Introduction

This collection of newly commissioned essays, edited by NYU philosophers Paul Boghossian and Christopher Peacocke, resumes the current surge of interest in the proper explication of the notion of a priori. The authors discuss the relations of the a priori to the notions of definition, meaning, justification, and ontology, explore how the concept figured historically in the philosophies of Leibniz, Kant, Frege, and Wittgenstein, and address its role in the contemporary philosophies of logic, mathematics, mind, and science. The editors’ Introduction familiarizes the reader with the issues that are to be explored in detail in later parts of the anthology

Sens et contexte

François Recanati, directeur d’étudesJohn MacFarlane, professeur à l’Université de Californie (Berkeley)Christopher Peacocke, professeur à l’Université Columbia Relativisation et niveaux de représentation De septembre à novembre, le séminaire de François Recanati a accueilli les conférences de prestige prononcées par des chercheurs de haut niveau invités dans le cadre de son projet ERC (European Research Council) : les « Context and Content Lectures », dont les textes remaniés seront publiés ..

Personal and sub-personal: a defence of Dennett's early distinction

Since 1969, when Dennett introduced a distinction between personal and sub‐personal levels of explanation, many philosophers have used ‘sub‐personal’ very loosely, and Dennett himself has abandoned a view of the personal level as genuinely autonomous. I recommend a position in which Dennett's original distinction is crucial, by arguing that the phenomenon called mental causation is on view only at the properly personal level. If one retains the commit‐’ ments incurred by Dennett's early distinction, then one has a satisfactory anti‐physicalistic, anti‐dualist philosophy of mind. It neither interferes with the projects of sub‐personal psychology, nor encourages ; instrumentalism at the personal level. People lose sight of Dennett’s personal/sub-personal distinction because they free it from its philosophical moorings. A distinction that serves a philosophical purpose is typically rooted in doctrine; it cannot be lifted out of context and continue to do its work. So I shall start from Dennett’s distinction as I read it in its original context. And when I speak of ‘the distinction’, I mean to point not only towards the terms that Dennett first used to define it but also towards the philosophical setting within which its work was cut out

Truthmakers and modality

This paper attempts to locate, within an actualist ontology, truthmakers for modal truths: truths of the form or . In section 1 I motivate the demand for substantial truthmakers for modal truths. In section 2 I criticise Armstrong’s account of truthmakers for modal truths. In section 3 I examine essentialism and defend an account of what makes essentialist attributions true, but I argue that this does not solve the problem of modal truth in general. In section 4 I discuss, and dismiss, a theistic account of the source of modal truth proposed by Alexander Pruss. In section 5 I offer a means of (dis)solving the problem

Rehabilitation versus surgical reconstruction for non-acute anterior cruciate ligament injury (ACL SNNAP): a pragmatic randomised controlled trial

BackgroundAnterior cruciate ligament (ACL) rupture is a common debilitating injury that can cause instability of the knee. We aimed to investigate the best management strategy between reconstructive surgery and non-surgical treatment for patients with a non-acute ACL injury and persistent symptoms of instability.MethodsWe did a pragmatic, multicentre, superiority, randomised controlled trial in 29 secondary care National Health Service orthopaedic units in the UK. Patients with symptomatic knee problems (instability) consistent with an ACL injury were eligible. We excluded patients with meniscal pathology with characteristics that indicate immediate surgery. Patients were randomly assigned (1:1) by computer to either surgery (reconstruction) or rehabilitation (physiotherapy but with subsequent reconstruction permitted if instability persisted after treatment), stratified by site and baseline Knee Injury and Osteoarthritis Outcome Score—4 domain version (KOOS4). This management design represented normal practice. The primary outcome was KOOS4 at 18 months after randomisation. The principal analyses were intention-to-treat based, with KOOS4 results analysed using linear regression. This trial is registered with ISRCTN, ISRCTN10110685, and ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT02980367.FindingsBetween Feb 1, 2017, and April 12, 2020, we recruited 316 patients. 156 (49%) participants were randomly assigned to the surgical reconstruction group and 160 (51%) to the rehabilitation group. Mean KOOS4 at 18 months was 73·0 (SD 18·3) in the surgical group and 64·6 (21·6) in the rehabilitation group. The adjusted mean difference was 7·9 (95% CI 2·5–13·2; p=0·0053) in favour of surgical management. 65 (41%) of 160 patients allocated to rehabilitation underwent subsequent surgery according to protocol within 18 months. 43 (28%) of 156 patients allocated to surgery did not receive their allocated treatment. We found no differences between groups in the proportion of intervention-related complications.InterpretationSurgical reconstruction as a management strategy for patients with non-acute ACL injury with persistent symptoms of instability was clinically superior and more cost-effective in comparison with rehabilitation management

Magnitudes: Metaphysics, Explanation, and Perception

I am going to argue for a robust realism about magnitudes, as irreducible elements in our ontology. This realistic attitude, I will argue, gives a better metaphysics than the alternatives. It suggests some new options in the philosophy of science. It also provides the materials for a better account of the mind’s relation to the world, in particular its perceptual relations

Joint Attention: Its Nature, Reflexivity, and Relation to Common Knowledge

Two parents are watching their son take his first upright steps in learning to walk. Here we have a paradigm of joint attention. The two parents are attending to their son; they are aware of each other’s attention to their son; and all this attention is wholly overt. Everything is in the open, nothing is hidden. In what does this openness consist? Can we characterize it explicitly, without using metaphors? The parents are likely to switch their attention to each other and smile during this episode. This would be a case of what is sometimes called ‘contact attention’; and here too everything is in the open. Again, we can ask: what is a literal, explicit characterization of this openness? As a stipulation, and following some but not all writers in the field, I will restrict the terms ‘joint attention ’ and ‘contact attention ’ to episodes which fully possess this openness. So our first task is to say what, constitutively, joint attention and contact attention are. We cannot hope to be clear about the relations of joint attention and contact attention to other phenomena and capacities until we have an answer to this foundational question. The question is not one of giving an analysi