606 research outputs found
Two Ways to Want?
I present unexplored and unaccounted for uses of 'wants'. I call them advisory uses, on which information inaccessible to the desirer herself helps determine what she wants. I show that extant theories by Stalnaker, Heim, and Levinson fail to predict these uses. They also fail to predict true indicative conditionals with 'wants' in the consequent. These problems are related: intuitively valid reasoning with modus ponens on the basis of the conditionals in question results in unembedded advisory uses. I consider two fixes, and end up endorsing a relativist semantics, according to which desire attributions express information-neutral
propositions. On this view, 'wants' functions as a precisification of 'ought', which exhibits similar unembedded and compositional behavior. I conclude by sketching a pragmatic account of the purpose of desire attributions that explains why it made sense for them to evolve in
this way
A low stellar obliquity for WASP-47, a compact multiplanet system with a hot Jupiter and an ultra-short period planet
We have detected the Rossiter-Mclaughlin effect during a transit of WASP-47b,
the only known hot Jupiter with close planetary companions. By combining our
spectroscopic observations with Kepler photometry, we show that the projected
stellar obliquity is . We can firmly exclude a
retrograde orbit for WASP-47b, and rule out strongly misaligned prograde
orbits. Low obliquities have also been found for most of the other compact
multiplanet systems that have been investigated. The Kepler-56 system, with two
close-in gas giants transiting their subgiant host star with an obliquity of at
least 45, remains the only clear counterexample.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, Accepted for publication on ApJL, comments
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The Hard Problem for Soft Moral Realism
Several leading moral philosophers have recently proposed a soft version of moral realism, according to which moral facts—though it is reasonable to postulate them—cannot metaphysically explain other facts (Dworkin 2011; Parfit 2011; Scanlon 2014). However, soft moral realism is faced with what I call the “Hard Problem”, namely, the problem of how this soft version of moral metaphysics could accommodate moral knowledge. This paper reconstructs three approaches to solving the Hard Problem on behalf of the soft realist: the autonomy approach, the intuitionist approach, and the third-factor approach. I then argue that none of them is successful
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