R Sorensen
Biographic Data
| ID | 10576 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R Sorensen |
| GIVEN NAMES | R |
| FAMILY NAME | Sorensen |
| SIGNATURE | SORENSEN R |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1635-0980 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 28 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1974 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Modesty is a Contagious Blindspot
I am modest about my spelling accuracy. Oops, I cannot consistently believe that! Modesty about my spelling entails I underestimate my spelling. If I indeed underestimate my spelling accuracy, then my ignorance about spelling accuracy is contagious. For if I believe you and I are equals at spelling, then my modesty commits me to underestimating your spelling. In addition to my ignorance of my merit spreading to my ignorance of your merit, my igno…
How to lie to God
For most of his career, Kant accepts Augustine's requirement that lying requires an intention to deceive. However, he eventually converts to Aquinas, following him in rejecting this requirement in favor of Aristotle's teleological conception of lying. This change of view amounts to an improvement, for it makes room for the possibility of lying to an omniscient being—and such lies, we argue, are indeed possible. We accompany these historical and p…
Kant and the king
Immanuel Kant promised, ‘as Your Majesty's loyal subject’, to abstain from all public lectures about religion. All past commentators agree this phrase permitted Kant to return to the topic after the King died. But it is not part of the ‘at‐issue content’. Consequently, ‘as Your Majesty's loyal subject’ is no more an escape clause than the corresponding phrase in ‘I guarantee, as your devoted fan, that these guitar strings will not break’. Just as…
Fichte’s world of wordless lies
Catholics condemn Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) as a fanatic; he fails to cushion ‘Never lie' with a distinction between venial and mortal sin. But Kant has secular substitutes: lie/mislead, candor/honesty, commission/omission, deception/illusion, discursive/pictorial. Kant weaves these distinctions into a safety net for polite society, business, politics, and religion. Kant's break-away disciple, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) removes this safet…
Time traveler confirms five minute hypothesis
Conclusion: What matters for any norm is personal time rather than time. Personal time is a time-like relation (roughly, the time measured by your wristwatch) that knits together scattered temporal parts so that they conform to familiar patterns. David Lewis introduced personal time as an interpretive fiction that allows readers to consistently read fictions about time travelers. Inadvertently, Lewis thereby introduced a metric for all value (inc…
Destigmatizing the Exegetical Attribution of Lies
Charitable interpreters of David Hume set aside his sprinkles of piety. Better to read him as lying than as clumsily inconsistent. We argue that the attribution of lies can pay dividends in historical scholarship no matter how strongly the theorist condemns lying. Accordingly, we show that our approach works even with one of the strongest condemners of lying: Immanuel Kant. We argue that Kant lied in his scholarly work and even in the first Criti…
Overbooking
Bumped from a flight? Relax with this defense of the big business practice of deliberately promising more services than one will provide. On a small scale, over‐promising yields a toxic moral dilemma and a lie. At a large scale, the dilemma becomes dilute, and the lie completely disappears. Overbooking is honest because there is a sufficiently high probability of fulfilling each promise. Overbooking is socially beneficial because the promised res…
Lie for me
Stealing Harman’s Thought
The number of unknown paradoxes
‘A logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science’. How many paradoxes are there? By 1920, Bertrand Russell's star student had concluded that there are few or zero paradoxes in philosophy. Most philosophical propositions ‘are not fal…
Fugu for Logicians
What do you get when you cross a fallacy with a good argument? A fugu, that is, a valid argument that tempts you to reach its conclusion invalidly (named after the dangerous but delicious Japanese puffer fish). You have yielded to the temptation more than you realize. If you are a teacher, you may have served many fugus. They arise systematically through several mechanisms. Fugus are interesting intermediate cases that shed light on the following…
Lying with Conditionals
If you read this abstract, then you will understand what my essay is about. Under what conditions would the preceding assertion be a lie? Traditional definitions of lying are always applied to straight declaratives such as ‘The dog ate my homework’. This one sided diet of examples leaves us unprepared for sentences in which conditional probability governs assertibility. The truth‐value of conditionals does not play a significant role in the since…
Borderline Hermaphrodites
The Pyrrhonian sceptic Favorinus of Arelata personified indeterminacy, cultivating his (or her) borderline status to undermine dogmatism. Inspired by the techniques of Favorinus, I show, by example, that ‘vague’ has borderline cases. These concrete steps lead to a more abstract argument that ‘vague’ has borderline borderline cases and borderline borderline borderline cases. My specimens are intended supplement earlier non-constructive proofs of t…
Interestingly Dull Numbers
Seeing Dark Things
If a spinning disk casts a round shadow does the shadow also spin? When the cave guide turns out the light so that you can experience the total blackness, are you seeing in the dark? Or are you merely failing to see anything (just like your blind companion)? Seeing Dark Things uses visual riddles to explore our ability to see shadows, silhouettes, black ants, plus some things that are only metaphorically “dark” such as holes. These dark things ar…
Semivaluationism
Bald‐faced Lies! Lying Without the Intent to Deceive
Surprisingly, the fact that the speaker is lying is sometimes common knowledge between everyone involved (the addressee, the general audience, bystanders, etc.). Strangely, we condemn these bald‐faced lies more severely than disguised lies. The wrongness of lying springs from the intent to deceive – just the feature missing in the case of bald‐faced lies. These puzzling lies arise systematically when assertions are forced. Intellectual duress hel…
Logically Equivalent—But Closer to the Truth
Verisimilitude has the potential to deepen the understanding of mathematical progress, the principle of charity, and the psychology of regret. One obstacle is the widely held belief that two statements can vary in truthlikeness only if they vary in what they entail. This obstacle is removed with four types of counterexamples. The first concerns necessarily coextensive measurements that differ only with respect to their units (specifically length,…
Seeing Dark Things
Meta‐conceivability and Thought Experiments
A meta-conception is a hypothetical one. It answers a question by imagining someone (usually a more able conceiver) answering that question via an act of imagination. Thus, meta-conceptions stand to thought experiments as thought experiments stand to executed experiments. If conceivability entails possibility, then meta-conceiving entails possibility. Meta-conceptions would then work as well as thought experiments. But they do not work as well, g…
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Spinning Shadows
If a spinning sphere casts a shadow, does the shadow also spin? This riddle is the point of departure for an investigation into the nature of shadow movement. A general theory of motion will encompass all moving things, not just physical objects. Ultimately, I argue that round shadows do indeed spin. Shadows are followers of the objects that cast them. Parts of the shadow correspond to parts of the leader, so motion of the caster's parts accounts…
Originless Sin
Suppose you have an infinite past. If you had banked the spare dollar you have always had, then the interest would have made you rich by now. Your procrastination is inexcusable. But what should you have done? At any time at which you invest the dollar you would regret not investing it earlier. Satisficers can solve prospective puzzles involving infinite choice but cannot solve this retrospective puzzle about regret. A moral version of the puzzle…
A Reply to Critics
Précis of Vagueness and Contradiction
Dogmatism, Junk Knowledge, and Conditionals
Journal Article Dogmatism, Junk Knowledge, and Conditionals Get access Roy A. Sorensen Roy A. Sorensen New York University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 38, Issue 153, October 1988, Pages 433–454, https://doi.org/10.2307/2219708 Published: 01 October 1988
Unknowable Obligations
You face two buttons. Pushing one will destroy Greensboro. Pushing the other will save it. (Sorry, doing nothing also destroys Greenboro.) There is no way for you to know which button saves and which destroys. What ought you to do? Answer: You ought to make the correct guess and push the button that saves Greensboro. Second question: Do you have an obligation to push the correct button
Self-Strengthening Empathy
Stepping into the other guy's shoes works best when you resemble him. After all, the procedure is to use yourself as a model: in goes hypothetical beliefs and desires, out comes hypothetical actions and revised beliefs and desires. If you are structurally analogous to the empathee, then accurate inputs generate accurate outputs-just as with any other simulation. The greater the degree of isomorphism, the more dependable and precise the results. T…
Democratic Frustration of Vast Majorities
Lie for me
A Strengthened Prediction Paradox
Journal Article A Strengthened Prediction Paradox Get access Roy A. Sorensen Roy A. Sorensen University of Delaware Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 36, Issue 145, October 1986, Pages 504–513, https://doi.org/10.2307/2219876 Published: 01 October 1986
Lying with Conditionals
If you read this abstract, then you will understand what my essay is about. Under what conditions would the preceding assertion be a lie? Traditional definitions of lying are always applied to straight declaratives such as ‘The dog ate my homework’. This one sided diet of examples leaves us unprepared for sentences in which conditional probability governs assertibility. The truth‐value of conditionals does not play a significant role in the since…
Semivaluationism
A Reply to Critics
Logical Luck
Journal Article Logical Luck Get access Roy A. Sorensen Roy A. Sorensen New York University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 48, Issue 192, July 1998, Pages 319–334, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9213.00103 Published: 07 January 2003
Pseudo-Problems
Vagueness, measurement, and blurriness
Was Descartes's Cogito a Diagonal Deduction
Adolescent Sexuality in Contemporary America
Democratic Frustration of Vast Majorities
Problems with Electoral Evaluations of Expert Opinions
An electoral evaluation of a set of expert opinions proceeds by treating the experts as voters. Although this method allows us to formalise our naive views about how to take expert advice, the formalisations are plagued by paradoxes which parallel those found in literature on social aggregation devices. This parallel suggests that our naive views about taking expert advice are in as much need of revision as our naive views about deriving group pr…
The iterated versions of Newcomb's problem and the prisoner's dilemma
Did the Intensity of My Preferences Double Last Night
About twenty years ago, philosophers debated the verifiability of the statement “Last night everything doubled in size.” It seems that universal nocturnal expansion would double our rulers and tape measures making the size change indiscernible. I think that there is an internal analogue to the question “Did everything double in size last night?” The question “Did my preferences double in intensity last night?“ also raises problems of verification
Was Descartes's Cogito a Diagonal Deduction
A Strengthened Prediction Paradox
Journal Article A Strengthened Prediction Paradox Get access Roy A. Sorensen Roy A. Sorensen University of Delaware Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 36, Issue 145, October 1986, Pages 504–513, https://doi.org/10.2307/2219876 Published: 01 October 1986
Vagueness, measurement, and blurriness
Dogmatism, Junk Knowledge, and Conditionals
Journal Article Dogmatism, Junk Knowledge, and Conditionals Get access Roy A. Sorensen Roy A. Sorensen New York University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 38, Issue 153, October 1988, Pages 433–454, https://doi.org/10.2307/2219708 Published: 01 October 1988
Fictional incompleteness as vagueness
Vagueness within the Language of Thought
Journal Article Vagueness Within the Language of Thought Get access Roy A. Sorensen Roy A. Sorensen New York University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 41, Issue 165, October 1991, Pages 389–413, https://doi.org/10.2307/2220076 Published: 01 October 1991
Paradoxes
Identity and Discrimination
Journal Article Book Reviews Get access Identity and Discrimination. By Timothy Williamson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. Pp. ix + 173. Price £30.00.) Roy A. Sorensen Roy A. Sorensen New York University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 42, Issue 166, January 1992, Pages 95–98, https://doi.org/10.2307/2220453 Published: 01 January 1992
Thought Experiments
Vagueness
Unknowable Obligations
You face two buttons. Pushing one will destroy Greensboro. Pushing the other will save it. (Sorry, doing nothing also destroys Greenboro.) There is no way for you to know which button saves and which destroys. What ought you to do? Answer: You ought to make the correct guess and push the button that saves Greensboro. Second question: Do you have an obligation to push the correct button
Pseudo-Problems
Self-Strengthening Empathy
Stepping into the other guy's shoes works best when you resemble him. After all, the procedure is to use yourself as a model: in goes hypothetical beliefs and desires, out comes hypothetical actions and revised beliefs and desires. If you are structurally analogous to the empathee, then accurate inputs generate accurate outputs-just as with any other simulation. The greater the degree of isomorphism, the more dependable and precise the results. T…
Logical Luck
Journal Article Logical Luck Get access Roy A. Sorensen Roy A. Sorensen New York University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 48, Issue 192, July 1998, Pages 319–334, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9213.00103 Published: 07 January 2003
Vagueness Has No Function in Law
Islamic building codes require mosques to face Mecca. The further Islam spreads, the more apt are believers to fall into a quandary. X faces Y only when the front of X is closer to Y than any other side of X. So the front of the mosque should be oriented along a shortest path to Mecca. Which way is that? Does the path to Mecca tunnel through the earth? Or does the path follow the surface of the earth?
Para‐reflections
A para‐reflection is a privational phenomenon that is often mistaken for a reflection. You have seen them as the ‘reflection’ of your pupil in the mirror. Your iris reflects light in the standard way but your pupil absorbs all but a negligible amount of light (as do other dark things such as coal and black velvet). Para‐reflections work by contrast. Since they are parasitic on their host reflections, para‐reflections are relational and dependent …
Paradoxes of Rationality
Charity Implies Meta‐Charity
The principle of charity says that all agents are rational. The principle of meta‐charity says that all agents believe all agents are rational. My thesis is that the arguments which are used to support charity also support meta‐charity. Meta‐charity implies meta‐meta‐charity. By recursion, the principle of charity implies that it is common knowledge. But there appears to be intelligent, well‐informed disagreement with the principle of charity. So…
A Reply to Critics
Précis of Vagueness and Contradiction
Philosophy (41 works) · Epistemology (33 works) · Computer Science (22 works) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (22 works) · Philosophy and Theoretical Science (17 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Linguistics (13 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Philosophy and History of Science (11 works) · Sociology (10 works)