David Boylan
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Journal Articles


What the Future 'Might' Brings. Mind, forthcoming.
[penultimate draft]

How Strong is a Counterfactual? (with Ginger Schultheis). Journal of Philosophy, forthcoming. [penultimate draft]

Agentive Modals (with Matthew Mandelkern and Ginger Schultheis). The Philosophical Review, 126: 3, 2017. [penultimate draft]


Conference Proceedings


Abilities and Success. Proceedings of the 22nd Amsterdam Colloquium. [published version]

Attitudes, Conditionals and Margins for Error (with Ginger Schultheis). Proceedings of the 22nd Amsterdam Colloquium.
[published version]


Miners and Modals. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 22, 2018. [published version]

Strengthening Principles and Counterfactual Semantics (with Ginger Schultheis). Proceedings of the 21st Amsterdam Colloquium, 2017. [published version]

I Believe I Can Phi (with Matthew Mandelkern and Ginger Schultheis). Proceedings of the 20th Amsterdam Colloquium, 2015. [published version]







Work in Progress


Agglomeration and 'Ought'

I argue that deontic but not epistemic 'ought's agglomerate. I give a theory that predicts this by appealing to the idea that a proposition can be epistemically, but not deontically, better than all the particular ways for it to be true.
  
  [R&R at Mind]
[draft]


Attitudes, Conditionals and the Qualitative Thesis (with Ginger Schultheis)

We show that, in standard frameworks, a plausible margin for error principle stands in tension with what we call the Qualitative Thesis, the thesis that, if you leave open p, you should be sure that if p, q iff you should be sure of the corresponding material conditional. We give a new framework for attitudes and conditionals to reconcile the two.
 
  [R&R at Journal of Philosophy] [draft]


Success and Ability

This paper considers the status of the principle that success entails ability, which I call Success. I argue Success is highly puzzling: it looks required to validate certain other plausible inference patterns; and yet it has counterexamples. I resolve the puzzle by showing we can invalidate Success while validating those related inferences by connecting the meaning
of ‘can’ to the facts about what is settled or open.

  [under review] [draft]
 

Know-How is Knowing You're Able

I consider new linguistic data about know-how, involving entailments to ability, negation and free choice. I argue only an intellectualist view, specifically one where knowing how is knowing you're able, correctly predicts these data.

  [in progress]





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