INTRODUCTION
VOLUME 41
From the literature of 2021
Each year, we ask a panel of prominent philosophers from all across the discipline to send us nominations of papers published for the first time that year, either in print or on line, that caught their attention as truly outstanding. On the basis of a further review of all nominations by the Nominating board, we as editors study those papers in an attempt to select the top ten overall.
Of course, what makes for a good philosophy paper—let alone the best—is itself a philosophical question. Reasonable disagreement abounds through months of study and days of discussion regarding a range of meta-philosophical issues, from what stylistically makes for a well-written paper to which problems are most worth debating, whether arguments are appropriately rigorous, and how to balance virtues of technically sophisticated argument against the promise of richly suggestive and insightful new lines of inquiry. We suspect that our readers will have their own opinion about these matters. We remain confident that the ten articles selected for this year’s Annual are exceptional works of philosophy that capture an exciting range of issues and debates, showcasing some of the very best of the discipline.
We might start with a foundational question in Western metaphysics: Just what is metaphysics about? Aristotle famously treats metaphysics as the study of ‘being qua being’ and mentions many senses of being, in Metaphysics Δ. 7 and elsewhere, but it is never clear how exactly these different senses of being are meant to form a coherent subject of inquiry. Aristotle scholars and contemporary metaphysicians still debate this question. In “Aristotle on the Many Senses of Being,” Stephen Menn paves a way forward, offering a clear and compelling answer. Aristotle’s different senses of being are meant to yield different investigations of causes, since statements about 1-place being are actually statements about 2-place being. In particular, Menn argues that Aristotle analyzes “F exists” as “for some appropriate S, S is F”, not as “for some appropriate G, F is G”, which means that the causes of F’s existence can be investigated based on the causes of S’s being F. Upshot: Against traditional wisdom, Aristotle’s Metaphysics Δ should be seen as an integral and guiding part of his Metaphysics rather than as an empirical collection of different meanings expressed in various philosophical terms. Against contemporary wisdom, metaphysics is not simply the study of existence, but more importantly the study of causes.
Causality is at the core of J. Dmitri Gallow’s insightful and sophisticated “A Model-Invariant Theory of Causation.” Take some token features, represented in a model with variables, and map the ways they causally determine other tokens. Elegant as this modeling otherwise is, current model theories of causation face a devastating problem: adding or removing an inessential and arbitrary variable results in in a revised verdict as to whether one variable caused another. Gallow offers a model theory designed to avoid the problem. His intervention is virtuously simple: to determine whether one variable caused another, we need only to check a single correct causal model, rather than checking all the possible correct models and then deciding which is the most suitable for the present context. The correct model, Gallow argues, centers a token feature transferring non-inertia or deviance to other tokens, an approach which not only deals with the arbitrariness problem, but has wider intuitive appeal as well.
Issues of truth—what it means and how much it means—are never far away. In “Hollow Truth,” Louis deRosset develops in detail a deflationist approach to truth as ‘metaphysically lightweight’ in terms of a grounding puzzle introduced by Kit Fine. The puzzle is this: An instance of an existential generalization would certainly seem to ground that generalization. It also seems clear that it is φ that explains why ‘φ is true.’ But for a q that represents the proposition that something is true, these together seem to give us the explanatory story
apparently forcing us to an unacceptable ‘φ because φ’ or ‘φ in virtue of the fact that φ.’ In his theory HT, deRossett develops the intuition that inference chains such as this come apart from grounding explanations. In particular, though truth-ascriptions can function as premises in explanatory inferences, they do so only as ‘stand-ins’ or ‘conduits’ for their grounds. The result is an analysis of how such puzzles mislead us in terms of a detailed deflationist outline of the sense in which truth is ‘hollow’ or ‘metaphysically lightweight.’
This year saw two major contributions on different foundational issues in logic and philosophy of language. First, Matthew Mandelkern’s “If P, then P!” takes aim at an apparently innocuous Import-Export principle in standard logic: that ┌If p, then if q, then r┐ and ┌If p and q, then r┐ are equivalent in all cases. Mandelkern first demonstrates that the only way to maintain this principle together with ┌If p, then p┐ is to use the material conditional for ‘if...then.’ Given the apparent inviolability of ┌If p, then p┐and the well-known difficulties of equating ‘if...then’ with the material conditional, Mandelkern proposes that it is Import-Export that has to go. In an important extension, however, he argues that intuitions seem to diverge between indicatives and subjunctives with regard to Import-Export: counterexamples are clear for subjunctives, but apparently not for indicatives. In his final account, Import-Export in full generality remains invalid for both, but the principle holds for indicatives in a restricted sense that accords with intuitions in its favor.
Second, Una Stojnić’s “Just Words: Intentions, Tolerance, and Lexical Selection” asks how we can individuate words. She documents two plausible accounts that explain word individuation: in terms of the user’s intention, or in terms of the local standard of tolerance for word recognition. Stojnić then persuasively argues against both these theories. Drawing from contemporary psycholinguistic research on word production, she offers a new theory of word individuation. According to Stojnić’s novel Originalism-Plus-Transference account, ordinary speakers individuate words according to two factors: (1) The lexical selection stage of word production, during which a user retrieves an item from their mental lexicon, and, (2) the causal history of the word, from its neologizing through its historical development. These two dimensions provide a theory of word individuation that—unlike its predecessors—captures a range of challenging examples, including cases where a word has a murky history.
One of the sterling papers chosen this year grapples with a central meta-ethical question that lies in the long shadow of G. E. Moore. A Moorean tenet that met much criticism from 20th and 21st century value theory was the centrality of the predicative good, of statements expressing a value concept of the form ‘...is good simpliciter’. Critics such as Richard Kraut have maintained that saying that anything is simply good adds nothing substantive to ethical thought, since everything about the genuinely valuable can be expressed in talk about being good for—being good in relation to someone or something. Turning this proposal on its head, Thomas Hurka’s “Against ‘Good-For’/’Well-Being’ for ‘Simply Good’” argues that everything worth asserting about relational values can be captured in simple predicative value judgments, suitably understood, and that such attributive judgments as ‘X is good for a subject’ actually have no substantive ethical role. If Hurka is right, pace Moore’s critics, we might unify the vocabulary of goodness around predicative good.
In addition to deciding whether goodness is predicative or attributive, a complete theory of value should consider how best to compare various goods. In making such comparisons, we reach for the relations ‘better than,’ ‘worse than,’ and ‘equally good.’ When these relations don’t suffice, are we left with incommensurablity, the sense that a pair of values cannot be compared on the same scale? In “Degrees of Commensurability and the Repugnant Conclusion,” Alan Hájek and Wlodek Rabinowicz expand our axiological imagination, arguing that two evaluands can be almost better than each other. To earn its axiological keep, the authors apply this relation to key issues in population ethics— they argue that their intervention yields a solution to Parfit’s famous Continuum Argument and avoids the dreaded Repugnant Conclusion. If a set amount of well-being in a population can be almost better than another, each iteration of the Continuum Argument generates a population that is almost better than the previous one. Unlike its sister, the ‘better than’ relation, being ‘almost better than’ isn’t transitive, which sidesteps the Repugnant Conclusion without giving up commensurability.
Goodness is not the only thing subject to measuring procedures; reasons are too. That there is a buy-one-get-one-free deal at your favorite restaurant is a reason to go across town. That you can meet a good friend who lives near the restaurant is also a reason to go. Together the weight of these reasons combines to give you much more reason to go across town, maybe enough to make the trip choiceworthy. Despite its centrality in deliberation, accruing the weight of individual reasons is mechanistically opaque. In “‘Adding Up’ Reasons: Lessons for Reductive and Nonreductive Approaches,” Shyam Nair draws on formal tools from Bayesian confirmation theory in offering a clarificatory account of how the weight of particular reasons-giving facts combine, representing their strength as conditional probabilities. This attractive Bayesian approach to aggregating reasons also offers a plausibility constraint on stories about what reasons are. Not all theories of reasons are compatible with such an account, and may be considerably less plausible as a result.
Finally, our selection includes two wonderfully observant papers in ethics that document and argue for phenomena that, at first blush, may be thought oxymoronic or paradoxical.
At great risk to yourself, you have saved the lives of 100 strangers—a truly praiseworthy act. But you have impermissibly let ten strangers die because you chose not to save the full 110 within easy reach. These are the ingredients for a range of intriguing cases, including more realistic examples, that Theron Pummer considers in depth in his paper, “Impermissible yet Praiseworthy.” Not only may impermissible acts be overall praiseworthy, he argues, but they can be more praiseworthy than permissible alternatives. Beyond documenting the surprisingly complex evaluations evoked by a range of striking examples, he offers a structural analysis of why the cases work the way they do. He outlines a general framework in terms of the strength of requiring reasons to act, and justifications not to, intended to undermine widely accepted and commonsensical conceptual connections between action being impermissible and blameworthy, and being praiseworthy and permissible.
Common sense—philosophical and otherwise—tends to imagine forgiveness as a once-and-done event. By contrast, Monique Wonderly’s “Forgiving, Committing, and Un-forgiving” argues for an account of what it means to ‘un-forgive’ someone. Her exploration of this undertheorized phenomenon is intriguing in its own right, but Wonderly’s investigation of un-forgiving invites a new theory of forgiving as well. In contrast to views on which forgiving involves ‘wiping the slate clean,’ Wonderly shows that the possibility of legitimate unforgiving asks us to imagine forgiveness as a diachronic and dialogic interaction, akin to a process of moral repair.
Were one able to read only ten articles from the philosophical literature of 2021, we think these would be a wonderful ten to read. Across a range of current topics of interest, we consider these to be excellent representatives of different ways to do great philosophy, whether addressing old problems or new.
Patrick Grim
Abdulwausay Ansari
Margot Witte
Lianghua (Glenn) Zhou |
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