Towards a theory of ground-theoretic content

A lot of research has recently been done on the topic of ground, and in particular on the logic of ground. According to a broad consensus in that debate, ground is hyperintensional in the sense that even logically equivalent truths may differ with respect to what grounds them, and what they ground. This renders pressing the question of what we may take to be the ground-theoretic content of a true statement, i.e. that aspect of the statement's overall content to which ground is sensitive. I propose a novel answer to this question, namely that ground tracks how, rather than just by what, a statement is made true. I develop that answer in the form of a formal theory of ground-theoretic content and show how the resulting framework may be used to articulate plausible theories of ground, including in particular a popular account of the grounds of truth-functionally complex truths that has proved difficult to accommodate on alternative views of content

A simpler puzzle of ground

Metaphysical grounding is standardly taken to be irreflexive: nothing grounds itself. Kit Fine has presented some puzzles that appear to contradict this principle. I construct a particularly simple variant of those puzzles that is independent of several of the assumptions required by Fine, instead employing quantification into sentence position. Various possible responses to Fine's puzzles thus turn out to apply only in a restricted range of cases

Higher-Order Corrections to Radiative Upsilon Decays

Recent advances in the theoretical description of radiative Upsilon decays are reviewed, including the calculation of next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the photon spectrum.Comment: LaTeX, 10 pages, 5 Postscript figures, uses sprocl.sty. Talk presented at the IVth International Symposium on Radiative Corrections (RADCOR 98), Barcelona, September 8-12, 1998, to appear in the proceeding

Semantic values in higher-order semantics

Recently, some philosophers have argued that we should take quantification of any (finite) order to be a legitimate and irreducible, sui generis kind of quantification. In particular, they hold that a semantic theory for higher-order quantification must itself be couched in higher-order terms. Øystein Linnebo has criticized such views on the grounds that they are committed to general claims about the semantic values of expressions that are by their own lights inexpressible. I show that Linnebo's objection rests on the assumption of a notion of semantic value or contribution which both applies to expressions of any order, and picks out, for each expression, an extra-linguistic correlate of that expression. I go on to argue that higher-orderists can plausibly reject this assumption, by means of a hierarchy of notions they can use to describe the extra-lingustic correlates of expressions of different orders

Everything, and then some

On its intended interpretation, logical, mathematical and metaphysical discourse sometimes seems to involve absolutely unrestricted quantification. Yet our standard semantic theories do not allow for interpretations of a language as expressing absolute generality. A prominent strategy for defending absolute generality, influentially proposed by Timothy Williamson in his paper ‘Everything’ (2003), avails itself of a hierarchy of quantifiers of ever increasing orders to develop non-standard semantic theories that do provide for such interpretations. However, as emphasized by Øystein Linnebo and Agustín Rayo (2012), there is pressure on this view to extend the quantificational hierarchy beyond the finite level, and, relatedly, to allow for a cumulative conception of the hierarchy. In his recent book, Modal Logic as Metaphysics (2013), Williamson yields to that pressure. I show that the emerging cumulative higher-orderist theory has implications of a strongly generality-relativist flavour, and consequently undermines much of the spirit of generality absolutism that Williamson set out to defend

Inelastic J/ψJ/\psi photoproduction

Inelastic photoproduction of $J/\psi$ particles at high energies is one of the processes to determine the gluon distribution in the nucleon. The QCD radiative corrections to the color-singlet model of this reaction have recently been calculated. They are large at moderate photon energies, but decrease with increasing energies. I compare the cross section and the ${J/\psi}$ energy spectrum with the available fixed-target photoproduction data. Predictions for the HERA energy range are given which demonstrate the sensitivity of the result to the parametrization of the gluon distribution in the small-$x$ region. (Talk presented at the Workshop on "Heavy Quark Physics", Bad Honnef, FRG, Dec. 1994)Comment: 11 pages, LaTeX; figures are included via epsfig; the corresponding postscript files are uuencode