Alexander Pruss's Blog

On the Thomistic primary/secondary causation model of meticulous divine providence, when we act wrongly, God fully determines the positive a...

As anyone who has talked with a language-learner knows, syntactically incorrect sentences often succeed in expressing a proposition. This is...

I can competently use a word without knowing what the word means. Just imagine some Gettier case, such as that my English teacher tried to t...

Suppose that Alice right now thinks about some fact F and no other fact. Then we can stipulate that “Xyzzies” is a sentence whose content i...

The truthteller paradox is focused on the sentence: This sentence is true. There is no contradiction in taking (1) to be true, but neith...

Assuming physicalism, plausibly there are a number of fairly natural physical properties that occur when and only when I am having a phenome...

Here are one way of believing in a totally sharp world: Epistemicism: All meaningful sentences have a definite truth value, but sometimes ...

Is cutting one head off a two-headed person a case of beheading? Examples like this are normally used as illustrations of vagueness. It’s n...

“Water” and “H 2 O” don’t mean the same thing in ordinary English: it is not a priori that water is H 2 O. But I suspect that when a chemis...

Alice and Bob are both perfect Bayesian epistemic agents and subjectively perfect utilitarians (i.e., they always do what by their lights ma...

From time to time I’ve had occasion to make use of examples where someone says different things to two different interlocutors in a single u...

If someone asks me to ϕ , typically that informs me that they want me to ϕ . But the normative effect of the request cannot be reduced to th...

Peter van Inwagen distinguishes the General Composition Question (GCQ), which is to give necessary and sufficient conditions for the claim t...

Imagine a philosopher who argued that the norms of assertion are relative to culture on the grounds that in England we have the norm: Only...

Suppose you receive this trustworthy report: Dr. Smith ate a banana. You are now in a position to learn this additional fact: Someone ...

Kripke famously argued that unicorns cannot exist. For “unicorn” would have to refer to a natural kind. But there are multiple non-actual na...

I used to think that it’s quite possible that all our mental representations of the world are propositional in nature. To do that, I had to ...

Here is a question I have wondered about and have never heard or seen much discussion of: What does it mean to say that God engaged in som...

One of the ways to clinch a too-many-thinkers argument (say, Merricks’ argument against perdurantism, or Olson’s argument for animalism) is ...

I’ve just had a long conversation with a grad student about (inter alia) reporting and asserting. My first thought was that asserting is a s...