John Bigelow

Monash University (Australia) · Faculty of Arts

This volume is a collection of essays on new perspectives on the philosophy of David Lewis. The main topics under discussion come from major areas of analytic philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, language, and ethics. Specifically, the chapters discuss the metaphysics and epistemology of modality, the status of grounding, the...

This volume is a collection of essays on new perspectives on the philosophy of David Lewis. The main topics under discussion come from major areas of analytic philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, language, and ethics. Specifically, the chapters discuss the metaphysics and epistemology of modality, the status of grounding, the...

This is a paper called "The song of the grasshopper" that received a Commendation in the 2019 Calibre Prize Essay Competition run by the ABR and judged by Peter Rose, John Coetzee and Anna Funder. A Russian translation is forthcoming in the journal "Ideas and Ideals".

One of Plato’s dialogues, the Timaeus (ca 370 BCE), describes an abstract numerical pattern that is said to have guided the creative work of an artisan, the Demiurge, who designed both the soul that animates the material world as a whole and the souls of each of the sentient beings that live within this world. Any artist or artisan who took this cr...

The four frescoes by Raphael in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican Museum visually embody close approximations of several numerical ratios that are of deep significance in the material grounding of musical harmonies in the physics of natural harmonics. Of special significance is the Pythagorean musical frequency ratio of 9:8, the (discordant...

Metaphysics is an academic discipline, taught at universities. As such, it arrived in Australia and New Zealand when European settlers began to set up academies in the nineteenth century. There were early settlers from other parts of the world as well as Europe; but in tracing the history of academic metaphysics, we must think mainly of the Europea...

According to the new family of theories that emerged around the second half of the nineteenth century, time is more similar to space than it had been construed to be under the previous family of theories. These new theories of time treat time as being a “fourth dimension” that is much more like the three spatial dimensions than it was imagined to b...

Presentists standardly conform to the eternalist’s paradigm of treating all cases of property-exemplification as involving a single relation of instantiation. This, we argue, results in a much less parsimonious and philosophically explanatory picture than is possible if other alternatives are considered. We argue that by committing to primitive pas...

Given Quine's views on philosophical methodology, he should not have taken the axioms of classical mereology to be "self-evident", or "analytic"; but rather, he should have set out to justify them by what might be broadly called an "inference to the best explanation". He does very little to this end. In particular, he does little to examine alterna...

In this paper we describe a simple software system that allows students to practise their critical thinking skills by constructing argument maps of natural language arguments. As the students construct their maps of an argument, the system provides automatic, real time feedback on their progress. We outline the background and theoretical framework...

Jackson often writes as if his account of public language meanings in terms of descriptivist conventions were just plain common sense. How else are we to explain how different speakers manage to communicate using a public language? And how else can we explain how individuals arrive at confident judgments about the reference of their words in hypoth...

ABSTRACT We argue that in societies like our own the prevailing view that parents have both special responsibilities for and special rights over their children fails to give a proper understanding of the autonomy both of parents and of children. It is our claim that there is a logical priority of the separable interests of a child over the autonomy...

Critique de la theorie realiste des mondes possibles de D. Lewis. Les AA. montrent que l'incredulite que provoque la theorie de Lewis n'est pas une objection contre elle, mais que cette theorie rencontre deux problemes de taille : Lewis ne donne pas de fondement de la distinction entre deux mondes possibles, et doit presupposer des concepts modaux...

This chapter explains the metatheory. The metatheory said that native speakers of English all know the meaning of the verb "to know"; and in virtue of this, they have tacit knowledge of the definition of the word "knowledge"; and in virtue of this, they have tacit knowledge that knowledge is true justified belief. It is true "by definition" that kn...

In this paper reasons are given for accepting a paradigmatically ‘metaphysical’ thesis called Unrestricted Mereological Composition, or something close to it. These reasons are drawn from thoroughly empirical considerations that played a significant role in the history of physical sciences, particularly in the emergence of the Newtonian laws of mot...

Frank Jackson argued, in an astronomically frequently cited paper on ‘Epiphenomenal qualia’[Jackson 19825. Jackson , F. C. 1982. Epiphenomenal Qualia. Philosophical Quarterly, 32: 127–136. [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®]View all references that materialism must be mistaken. His argument is called the knowledge argument. Over the years since he publ...

One of the major problems in CBIR is the so-called 'semantic gap': the dierence between low-level features, extracted from images, and the high-level 'information need' of the user. The goal of diminishing the semantic gap can be regarded as a quest for similar 'concepts' rather than similar features, where a concept is loosely defined as "what wor...

This paper presents an overview of the challenges of producing a list of retrieval results ranked according to perceptual similarity. We explain some of the problems in using a metric to measure peceptual similarity, and consider the arguments for the desirability of metrics for retrieval. We discuss the use of broader definitions of betweenness to...

Ellis defends a theory which is of great interest and importance: scientific essentialism. Science seeks the essential properties of things in the world, and the necessary truths which follow from them, argues Ellis. The core doctrine of the Ellis theory, I take to be this: Among the essential properties of many different natural kinds of things, w...

Analyse de l'interpretation quasi-theologique et ontologique du theoreme de P. Halmos selon lequel rien ne contient rien et l'univers n'existe pas («Naive set theory», 1960). L'A. montre que les nouvelles mathematiques issues de la theorie des ensembles menacent les ultimes vestiges du monotheisme illustres par la these du pantheisme minimal, doctr...

No idea sounds so silly that no ancient Greek fervently defended it. I hope we do not lose sight of the value there is in studying the Greeks. Yet it is even better to do as they did and not just to study what they said.

Humean supervenience is the doctrine that there are no necessary connections in the world. David Lewis identifies one big bad bug to the programme of providing Humean analyses for apparently non-Humean features of the world. The bug is chance. We put the bug under the microscope, and conclude that chance is no special problem for the Humean.

Mathematics has become so sophisticated that it is easy to lose touch with the mathematical realities out of which it arises. Many nowadays think of mathematics as complicated games with forests of symbols. Yet this is an image which could not have got a grip on the ancient mathematicians, like those of the Pythagorean brotherhood, who stood nearer...

This book espouses a theory of scientific realism in which due weight is given to mathematics and logic. The authors argue that mathematics can be understood realistically if it is seen to be the study of universals, of properties and relations, of patterns and structures, the kinds of things which can be in several places at once. Taking this kind...

A group of six second grade children (average age 7 years 5 months) and their class teacher, were sitting around a table. On the table were arrangements of small wooden objects - mostly representations of animals There were two rabbits, four bears, six roosters, eight trees, 10 peacocks, and 12 worms. Starting with the two rabbits, the teacher had...

Australia has throughout 1988 been celebrating what has been officially referred to as the nation's ‘Bicentenary’, marking two hundred years of settlement by the British. There is indeed much to celebrate in the achievements of these two hundred years, but the very description of the occasion pointedly ignores the forty thousand years of settlement...

The world contains not only causes and effects, but also causal relations holding between causes and effects. Because causal relations enter into the structure of the world, their presence has various modal and probabilistic consequences. Causation and necessary and sufficient conditions do often go hand in hand. Causation, however, is a robust ing...

Recently, Brian Ellis came up with a neat and novel idea about laws of nature, which at first I misunderstood. Then I participated, with Brian Ellis and Caroline Lierse, in writing a joint paper, “The World as One of a Kind: Natural Necessity and Laws of Nature” (Ellis, Bigelow and Lierse, forthcoming). In this paper, the Ellis idea was formulated...

Plato was right: mathematics is the study of the Forms. He may not have been entirely right, for instance, about what the Forms are, or about when and where they are to be found. Yet he was not entirely wrong either. In fact, he was quite right about the most important things. Mathematics does deal with properties and relationships, patterns and st...

Vectors, we will argue, are not just mathematical abstractions. They are also physical properties—universals. What make them distinctive are the rich and varied essences of these universals, and the complex pattern of internal relations which hold amongst them.

Traditionally, forces are causes of a special sort. Forces have been conceived to be the direct or immediate causes of things. Other sorts of causes act indirectly by producing forces which are transmitted in various ways to produce various effects. However, forces are supposed to act directly without the mediation of anything else. But forces, so...

An analysis of indefinite probability statements has been offered by Jackson and Pargetter (1973). We accept that this analysis will assign the correct probability values for indefinite probability claims. But it does so in a way which fails to reflect the epistemic state of a person who makes such a claim. We offer two alternative analyses: one em...

Without Abstract

Probability measures can be constructed using the measure-theoretic techniques of Caratheodory and Hausdorff. Under these constructions one obtains first an outer measure over "events" or "propositions." Then, if one restricts this outer measure to the measurable propositions, one finally obtains a classical probability theory. What I argue is that...

This paper concerns the semantics of belief-sentences. I pass over ontologically lavish theories which appeal to impossible worlds, or other points of reference which contain more than possible worlds. I then refute ontologically stingy, quotational theories. My own theory employs the techniques of possible worlds semantics to elaborate a Fregean a...

What is it for a person to mean something by an utterance? Until recently, few philosophers have explicitly set themselves the task of answering this question. Of those who have, most have proposed answers which in one way or another analyze the act of meaning by appeal to the utterer's intentions.

Without Abstract

to refute physicalism and that interactionism is implaus-ible, the only reasonable option left for him seems to be epiphenomenalism. However, some philosophers hold that the knowledge argument is not consistent with epiphenomenalism. Epiphenomenalism claims that *qualia are causally ineYcacious in the physical world. Ironically, this claim appears...

In his book From Metaphysics to Ethics, Jackson's defence of what he calls "conceptual analysis" proceeds in two stages. In the first stage, he argues for the existence of common knowledge shared by all speakers of a public language. He then brings this postulated common knowledge to bear on an array of philosophical problems, ranging from puzzles...

Here is a simplified fiction which is based on a real case at a Californian University. The Faculty of Humanities decided to try to increase the number of women on their staff. There were 13 women and 13 men who applied for positions in the Faculty. All the positions were directed towards the study of either time or space, in the departments of His...