 So, welcome everybody to the first occurrence of the logic and philosophy seminar of this year. So, we used to focus last year on the topics of the Big Miss project, but given that it's finished, we extend a little bit the seminar. and I'll be doing it on my own because I'll be learning about a better job. But nevertheless, we have some very interesting speakers coming up. For today, original choices are cancelled, but the replacement is at least as exciting. So it's been four months now that you don't work here anymore. It was another time to check up on what you've been doing. So the floor is yours. Thank you very much. This is something I would have worked on if I hadn't joined Peter's project two years ago. So now that the project is over, I can go back to that paper that has been in the process of being written for some years now and I'm still happy to get some feedback from those ideas because they are quite unorthodox as you will see. So our topic is really counter-possible. So let me just introduce the topic. Counter-possible are counterfactuals with absolutely impossible arguments. So the classic example that you find everywhere in the literature is a following. It helps at square the circle, the six children in the mountains of South America will not have cared at the time. So you're supposed to know that it's impossible to square the circle and it seems to be something reasonable to say. Six children in the mountains of South America don't care about math and they probably don't know who helps them even if they care about math. There's no way this could not be true. So those are counter-possible. So I should probably know possible words, semantics, many possible to do a logic for counterfactuals like the classic papers were done and the classic paper is written in 1968 and then Louise wrote the book Counterfactuals in 1973 which develops the possible of semantics for counterfactuals and those early and foundational theories built in the logic of counterfactuals that counter-possibles are vacuously true. Which means that they are all true and vacuously true in the same sense than universal quantifications on empty predicates are vacuously true. So if you remember your class of first-order logic, probably remember having been surprised because it's something that is not dotted in line with natural language and with ancient logic. But if you take like an empty predicate, like round square, so you granted the premise that there are no round squares, then it's true to say that all the round squares are black, whatever, so all round squares are bananas. So this is true to say all round squares are bananas just because there are no round squares. And this is the case of vacuously true. This is true vacuously true because there's nothing there, so vacuously everything, that is F is G for entity. And you have the same phenomenon with counter-possibles in the original possible world theory, and there is actually a deep reason for that, is that like in the hidden semantics, you have universal quantification. And then impossibility is true at no possible goals. So the reasons are exactly the same even though they don't show up when you look on this superficially at the formula. But if I were to give the semantic loss as responsible for this, you will see a universal quantifier and an empty predicate. But for exactly the same reason, you are allowed to say in the Lewis and Stollinger theory that if 2 plus 2 were equal to 5, then Emmanuel Macron would be the trothkist. So this is true. I do that example because I find it funny, but you can replace it with every sentence, whatever you get. This will be true according to the theme. And this is like the orthodox view, and Lewis like notices that his theory has this result and he argues that this is a good result. Nowadays there are people who are completely aware of this and they don't take it just as something that you have to live with. They argue that it is something that should be the case. Especially Williamson is one of the foremost contemporary defenders of orthodoxy on this point. So the view that all counter-possibles are actually true is called vitalism and this is the orthodox values. And we are philosophers, so each time there is something that is orthodox, there are obviously people who reject it. So we are going to call them reformists. And the reformist view is to ignore counter-possibles should be... We should ground the possibility from counter-possibles to discourse. They have the right to discourse, just like any other counter-pattern which is not discriminating against them. So this is like the reformist. So they want to get rid of vitalism. They have no problem with saying that counter-possibles can be true and they can be true also for good reasons, not just because they are not responsible for anti-celebrity. It's true, so they can be more likely to be true and they want them to have the possibility to be false. I gave just two examples. This is a growing literature, especially people from the relevant logic camp have defended a view like that about counter-factuals, so Ed Merz, in particular, is one of the early defenders of actually non-vacuous reformism. And I think that the example of Hobbes comes from his paper. I'm not sure about that, but... Anyway. So basically, so this is the controversy I'm interested in. And the way it is it is a controversy that is just about a very narrow topic in the logic of counter-factuals. But in fact, and that's what I hope will be interesting to all those of you who are not politicians. Actually, this debate has a lot of ramification with more general issues that have to do with metaphysics. And especially the possibility to have hyperintentional notions in metaphysics. So if you don't know what hyperintentionality is, I will explain in a while. But I want to explore the connections between vacuumism, hyperintentionality in metaphysics, just to give a preview. If you believe that there is hyperintentionality in metaphysics, then you should go with the reform. So that's one way that connects. But the problem is that the way the reform has been carried out, especially by the two co-authors, I mean the two groups of authors I mentioned in previous slide, it doesn't really work. At least I think there are problems of coherence. And so I will address that problem starting with an argument from Williamson that is against the reform. And then I will give my solution for more transparency in the reform. This is a problem because the problem has to do with notion of opacity. Now I understand that this preview is a bit opaque. But anyway, you've seen the interview to the topic. So the next step is to give the main arguments for reform, give some arguments for orthodoxy, explain how it's connected to metaphysics. Williamson, he's a orthodox guy. He has a very strong argument against vacuumism, so with an expanded argument. I will see how the available reformists have replies, probably replies. And then I will give my reply, which introduces more transparency. So that's where I go. So why be a reformist? So the first thing that some reformists say is that, well, actually common sense is non-vacterist. And basically just a few two intuitions. So sometimes possible sounds intuitively non-vacteristic true. Sometimes possible sounds intuitively non-vacteristic false. Therefore, vacuumism is false. And just like maybe examples of fairs, of contemplation was the first of which sounds true, for good reason, non-vacteristic reasons, and the second some schools for non-vacteristic reasons. So the first four A is the one I gave earlier. So for B, it just negates the consequence. If Hobbes had squared the circle at the time, or you just negates the consequence, if Hobbes had squared the circle, C children in the mountains of South America would have cared at the time. No. We didn't know who Hobbes was anyway. He could not possibly have cared. Another example, which actually would be central to the second part of the talk, is the following. If aspirants had not been phosphorous, the astronomical facts would have been different. From there, they actually are. Or a variant of this example is if aspirants had not been phosphorous, my astronomy teacher would have been a liar, because he told me that they are in fact the same planet. And they are identical beings. However, if you say if aspirants had not been phosphorous, the astronomical facts would have been different. It seems like not the right thing to say, because the fact that phosphorous is phosphorous is identical to itself. It's not an astronomical fact. It's either a logical fact or a metaphysical fact. It has nothing to do with astronomy. So it seems strange to see something like that. The variant is if aspirants had not been phosphorous, my astronomy teacher would have been a liar. No, your logic teacher would have been a liar, or your metaphysical teacher would have been a liar. So this is pretty standard methodology in contemporary anatomy to give intuitions. To the extent that they are shared, the problem with those cases is that the counter-possibles are not ordinary counterfactuals. So we have to take perfect examples. So sometimes intuitions are not so clear. But at least I'm just like reporting what the formists say. They say, well, this is intuitive. And saying that B4B is true and 5B is true seems like counterfactuality. Problem is that intuitions are not like that. They don't give you, like, another argument. Prima-Fâché justifies it, but they are as good as it gets insofar as we don't have like an independently... Well, let me put it this way. They give Prima-Fâché evidence, but of course they can be overwritten if we have an independently plausible error theory. And this will be a topic for something that will come later. So if I know things about human psychology which says that we use heuristics when it's just those things that make those judgments particularly unreliable, then I have a good reason to not trust this particular intuition. It doesn't mean that I don't have to be skeptical about intuitions in general, for this particular kind of intuition that is independently explained by possible error theory, I'm justified in not taking that intuition. So that's the kind of way the dialectics can go from there. But for now, I would just accept those intuitions as they are. Now, what can the orthodox philosopher or logician say in response to that? Of course, the kind of thing that he or she will have to say is to counterbalance the intuitions with more general theoretical demands. And so this is like an argument that is given by Williamson which says that the orthodox logic is actually much more elegant, much more unified than the logic you get if you want to account for the intuitions that I gave earlier. So in the... those principles are the principles that hold in most versions of the possible semantics of Starrach and Lewis. Starrach and Lewis don't agree on exactly the same system. They disagree about some details. But those are really fundamental principles that hold that for both of their theories and they are intimately connected to the fact that we use possible words to model the learning. So basically this says that when two sentences are logically equivalent, they can be exchanged in an incident position. This says that if we have an internal, a logical internal into the NB, we can take A as a counterfactual position. It always can be. This says that if you... if the conjunction of all the BNs interweave, if we take the same... if you have a counterfactual position that entails B1, B2, Bn, then that counterfactual position can be. And have another principle that is the principles of substitutivity or identity, which will be important for later. So if we have a true counterfactual and A doesn't equal to B, then if we substitute B for A in the original counterfactual, we also get a true counterfactual. So of course if you want to defend the... if you want to have a logic that does not... that allows for the judgments I gave earlier, if you want in the two pairs I gave earlier possibility for the first one to be true and the second one to be false, you will have to remove those principles. I cannot show exactly the demonstration, but you will have to make sure that they do not hold... you will need a wrinkled logic. But of course the problem is that they will fail only for counter-possible. You still want them to hold for ordinary counterfactuals where the antecedent is possible. So what you need is them to be false, but you need them to come back when you put the possibility of the antecedent as a prince. And then like Williamson says, yeah, this is our league basically. Cetilis Palimbus, Cetilis Palimbus, a uniform counterfactual is actually perfect, a non-uniform counterfactual logic. Backingist counterfactual logic is more uniform than non-backingist counterfactual logic. I'm sure there's a way, if I remember correctly, Williamson put it in more subtle terms, but this is a general message. This is not where I'm going to disagree or attack him. The only point I would like to say is that it's not like completely decisive argument because you have similar phenomena within the usual semantics. There are some principles that fail only when the antecedent is impossible. For example, particular behaviour of ligation fails when the antecedent is not possible, but when the antecedent is not possible. So you have a similar phenomenon already in the usual semantics. Just to say that this argument is not a non-uniform argument and perhaps some completely coherent. But still, I think you can see that those very, those kind of laws, I think before anyone thinks about counter-possible, they seem like intuitively plausible. So if A logically entails B, and it seems like unfortunately, if it were to be the case that A, then it would have to be the case that B. It seems like very intuitive things to say. But this already is enough to get you into a vacuumism very quickly. Yes? You mean here that it's not consequences, right? Each rule doesn't work, not the envy dash claim. Yes, thank you very much. No, you're right, you're right. You're right, you're right. So that's a very good, that's a very good, yeah, the notation is misleading. I just wanted to make sure. No, what I should have done is like... Yeah, that's what I mean. The inference line. So what I meant, what this is supposed to mean is that it's logically possible to have this true and this false. But thanks, yeah, that's just a sloppy way of putting it. Because in some cases there is no problem. Exactly. So it's not that whenever this is a... Thanks, that's an important thing for the written version. Okay, now I go for the more interesting stuff, which is the connection with metaphysics. So there is an obvious connection. It's something that was also quoted out by Williamson. So there is a certain kind of use in general for counterfactuals with the fictionalist research programs. So, for example, if you want to be a fictionalist about something, you still have the problem of explaining how you can use that useful fiction to actually do some work. So here are a few examples. For example, in your domain, you believe that numbers don't exist and you certainly don't want to quantify our numbers or any mathematical entities. But still it can be useful to use numbers as a useful fiction. For example, when you want to do mathematical calculations when you do physics. But if you are a hardcore physicalist, you believe no, there are no abstract objects. So similarly, you can be at core like an actualist. You believe that only the actual world exists. So all the reasons for that are possible were just myths. But still you want to be able to use that myth when you want to reason about possibility. So you can be a fictionalist, right? You could be like a hardcore miracle nihilist. So you believe that nothing composes whatsoever. But still you won't be able to talk as though there were composite things. And then you will take marital theories that accept composition principles as a useful fiction. But as I said, the fiction is useful only in so far as it can back through preservative inferences. We want to be able to use that fiction to make actual inferences. And here, counterfactuals can be useful. So one way to use fictions, well, even if fiction were true, given that this is a true that does not involve fiction, I can get another truth that does not involve fiction. For example, if you are a mathematical flatonist, a physicalist, and you want to use math when you do your physical calculation, and here you have a physical description, you have a fiction which is mathematical flatonism, and if that were true, I would be able to quantify over and over to make calculations out of that and come up with a lot of physical descriptions. And I would have used math to learn something new about the physical world, even if I'm not committed to the existence of mathematical instances. So that's the way that fiction is programmed can be put forward by using counterfactuals. The problem is that if you do that in metaphysics, it's not automatic, but there's a high chance that the kind of fictions that you will be using will be false, of course, but they are fictions, but they will be non-contingent false. They will be actually impossible. So if the world is a physical issue, if there are no abstract objects in the actual world, it's not because our actual world is continuously devoid of abstract objects, because all abstract objects are incognito entities or they just cannot possibly exist, so there is no metaphysics impossible with abstract objects. So if I want to use my fiction in the antecedent of a counterfactual, I'd better have a non-vaquist semantics otherwise all the things I would do with those fictionalist counterfactuals would be trivial, just by vacuumism. So this is one reason from fictionalism to be interested in non-vaquist counterfactuals. You will need non-vaquist counterfactuals to do things like that. Of course, you don't have to be a fictionalist, but if you're interested in that kind of program, then you will need them. Yes? I'm not sure whether I get the program, and that's why I wrote it. It seems quite provisional, so if, like, suppose I don't believe in God or an intervening God or something, and I say somebody has done something evil and had God existed, had a good intervening God existed, and this person would be punished, with that counterfactual plan, I'm able to conclude that that person will be punished. It doesn't seem right to conclude from a person has done something evil to that person will be punished, if I'm not a afaminatious, right? That's a good point. That sort of policy is all over the place, and this seems just a specific point where it gets extra bad. Maybe we can keep this for discussion. I thought I missed something. Oh, okay, no, that's a good... So, I think the idea that you can learn... So, using counterfactuals is a way... You know, putting fictions in the interest of a counterfactual is a way to have them to work. So, it's possible that the kind of, like, stigmatization I gave is over-simplistic and over-generates. I have to confess I haven't thought hard about this, but I think the general idea that using counterfactuals to reason with fictions and fictionalized programs and putting them in the antecedent is something that is quite natural, I think, to assume. So, perhaps it will have to be done in a more cautious way, but can you agree, at least, with this idea that you will need them in the antecement of a counterfactual? Can I get a fiction on this? Yeah, okay. Still, the strategy seems overly flawed. I don't want to run this too far afield, but the case of theism, I think, is actually really interesting because I got in a fight about exactly this in a graduate metaphysics seminar with Peter Van Inwen, who is a graduate student, who is a firm believer that S5 is just the true monologic that describes the world. And so, if God exists, God exists necessarily. I believe that God doesn't exist. I can't reason counterfactually about God's existence. I don't have the tools, right? He necessarily doesn't exist. He's not out there. So, I can't even formulate. So, there may be an actually kind of interesting analogy case. You can if you go non-vacumist. Well, no, I know. But I think there's a cool, there may be an interesting analogy to push it, actually. That could be kind of a cool example, actually, because theism example, it generates the same kind of worry, but in like a weird way. Yeah, yeah. Yep. How does it relate to fiction? It seems to me that it's the same kind of, excuse me, if you'd like, I guess the idea is that if you're a firm believer, maybe the connection is never met, maybe it actually is just a pure counter-possible, not that I think about it. The idea is if you're a firm believer, if S5 has to be the real monologic, for a lot of, for most of theists, God's intentions is a case of counter-possible. So we're just back to that counter-possible in the end. Right. Okay, so this is one way to put non-vacumism into the picture. I think this has been explicitly a point of debate in the case of moral fictionalism. So in the discussion between Hale and Rosen, like at some point, yes. The semantics of counterfactuals forces you to say something absurd, and he assumes that vacuumism is true, so if you're a good non-vacumist, you're going to be at least a part of the politics. From a purely dialectical point of view, it's perhaps better to stick with a specific case and not try to give her, like, a general skin line of opportunities. Anyway, another connection is with hyper-attentional metaphysics. So I will have to introduce a notion of hyper-attentionality. So I try to give a definition which is as broad as possible and not too slowly. So I hope I kind of arrive at something satisfactory. So those metabrivals are supposed to be, like, neutral or monotonic syntactic categories. So they can be whatever expressions that admit extensions. So if they are like sentences and this symbol of equivalence says, like, material equivalent, if they are singular terms, this means identity. This symbol is like the necessity operator. This is a symbol for context, so it means basically a sentence with a whole length that you can fill either with a sentence or with a singular term. So obviously you need to like any consistency, so if you decide to say that the metabrivals are individuals, then you take them as metabrivals for individuals all the way. If you take them to be metabrivals for sentences, you would like the same interpretation all the way. And so basically what this rule allows you is to allow for substitution of things that are necessarily equivalent. So if two individuals are necessarily the same and you say something true about the first one, then you can say something true just by replacing the name of the second with the name of the first one. Similarly, if you have two sentences that are necessarily equivalent and you apply an operator to that sentence, you say, I need to leave that sentence. Then you should be able to say that you have to believe the other one. So this is the substitutivity of necessarily equivalent SME. So context C is hyper-tensionals if this rule fits. So there are contexts that do not allow the substitutivity of necessarily equivalent. And we are all familiar with hyper-intentional context, belief, or Alice, which is that, is a hyper-intentional context. So in order to show that something is hyper-intentional, you need to have those three pieces of information, have two sentences that are necessarily equivalent, have a context that applies truly to the first one and context. And the same context does not apply truly to the second one. Alice believes that Bob is stupid, as soon as true. Suppose that Alice doesn't know anything about Delida. It seems like false to conclude that Alice believes that Bob is stupid and either Delida is smart or Delica is smart. But, like, Bob is stupid and either Delina is smart or Delica is smart are truly exactly the same possible words for the unnecessary equivalent. So we have an instance of this case. It's actually very easy to generate instances like this just by using irrelevant tautologies or irrelevant antithesis. And this is, so it's very easy to device test for hyper-intentional, it's like that. It's more complicated to find plausible contexts where this would be meaningful, but here, I suppose, it's okay. The thing, so, since, like an important paper of Noran in 2014, there is a growing number of pedo-supports who accept that many technical concepts generate hyper-intentional concepts. So when you talk about essence, when you talk about physicians, when you talk about grounding, when you talk about dependence, when you talk about fundamental tith, you will use contexts in the sense I introduced above, which is forms of expression that can be filled. And, for example, it is essential to so practice that. This is a central context generated by a sense of essence. So you end up with a context that behaves like that, that are hyper-intentional. And I get a classic examples from the literature on essence. So the example actually goes back. Fine, but I think it's already in an ordinary article by Mike Dunn. Anyway. So it's essential to so practice that so practice is human. It seems like something everyone is prefer to agree with. But it's not essential to so practice that the singleton set that contains only so practice exists. It is something that is necessary even though so practice exists. But it's not part of so practice nature to be a member of that particular center. It's just something that goes necessary with this existence. But it's not part of this nature. It's not part of the definition of so practice. So that's why people tend to deny so it's a very Aristotelian or neo-Ristotelian intuition. But all the readers will find I've accepted that. And then I can see the intuition to be at the start. Doesn't follow your scheme, right? For that it should be necessarily equivalent that so practice is human and that singleton so practice exists. Yeah, so I think it has to do with whether you want to assume that so practice has to whether you assume like that that predication requires existence because so practice is human and all the possible words where so practice exists and singleton so practice exists in all the possible words where so practice exists. Oh, it's necessary that so practice exists. Yeah, that's so practice. So the question is whether there's if you take whether so practice can be human in the world where it just doesn't exist. In that case, that world would be a world where it's really human. But if it's necessary, that's fine. I was thinking that... Yeah, the assumption is that essential properties are necessary but what is debated what is denied implicitly here is that all necessary properties are essential. Only a subset of your essential of your necessary properties are essential to you but all your essential properties are necessary. Yeah. So there's another example given by I don't remember who gave it first but it's definitely the paper of no-lans. So suppose you write a computer program you're a teacher in the you're teaching girls in computer series and you write a recording program that recursively generates all the theorems of the systems you're studying so of course you take any time to speed up all the theorems but you put a line of code that says well, if you ever generate the girl sentence then you print a half proof my own girl sentence and of course we know that this will never this cannot possibly happen for mathematical reasons which are basically first in completing this theorem of girl but you get still like if you want you have one line of code to lose you can add that and then in that scenario you can say well the program is disposed to print I have proved my own girl sentence in the event that the program proves the girl sentence of course this is like impossible because you know that it cannot happen but this is something that's proved to say but if you substitute the impossible interest another impossible interest that has nothing to do like the program is supposed to print I have proved my own girl sentence in the event that the girl is the girl which is absolutely impossible given some assumptions and proper names and necessity and I'm going to go into it but if you agree that it's impossible for the girl to be the girl given that there are different people then this is also counter-possible and the antecedents of both are truly the same set of possible or maybe the empty set so this is evidence that this counter-possible context at least is hyper-intentional and here in this case it's supposed to show that this position of concepts are hyper-intentional so we have hyper-intentionality and what is important about hyper-intentionality is that unlike the hyper-intentionality of belief it's something that's supposed to happen like a worldly source so when we when we so one way to look out for the fact that it can be at least can believe that what is to be that belief in that what is to be an idol that he dies as a mark if that belief is something that introduces the perspective of an agent so you can think of possibilities that are not as stupid without thinking about the idea even though that possibility is intuitively the same as this one so you have abstract information when you are in the business of believing that kind of explains why you can make some subtle differences or pieces of information that are true in exactly the same possible also but it's hard to come up with such an explanation because here we don't care about we don't have the perspective of an agent no one believes anything we're not thinking about mental representations of ensign we're thinking about what it is to be secret or what should happen in that particular stimulus even though it's impossible where to occur and actually some explanation has been made between people who are in the business of high potential metaphysics and possible so I'll start with some as a paper where he actually give an interpretation of grounding that is based on some work on interventions and counterfactuals so basically he sees a connection between grounding claims and counterfactuals involving impossible interventions so it's a way to sell grounding to philosophers of science who understand intervention for example if an intervention work had to annihilate just singleton secretis so secretis itself without annihilating the idea is that singleton secretis is dependent on secretis so if you just surgically remove the dependent entity don't touch the fundamental entity so that's how intervention annihilating singleton secretis keeps so secretis safe but it doesn't and of course so if you take just a negation of consequence then you should have a false evaluation similarly if you assume that just one of the secretis in singleton secretis were to exist but not both it seems that the one who should not exist is the less fundamental entity which is singleton secretis whereas it could not possibly be the case that only singleton secretis exists without secretis it seems like metathesis key completely and coherent so here we have metathesis called repentantianity and it's manifested by non-vacues counter-possible and Alistair Brisson makes the very prestigious claim that observation that the kind of metathesis that are drawn to accept grounding are the same kind of people who should go into non-vacues counter-possible and the same auditions that are identical to non-vacues counter-possible are the same who are skeptical of grounding so the two kind of positions seem to be that and it turns out that there is a way to translate every case of metathesis and contentionality to non-vacues counter-factual then you can see that the two things actually go very deeply together and actually there's a kind of recipe so I don't have a formal proof that the recipe works because you need to build assumptions about contexts and also the logic of counterfactual so it's hard to make everything but at some intuitive level I think it's sort of easy to see how you can start from the information that context is hyper intentional to generating a pair of counter-possible that shows that non-vacues one has to be true so basically you start with so the pattern is that you have necessary coherence between the sentence that satisfies the context and the sentence that does not and typically you get that because this is completely irrelevant to the context and so you can you can form a counter-possible by having as a premise the sentence that satisfies the context contrary to the negation of the necessary that irrelevant one perhaps we'll prove that in general this counter-factual should be true but in all the examples I've seen this is typically the case and of course if you negate the consequence then you will get something false so it will be further examples for non-vacues so here I've played that game of expressing all the examples about fundamentality about grounding about essence by using that recipe actually this is not exactly an instance of what I've presented you need to be some simple simplifications that have been done to make it more readable but the idea that such translation works there's a recipe that seems to work easily and I feel that allows to generate examples in the system so the theoretical case for non-vacues if high pentagonal methodical high pentagonalism is true then methodical concepts generate perpendicular concepts if methodical concepts generate high pentagonal attacks then there are non-vacues counter-possible therefore methodical high pentagonalism entails non-vacues so this is the kind of argument that takes you from methodical high pentagonalism to non-vacues okay so now how how could the deontodox resist to that move and here what I found a very powerful argument from objectivity this is not necessarily a very strong argument for all kinds of programs about counter-possibles but it's particularly strong for the kind of programs that tie non-vacues to metaphysics because we want to be able to say that the counterfactors are objective in those cases so the Williamson argument for other lexicals as follows it's my reconstruction that I think is pretty fair to the way Williamson presents it so counterfactual contexts are always objective counterfactuals are about the way things would go differently if things would be different it's not about what we believe how we believe they would change whether or not so it's objective so the second premise is that if vacuumism is false then counterfactual contexts are very virtually opaque I'll show how each premise can be justified in this for now it's important to just get the structure of the argument third, referentially opaque contexts cannot be objective therefore, vacuumism is true so of course I need to define what is an opaque context and it will be done shortly now I just talk about objectivity because in the way Williamson understands it it has a very specific in mind that context in general and the counterfactual context in particular is objective if feeling it with something that makes it true has nothing to do with the way the perspective of an agent represents anything to yourself so we can get an idea of that if you compare the counterfactuals with indicative conditionals they will be dependent from the perspective of the assertion so if an assertion hits as per us if an assertion hits as per us it could have hit as per us if you know that as per us it was for us and something that you have to accept they are just the same thing if you hit one under the first name you hit the second under the second name and it remains true even if no one knows that as per us it was for us but if you take the perspective of a pre-billion astronomer who actually thinks that there are two distinct stars that it makes sense it's completely coherent for that person to say that if Zeus hits as per tomorrow he might still spare for us that's kind of a reasonable thing to say and it's not reasonable to say from the same perspective if Zeus hits as per us tomorrow he might still spare as per us this is like nonsense but here we have to change just change the names of the same entity conclusion indicative conditionals are representational they are not objective constructions counterfactuals are not objective constructions and you have a similar if you want to take that distinction from more familiar ground so if you understand the difference between objective probability and subjective probability they are the same thing so if you understand probability in an objective way the probability that A hits as per us given some background condition should be the same sorry I forgot to add a zero there it has to be I forgot to give you that the probability that A hits as per us is the same as probability that A hits as per us given the same background condition but if you talk about tendencies then one is consistent to have one like higher than the other because nature may not ignore that as per us so the same thing which I talk about objective and subjective construction is exactly the same in which we think of probability as objective and subjective now I turn to opacity so opacity in the sense of refrigeration refrigeration opacity is basically the failure of the rule of sensitivity of identity so the rule says that if A is identical to B and A satisfies the context C then I can replace A with B within the context and when context always satisfies the rule we say that the context is referentially transparent and we said it's referentially opaque for example to this rule and so for example is very well known that knowledge generates a referentially opaque context but three million astronomers knew that as per us is identical to as per us yes but they didn't know that as per us is identical to as per us and I just like and of course we know that it's true that as per us is as per us so this is an example of the failure of the substitutility identity for epistemic context context of knowledge so why should we say that opaque that if vacuumism is true premise 2 said if vacuumism is true sorry if non-vacuumism is true, if vacuumism is false then counter possible is opaque well when I gave the intuitions that the wish warmers accept the failure of non-vacuumism I just gave an instance that actually violates substitutility identity if as per us is identical to as per us yes we don't have to be different if as per us is identical to as per us yes we don't have to be different so if you say this is a good reason to be non-vacuumist you also have to say this is a good reason to believe that this is our thing and this is kind of Williamson does not this is an example that is given an accent to that reference so it's not like a trick from Williamson or something it's over there in the literature and repeatedly like we for us have stuck to that kind of intuition so it seems like you have nothing else to say then well it's a reference to the opaque and then the third condition says well a reference to the opaque context has to be representational and here also it seems very hard to avoid so if a context is really about an object itself independently of the rate presented by any agent either explicitly mentioned or explicitly mentioned in the context then if you replace a name of A with another name of the same entity then it has to be the context with that name replaced should also be true there's no way you can move from true to positive if the context is objective so actually Williamson used the referential opacity as a test for being subjective for not being objective, for being representational so it seems like there's no coherent sense to be made of the possibility that a context be both objective and opaque the mark of objective context is that sustainability of an entity preserved truth to be known so it looks like the the copy-paste error and I just didn't copy-paste the same version of the argument so we have support for the three premises and conclusion like, particularly for those from the three premises so it looks like it's very hard to to accept all the premises and deny the component that's why I think this argument is a very good argument very strong argument for that so what have the reform is how do they propose to solve the issue and here, what is interesting is that they don't agree about how to react to that so people say we need to deny one so we need to grant that counter-possible are not objective and actually others say that we don't have to do that we can live with objective counter-possible and non-bacterism this but personal and colleagues in 2017 and I'm going to to disagree with both of them so should we accept opaque counter-possible that is one option is to say they are opaque and they are representational, they are not objective can make coherent sense and plot the argument question is whether it is a good move so my first observation it's not exactly something against the view but it's definitely the criticism of the way people argue for the literature so actually they like some arguments that you find repeated in the literature are based on the fantasy it pains me to say that because those are very good philosophers and colleagues that I appreciate the work very much but when I think hard about this I come to the conclusion that there is a fantasy goal so I have to have to say it so one common argument is that I give a course of course so what people go like this, non-bacterism counter-possible are representational are representational context are representational opaque yes that's what they say therefore non-bacterism counter-possible are representational opaque and this is not quite right so there is a connection between non-vacuism and hyper-intentionality so it's possible to go from very minimal assumptions about counter-factual logic and modern logic to the view that if you accept non-vacuism then generates a hyper-intentional context so this is like form of proof in this case I there are some steps but not particularly some calculations that I avoided because what I want to know is in the structure of the argument we can go into the details if you want if you have comments to make Q&A but this is non-vacuism non-vacuism gets you directly to hyper-intentionality the question is how hyper-intentionality relates to opacity and so this is something that so Beto says something referencing Williamson he says something stronger than Williamson says because Williamson says the people who are new for non-controversy rules on the basis of examples use examples that also show that they are opaque so you can take that as a non-hominem point it says well if you accept this intuition you also have to accept the view that they are opaque but it doesn't imply that because they are non-vacuism they have to be opaque it's just like a coincidence and so when Beto says that non-vacuism is possible it doesn't follow from what Williamson says and even the way he presented the evidence and so and then he moves directly from hyper-intentionality to opacity so the possible disposition would have to be integrated hyper-intentionally one and the same object might be disposed in some way to participate so this is a point about hyper-intentionality and I agree but hyper-intentionality does not this is a symptom of opacity I don't know what those two points are supposed to mean but they cannot make that concept so we have to be careful here because that's very important Robert and Salano make the same move the non-vacuism of actually is hyper-intentional hyper-intentional operator do not permit substitution why? it doesn't follow from the definition of hyper-intentional operator even though there are some cases where you can establish both by the same example but it doesn't mean that every example that shows hyper-intentionality also shows opacity and actually there are good examples of sorry so you can move in the other direction you can move from opacity to hyper-intentionality and that's the reason why you can find examples that show both at the same time because if you show opacity then automatically you show hyper-intentionality if you accept Kripke's doctrine about the necessity of identity so if an identity is into resilient designators it's necessary if true and you have evidence for opacity based on the fact that A equals B A does not satisfy B does not satisfy C then by the necessity of identity you can show me to necessity and then you have evidence for hyper-intentionality so from opacity you can go to hyper-intentionality but the other way around no and there are very simple contra-examples factual equivalence so the fact that two sentences describe the same fact possibly described in different ways would be hyper-intentionality because facts are inviolated intentionally but it would be reference to inspired because the factual descriptions are meant to be reference to inspired so surprises exist it's clearly factually equivalent that surprises exist but surprises exist not factually equivalent with signature surprises exist it's not described the same fact expressed science is factually figuratively factually equivalent with expressed science but it is also factually equivalent with falsehood science so there will actually the factual equivalence is refreshing and transparent it's not just an accident just because well, just because it's basis for sports so we are allowed to make that so this so if you thought that you could get opaque counter-possible just because they believe hyper-intentionality just because they believe pretensionally that's definitely not a good reason so that's one point I think and most of the reasons as in literature are like that another problem with that is the kind of situation you end up with so what you end up with if you just take the inclusion at this value is that ordinary counterfactuals are objective because typically they behave transparently but then it turns out that some counter-possibles behave in a no-pick way and here we have like an experiment to explain why should the model status of the antecedent have anything to do with opacity or transplants it looks like we don't see the reason why we should move from transparently opaque just when you introduce possibility in the antecedent so this is not a no-dial argument but I think this is a very unstable position and also more importantly for the case if you resist Williamson's argument by saying that counter-possibles are not always objective then it doesn't sit very well with the idea of hyper-intentional metaphysics you have to conclude that in hyper-intentional metaphysics may be not objective which may be metaphysics I don't know so this is a very unstable position I don't have a no-dial argument but I think if we can avoid it we better avoid it what about opaque objective counter-possibles well it's something that like Berthot so France Berthot, Grand Prix, David Le Play and Robert French wrote a paper when they attacked Williamson's views on counter-possibles and they addressed the argument I reported and they said oh, it's ground that counter-possibles are objective they don't like claim it but they say well we can accept that assumption and it's compatible with our view of our long vacuumism about counter-possible and then the question is well and they accept the intuition about they also accept the example that shows that counter-possibles are opaque they have to say well opacity and objectivity are compatible and then I say well how and they say a few things in defense of that because they have to say something so the first thing they say is that because they have impossible worlds they kind of ground for that and they're in a sense in which impossible worlds allow you to show how objectivity and opacity are compatible and they just find the argument which needs to be unpacked from the literature but it's not but ultimately I will reject their proposal so first they also make a confusion between hyperintentionality and opacity although it's not in the it's a symmetrical confusion so they make the right observation that hyperintentionality does not imply it's being presentational or delistinive so that they get right and they point to hyperintentionality that are not in any way about presentational features or intellectuals maybe well on this so we can have hyperintentionality without presentation and while saying that they think they are safe because they think that they are secure hyperintentionality from opacity but wait they accepted an example that also establishes an independent opacity so this has no weight on the issue so hyperintentionality does not entail opacity okay but then the existence of objective hyperintentionality does not entail the existence of objective opacity so okay it's a good observation I agree but it doesn't solve anything to the issue and then so they have impossible worlds and they have not any kind of impossible they have like very how should I put it so that it's not negative connotation logically chaotic impossible but that's why the people who like them like them so it's not supposed to be negative so you have two levels of like a chaoticity the first one is that for every formula you have a world where it's true so even like a contradiction will be true everywhere but also for every set of formula there is a world for every set of formulas and formula there is a world where all the formulas, all the members of Kama are true and five which means that for any logical law you can possibly imagine there is a possible world there is a world impossible in that case in many cases which falsifies which invades that law we know that there are very weird worlds around and so in particular so this is the primary directive and this is the secondary directive and so by the secondary directive for every identity statement which dates to the main ones the identity and every sentence we see we will find a world where A equals B is true C with A is true and C with B is true and also that also in cases where C is objective because it's impossible in that case so here's what they say a world is partially characterized by set of sentences this tells exactly what the word is like whether it's possible or impossible and if it be retorted that if A equals B and this statement really is about A and B the failure of substitutivity would be impossible and the reply is of course it's impossible of course but we are in an impossible world so what's the problem they are right to say that there is a sense in which objectivity is compatible with opacity that is at impossible goals at impossible goals you can have goals but then hey we've accepted that this is true and this is false in the actual world so if your response to the to the fact that you should say well opacity is compatible with with objectivity at impossible goals and you have to say that the actual world is an impossible world because here you have a failure of the substitutivity of identity so there is just no way save the co-existence of objectivity and opacity in the actual world so there is no way to save it for the evaluation of those two counter-possible in the actual world so basically their proposal is incoherent because they cannot accept that the actual world is an impossible world so I conclude that Berto will play a French failure of the co-existence of objectivity so what do we do if you want to resist Williamson's argument and here is my plea for transparency so I think the response should be more transparent how much time do I have maybe I am already over 15 minutes over ok I will try to wrap it up I try to give the general idea and then we can discuss the details in the Q&A so at the end of the day the problem comes from these isolated intuitions so we have a general argument from non-vacuumism to hypentensionality but the only connection between counter-possible non-vacuumism and opacity comes from intuitions should we trust those intuitions so I said at the beginning that intuitions are as good as the unavailability of independent error theory and I said I think we do actually we do because the laser could keep a few days above actually developed a whole theory about model intuitions and especially when it comes to the use of proper names which are rigid designators and all the intuitions have in the background the necessity of identity so they are all connected to scriptural considerations so what Tricky told us is that it's easy to confuse an impossible world where experts are not phosphorus with a possible world world which is just like ours except that you have a star that shines exactly the way shop of Venus shines in the morning and there's another planet that shines exactly the way that Venus shines in the evening but there are two distinct stars and so from a purely epistemic perspective those two worlds look exactly the same the second one is definitely possible and people will be thinking exactly the same way but only the second one is a possible world and when we say phosphorus is not phosphorus we literally say that one thing, Venus is not Venus so it's impossible but sometimes people might say well it could have been that my beginning discovered that the phosphorus was but it could have been that actually there were two different planets well if you say so the only way to make sense of this is to say that you use an epistemic good but if you want to use an objective good that's the way this can be true you can easily confuse the two and so the proposal is to say well those I will go directly to the so my proposal is that the intuitions that tend to establish that counter-possible are opaque exactly the same kind of district of intuitions so they are plausible if you rephrase them epistomically or with a kind of story why you have to do two distinct planets here they work but if you take seriously the fact that phosphorus is phosphorus just name the same planet then what you have to say is that this is false just in the same way that this is false because this counter-possible supposition is exactly the same as this counter-possible supposition and just to finish with a a Nagominal point against but I think it's a fair point because in this book on non-psychologies it addresses the problem of the context of relevant and it says well you get this so if A equals B then A equals B and tells B equals B it seems to violate the requirements of relevance because those two the consequence don't share anything but then it says well because A is equal to B then they say exactly the same thing basically that both the same object is identical to itself so it's allowed to make that move in the context of relevance it seems weird to deny that move in the context of content so perhaps it looks like if you apply this kind of standard if you are dealing with these kind of standards when it comes to relevant amplification you should apply them to counterfactual and then you will get that evaluation so what I propose is to take what is possible to be no more representational counterfactuals I think the view is theoretically elegant more than a view that says that some possible are representational and most counterfactuals are objective and it serves the needs for a potential meta-physics so I think the party of reform only needs to adopt stronger policy, favorable transparency to resist Williamson's argument and I thank you for your attention I would like to break anybody's argument to speak with the members maybe I miss it but do you see just structural similarity between your case about fictionalism and hyperintentionality or do you see something more deeper there no I think the so these two are connected but the connection is deeper in the case of hyperintentional meta-physics so in the case of fictionalism so one way people are giving favor of non-vacues or motivate non-vacues counter-possible is to say sometimes we need to be able to take the perspective of a theory we know is impossible just to reason about it so fictionalizing is an instance of that but it's not the only reason or the only instance where you can do that just for example people say well sometimes we are we are given examples of their weird metastical theories or very weird logical theories we kind of believe that they are impossible and if you are right they are impossible but still no trivial reasoning we can make with them and to do that we need non-vacues counter-possible it does not require hyperintentional meta-physics so even if there were no hyperintentional meta-physics involved you could still want to be a fictionist and to use counter-possible to play in fictionism with non-contingent non-contingently false meta-physical fictions so in that sense the motivation from fictionism is more general don't need to buy meta-physical hyperintentionalism but it's still to be open to the idea of reasoning hyperintentionally about metastics about false meta-physical theories that are impossible so the hyperintentionality would be only in the logic whereas if you go with the hyperintentional meta-physics the hyperintentionality is already the concept that you use to describe the world so the the motivations are not exactly at the same level and it's true that the way I constructed the later argument the one that matches most is the second one but I think it's also fair Williamson mentions the one with fictionism and I think it's also good if non-vacuous counter-possible can help to be a fictionist I think it's a good application but it was not the central one I have said that made that more clear in the presentation does that answer your question? yes but far keep there's some similarity in some cases of fictionism or special cases of hyperintentional in certain cases in the context but of course when we go to fictionism it's not the same motivation at all when you go to it's the preservation of truth that you really really care about fictionism you worry that the thing you include in the tools will get you to do something when you get rid of the fictionism you get to the conclusion there will be some effect of the tool in the result and hopefully even if it's a programmatic tool you would like to have no effect in some kind of constructiveness exactly and it seems to me that hyperintentionality is much broader, much more metaphysical like you said but they are structurally the same you want to have non-vectorism in both of them yes exactly but for a completely different reason that's why I'm surprised that Williamson is saying that they are both in the same category at least for his arguments or there are two cases so it's two different there are two different motivations and it could in principle have one motivation without having the other but they are both related to metaphysics so if you have a fictionist program in two metaphysics you should like not that huge content possible if you have a program in hyperintentional metaphysics but you are not a fictionist then you should like so the two are equivalent perhaps the two could be combined but you might be a fictionist that wants to have non-vectorism because obviously it would be very bad for a fictionist and you don't care about metaphysics exactly, exactly which is maybe not the less the case for our hyperintentionality there seems to have ontological consequences yeah so I have a weird a weird question but maybe it will help explore your positional or give you some more time to rant about your position as well because I was super happy to see you come back to the intuition question at the end about how to unpack these things because one thing that struck me at least I'm struggling with how to formulate this one that struck me as weird right about our intuitions in those kinds of cases is that it strikes me that I don't really have intuitions directly about evaluating the counter-possible what I have is intuitions about evaluating a kind of sense of which maybe some of those have the new invoke counter-possible but for instance if Hobbs had squared the circle the kids in South America wouldn't have cared if Hobbs had gone to the bathroom at 4.30 in the afternoon on a Tuesday the kids in South America wouldn't have cared either there's something at a much broader level I'm not really engaging with the counter-possibleness of the squaring the circle when I create my intuition that the kids in South America wouldn't have cared it's just about the fact that they don't care about what Hobbs is up to Hesperus and Phosphorus you can play the same it's a little more complicated to play the same kind of game but I feel like you probably still can and this is where I think maybe you were doing something that looked kind of like this at the end where it's not the intuition that the astronomical facts would have to be different is more like but I know like how people put names on stuff when they assign when they like do astronomy so like if we had decided to put names on stuff differently probably that means that the stuff would have been different in like a relevant way and it's like as a specification of that general principle that I have if I have that intuition that I have that vague intuition that like that counter-possibleness kind of makes sense do I really feel like I'm like sitting with the counter-possible and I feel just like that counter-possible sentence just feels correct and so I wonder if there's if there's something interesting or deep about that about what I just said or if that's like kind of orthogonal and sideways it's typically the kind of line that the Orthodox philosophers the way they try to diffuse those intuitions so either we use some heuristic we neglect the fact that we kind of like we neglect the bonus status of the antecedent and we just like look at their connection like a reasonable connection if no or not so the the problem so what is problematic about those intuitions is that so it's in the case of falsity because everyone agrees about the case of truth so the question is what happens when you say that it's false because usually when you deny a conditional it's because you kind of accept or you allow the antecedent but you want to deny the consequence so it seems like you're prepared to accept like the eventuality so I do not use the term possibility you're prepared to have the eventuality of having the antecedent without the consequence and in the case of hobs I mean of course you have to know that it's mathematically possible but basically so the tradeoff is well it's impossible but so one pressure is like it's impossible so anything goes but here the thing is like there seems to be no connection so I should be able to have one without the other I mean each person has a very positive delay like if you are flexible enough to allow for like local impossibilities to happen I don't know if God had made the laws of math a bit different and perhaps and or if logic has been like had worked a bit differently it's not about like good or being wrong about the incompletions but if like God had created formal systems in a different way yeah and so so but yes so I agree that this game is a bit cheap in the sense that the kind of thing that shows the intuitions is more like the cheaper to not care about math there is nothing to do with the good or the bad or whatever so this is kind of like so this is the trick that's supposed to get you into the intuition so then the question is like if we trust our intuition in those cases to be like considered intuition there's this trade of questions do we like is the impossibility sufficiently like weird or blatant so that blocks everything so just like there's no comparison whatsoever with anything else so that the issue of like the relevance of the consequence is completely it's completely out of the question or we can still make connections and if you can still make connections that makes sense for non-vacues falsity so one example that is used by the whole from the virtual priest camp so if you reason from it rains and it doesn't rain right now so if it were to rain and not rain right now it would still rain it's impossible but here to just supply contentual emanation and sorry the reason why you accept this has nothing to do with why you accept this if it rains, if it were to rain and not rain that the Pope is Pope is Pope is must be those, like the way you get to those judgments seems to be like quite different so so I agree with so I think your observation about like what drives our intuition is completely correct but if we trust so this could be this could be used as an argument to defuse some of those intuitions for example if if I were reading the next slide the next slide paper and where people did not like apply a control for the comprehension of the subjects so that we just like see that it's about math and they then I would say it's very poor evidence for the intuition in case of falsity but if we trust there's a way I think there's a way too and I can elaborate I can take you to a justification for those judgments that clearly takes into account the impossibility of getting this event and balances off with the relevance of I would like to react to I would say that it's even the same sort of situation you get for most contractuals people use whatever principle they have that doesn't have to do with the specific thing you change to still make it go through so had you not been here then you wouldn't have been able to cast on YouTube so the fact that this goes through is because of there's a simple link between your presence and our ability to cast on YouTube independent from the fact that you're in fact not here or where you are so it's always a matter of ignoring some substantial things and see what goes through anyway and so for me at least I'm not very counterpossibilist that doesn't cause any problems the fact that there's some possible stuff you're going to ignore it's always about ignoring stuff not I think there's something cheap about some of the examples so if you just take the true counterpossible it's true just because the consequence is irrelevant and then you get to a false one just by negating the irrelevant consequence I think it's a bit cheap because it's not really a case where you say I could have the interest and not have the of course you cannot have the consequence because you chose something which is really really irrelevant I think those cases are really important it's also important to have this kind of cases where there's possibility for the antecedent to be to be directly relevant in the true case I hope I hope it helps absolutely okay so we have a discussion this discussion on opacity may be a lot of debate and more familiar with which is on symmetries in physics and the idea that this opacity introduce some kind of classific equivalence in possible world seems to be the same as we have symmetries that create a classific equivalence of possible world in physics and the traditional way to see it in your case symmetries both but the invariance is the objective way to see stuff and what is metaphysically pertinent to what is invariant, what is objective and I was wondering if the same aspect of perspective that are being introduced by symmetries are objective part of world metaphysically pertinent I was wondering if you could say that opacity is invulnerable in metaphysics it's objective it's invulnerable it's invulnerable in opacity in world and the way of substantial stuff is pertinent metaphysically you cannot get rid of it in an Australian way or something like that I think that's a very very good so it's a very good question so it's true that there is sense in which the way the argument does its argument and the way also I run the argument and I twist it around goes from it's almost by definition impossible to have both objectivity and opacity because you take referential transparency as a criterion of opacity so there is a sense in which it's it's almost a definitional claim and I agree with you that we should be open to the possibility why why couldn't we have like perspectives within metaphysics I think we should be there should be a way to rule this out better to have a way to rule this out which is not just by definition but from more like a substantive reasoning so that's why so the way the best thing I can offer for that is to justify the criterion of transparency and not just take it as a just a definition and I think there's a there are I'm just repeating myself so if you think that something is really about an entity an independently of any perspective then it's transparent and if the substitutivity of identical scales it means that you have some perspective involved and you are out of objectivity so then I think the the way to move is to pass to focus more on whether my identity so the thing is whether people do have something that is true and the idea is that like C is A and nothing else and for now I can hardly do anything more than just say about which is a bad sign that she doesn't feel I feel like you need to insist like that and that but the key notion is like I think that's where the action is so part of the action is here and it's about this and independently and non-perspectively it's about but of course when you have something when you use a particular mode of distribution it's still about independently of a mode of presentation and the idea that the mode of presentation is something that is outside the states in the world it's in the mind so it's the way we present stuff and so that's why sensitivity to mode of presentation takes us out from objectivity then I think my way to move forward is to question the notion of mode of presentation is there anything to say about objective or the objective mode of presentation so in literature there's literature of representational grounding and where I think you have this kind of issues so Korea for example you easily have problems when you so if you accept the thesis that what is H2O but you also accept the thesis that something about H2O something about structure of H2O something about water I cannot think right away about predicates first of all have an equally applied water and H2O but suppose we have something like that if we if we accept the identity thing take it seriously as an identity thing and we accept that grounding is irreflexible nothing ground itself then we cannot accept this cannot say there's something about H2O ground something about water because well this is exactly the same thing so it would be like it would be exactly like accepting the H2O grounds the H2O and yet some people have said that there are some like descriptions which are metaphysically more accurate or cut nature the joints more than others and so one way to make sense of this claim in spite of this and in spite of this is to say that this description is more joint carving than this one then the problem is that joint carving mess would be reference legal maybe logistic should do more philosophy of science real philosophy of science real representation no of course you can deny that you can start to deny that but it's weird amount of representation that would be objective a contextual notion that could be objective in a deep correspondent way in the world grounding of representation it's maybe ok but it sounds really really weird I agree with you I'm just trying to push the idea as far as I can no no no I agree but so it's weird maybe it's the way you explain the Bertot answer to the nitri because it works in an impossible world it's ok ok but how is it related as you said to any consideration about the capacity in the actual world yeah I think that's the approach I don't want to be nasty but the way you presented I don't know I don't own the original literature but it seems very dumb that's why I'm sorry they go very quickly in the paper so I try to be as charitable as I can basically the quote I gave is almost everything they say which is well of course there will be a substitute for objective context that's impossible yes it happens in impossible worlds thanks just thank you ok it doesn't help with the problem which is if you say that counter-possible are objective and you have an example that shows that they are opaque you are in the real world so moving to impossible worlds is not so big but sorry I you could continue I think I said so perhaps the idea of description more fundamental or more joint carving in the cyber sense can get you can put some it's a way to put perspective back into metaphysics the immediate issue and something perhaps needs to think more about is that this will help temporarily seem to solve the problem but only to get the result that joint carvingness will be not an objective so so there is a sense in which if you start to do the metaphysics of joint carvingness like metaphysics automatically loses some sort of projectivity so so perhaps so the thing that joint carvingness is you have the same problem about what are the consequences of high vintage capacity I think you will have to live with hyperintentionality because you already have logically equivalent descriptions which bring irrelevant stuff that will be non-joint carving so we have to make discriminations about things that live in exactly the same possible worlds so it will take you directly to hyperintentionality if it is okay with doing hyperintentionality but if it takes you to opacity so I think in specific case I will put the pressure on this kind of view to be honest I think that the tricky justification for this is super sketchy I think I think I think still in the philosophy of science there is like criticism I say something crazy but it seems like the idea of theoretical identification is still like something reasonable so the idea that we can put an idea to decide between theoretical concepts maybe not horror something that we might need at some point in the philosophy of science so then we might have issues of opacity when we deal with theoretical identification and I think so there's a I think where I took to be a good book by a guy called Hafen Ban-Rin about reduction in Ponsai that inter-ethical reduction brings hyperintentionality because you have issues of irreflexibility and non-commitativity so obviously it has to be hyperintentional but then when you talk about the irreflexibility of theoretical talk to others we're in the representation of the world we're not doing like metaphysics so we're not adding to yeah so if it's opaque it's not a problem in that case yeah from from point of science this opacity you could say that there are multiple theories that describe the exact same thing but the way to get out of it I suppose is to believe some kind of fundamentality but the only fundamental one is joint carrying in this case carrying whatever at the joint of the world but if you have non-financial reduction in the strong sense then you just back into opacity and this is such a problem I would say that if I write the book of the world as I was going to write it I think every have names that are perfect names everything is called a joint I would definitely not have distinct names for the same entities so the issue of opacity will never occur and if it were to occur I would say I would throw the book away and start writing again because I would not expect any anything in the book of the world to be opaque but in the book of the world there may be fundamental entities exactly so you have to presume that there is a fundamentality which is a strong carry because there is something like a cartridge you have levels of transparency oh yeah, fundamentality plus behaviour reduction to fundamental entities so okay but if it's turtles all the way down of course maybe turtles all the way down in this case you're not writing the book of the world but you have to assume something when you start writing a book you assume that the world is not uniform in the way a cartridge would say yeah, you're right, it should be explicit that they are talking about some fundamental because for grounding you don't need necessarily fundamentality of course you do, because the ground is supposed to be more fundamental than the ground no no, but when I say fundamentalities, do you need a level zero yeah, you need to it cannot be turtle all the way down level zero is a strong claim about the world of course I was talking about relative fundamentality here which I take to be, of course you might deny that but I thought that in mainstream metaphysics of science like the concept of relative fundamentalities something like that okay, but when you talk about the book of the world and you can write every that it's described by every sentence that is pointing to every object it's like a wisdom of the world you need from a zero level and you need the language that is unique for this natural property that I told you so that's cool all this discussion depends on this claim I'm okay I was trying to relate to help, I came in to relate parts of the literature where like a clear metaphysical program that is built in terms of joint poweringness and cider goes to mind you know, but I yeah, of course, there are sentences that you might deny but what I would say is that maybe William Sons and all these guys they have this metaphysical claim in the background to shade their discussion that's a good question the way they write about these particular issues they did tend to not bring any specific metaphysical the world may be like a stroke, may be layer, may not be layer they are quite inimical to that so they tend to see not like the idea of facts that are have been intentionally individuated so they cannot be inimical to hyper-intentionally individuated metaphysical entities but yeah it's hard to say anything more specific on that all the questions but we don't have much time anymore but my so I like I very much like your talk and I think I agree with the criticism you had to these heterodoxists but I didn't really get your solution or how you got out of okay, yeah so the the nitrous too so the strategies that in all the papers I've read and one yeah because attack in two means one of the intuitions one about so all except that intuition all the them that all I've read explicitly endorse the intuition about so so and they treated exactly the same way as the others the fact that it's the only one that has to do with the substitutility of identicles I think it's an independent grasp to take it apart so it's not being doing cherry picking it's like this is a different game being played here because the logical structure of the of the case is different and the second reason why I'm not cherry picking is that we have independent the case of models objective models we have a story why the use of experts in phosphorus can lead us astray and my proposal is that the same story or very just a bit more complicated because you have some details to take care of but very similar story is helpful to show how the inclusion is responsible for too actually it's not a safe intuition it's ambiguous, you have scope distinctions there are different ways to understand the how it works especially if you take this as rigid designators and you neutralize the descriptive content if you compare the rigid designators the equivalent or the rephrase in terms of descriptions because you have two different descriptions connected by a single sign you have four possible ways of assigning scope but I think you can isolate the reading which gives you the intuition which is this one so there is there are two entities there is one entity which asprovises and does not for surprise or so they could have been like an entity that just appears in the morning and does not appear in the morning and if that had been the case what I was talking about but one thing that could not have happened for non-astronomic reasons but like a deeper metaphysical reason is if something at both asprovises and not asprovised then we have them and that's the reason why we just say it's kind of been the case but here we're dealing with different descriptions just in the same way that when we say it could have been the case that asprovis is not asprovis no, but that indicates that something asprovises and not asprovises asprovises is a shorthand for the description that appears exactly in the same places so that's why the intuition is about the product to me that's what I claim as a story about why we can easily take that as the same claims with asprovis in the place of asprovises and phosphorus and so the pressure, given that the tricky is mainstream so the dialectical move, so to speak and if you accept a tricky story about models and almost everyone accepts it and you should accept it here too and the fact that people use these kinds of examples which are very tricky and because they if you want to make it as a case of a pre-tensionality and not just opacity you have to assume the necessity of the entity which means you have to assume the tricky story about the proper names so if you want to assume it like assume it all the way down and so that's the reason that is very, I mean I'm not sure that for those who are deeply from tricky, I think you have some interpretation but all the the way about the story I think is very very true or to the pre-kin view so it should be and the pre-kin should agree with that I think but if we prefer to say that it's coherent at least and do you this a referential opacity I think you only gave examples where it's the reference of names of objects but it's also supposed to hold for properties and full aspects of language that they are a referential pick well even in the counter possibility yes so that's a good question and not being so transparent I think it's more complicated I think it's relatively uncontroversial that we refer to individuals by means of names the question is how we refer to properties if we ever do what I think is like what I'm not prepared to accept easily although I need to look at the literature in more details is whether just predicating a property to an object comes as referring to it I wouldn't say so but it depends on your theory of predication so for example so if you have like a principle that said that allow you to from this to that which is I mean it might be a reasonable principle it's a substitutive principle that makes sense I don't know if I would call it so if this fails I'm not sure related to the phenomenon of referential opacity because I'm not sure it has to do with reference but still it's a kind of opacity in the sense that you treat like identical stuff differently they're referential terms I mean that's what you made of this symbol and then basically you're going into higher order logic and I have to say I'm not an expert in this area but I know as things get really more complicated and you are in trouble with paradoxes very quickly so it requires a lot of care I'm not in a position to say anything about this but from the purely philosophical point of view if you think that counter-possible are objective and you believe that it makes sense to identify properties that are presented in different ways then I think this kind of principle should hold for counter-possible and counter-possible generally and that's that's the same as philosophical that's what follows from the view I tried to sketch I don't see like reasons where this kind of principle would be problematic independently of the way this person was supposed to be but if you can find something I'm very interested to see what I should say by them we should finish here already 5 minutes at a time