget where it’s raining.)

It seems open to reject this location-neutral sense altogether, recognise only the location-general sense, and then use the location-general sense to analyse all of the propositions which C&L apply their location-neutral sense to. Perhaps this is the position taken by Recanati – but in the footnote C&L don’t say enough to be sure. This seems frustrating, as it’s the most natural way a friend of unarticulated constituents might go when faced with the cases C&L discuss.

If we think in terms of an opponent who wants to take this line, C&L’s argument starts to look pretty weak. Their ‘first exercise’, involving claims 7)-10), asks us to intuit that ‘rain’, as an abstract mass noun, is used in a location-neutral sense, and then move (analogically?) from this to the claim that ‘rains’, the verb, has a location-neutral sense. Even if we grant C&L’s intuitions about 7)-10), it seems quite reasonable to resist drawing any conclusions about ‘rains’ from them. Maybe something unusual about abstract mass nouns (and they have plenty of unusual features) accounts for the location-neutrality of 7)-10).

So looked at as an argument rather than as an imaginative exercise, this passage seems easily resistable. And there is prima facie reason to think that there isn’t a location-neutral proposition expressed by utterances of ‘it’s raining’ that is distinct from the location-general proposition ‘it’s raining somewhere or other’ (of course, C&L don’t deny that the location-general proposition exists – they just think that it’s distinct from the location-neutral proposition.) This prima facie reason is that the location-general and the purported location-neutral proposition are true in exactly the same range of possible worlds. On some views of propositions, this suffices for identity. So C&L will have to adopt a view where propositions are structured – but it seems a non-trivial problem to give an account of the structure of the two propositions such that they are interestingly distinct. In any case ,it’s a problem that C&L don’t even begin to address.

Somethings interesting to compare with ‘it’s raining’ (which is the sole focus of this paper) were verbs which have both a transitive and intransitive use. Consider ‘John drove’ and ‘John drove his car’. We don’t want to say that ‘drove’ is ambiguous. So is there an unarticulated constituent in ‘John drove’ which means that it should be analysed ‘John drove (some vehicle or other)? Cappelen and Lepore would presumably want to go with a ‘vehicle-neutral’ sense of ‘drove’ instead; but this seems to render ‘drove’ ambiguous between the intransitive and the transitive verbs.