Jonathan Tallant
Biographic Data
| ID | 257937 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jonathan Tallant |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jonathan |
| FAMILY NAME | Tallant |
| SIGNATURE | TALLANT J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Nottingham |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8085-3104 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 46 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
From Trust to Corporate Agency: An Argument in Social Ontology
This paper puts forward a novel argument for realism about corporate agents. We begin with the observation that philosophical theories of trust generally require that any putative trustee is a moral agent. We then consider sources of evidence from practice that suggest that people speak, behave, and theorise as-if they trust corporations. This amounts to taking a realist view about corporate moral agency. Corporations can thus be conceived as age…
Attitudes of trust: Experimental evidence for a morally relevant conception of trust
Untrustworthiness
Discussions of trustworthiness are not ubiquitous in the philosophical literature (compare remarks by Jones 2012, 61). Nonetheless, there are some attempted analyses and there is excellent work ongoing. The goal of this paper is to focus on trustworthiness's even less discussed opposite: untrustworthiness. So far as I can tell, the concept has gone largely undiscussed in the philosophical literature. This is unfortunate. For, just as Hawley (2014…
Irrational trust and its consequences
With the specific target being three-placed accounts of trust that are prominent within the philosophical literature. Towards the end of the paper, I pursue a particular challenge to the claim that we have irrational trust. I demonstrate that what the challenge shows is that either we can have irrational trust, or else that several views in the literature are false. I (tentatively) suggest that it's better to opt for the conclusion that we can ha…
On the possibility of a normative account of corporate trust
Philosophers have had much to say about the moral obligations arising from trust. These obligations involve, predominantly, interpersonal relationships. But what can we say about the moral relevance of trust in institutional settings? In this paper, we consider the particularised approach to trust and its focus on interpersonal relationships and argue that it is far from clear whether this is the kind of relationship that persons can have with re…
The Role of Boundary Spanning in Building Trust: A Place-Based Study on Engaging Hardly Reached Groups in Community Healthcare Settings
This paper investigates the impact of boundary spanning activities on building trust as a means of tackling health inequalities in hardly reached communities. Lack of trust has been identified as a barrier to engagement with healthcare services, resulting in poorer health outcomes. Engaging with hardly reached communities is challenging due to the social and symbolic boundaries prevalent in community healthcare settings. Drawing on empirical data…
Trusting What Ought to Happen
This paper introduces a new account of trust and distrust. The core aim of the paper is to introduce an account of trust that places treats trust and what ‘ought’ to happen as close conceptual companions. Over the course of the paper, I develop the account and compare it with certain rival accounts
Locative grounding harmony
In this paper, we explore locative grounding harmony, according to which the location of the grounds mirrors the location of the grounded. We proceed in three stages. First, we clarify the notion of locative harmony and describe different locative harmony principles. Second, we offer two arguments for the claim that grounding between physically located entities obeys principles of locative harmony. Third, we consider and respond to a range of cas…
Empirical and Philosophical Reflections on Trust
A dominant claim in the philosophical literature on trust is that we should stop thinking in terms of group trustworthiness or appropriate trust in groups. In this paper, we push back against this claim by arguing that philosophical work on trust would benefit from being brought into closer contact with empirical work on the nature of trust. We consider data on reactive attitudes and moral responsibility to adjudicate on different positions in th…
Teaching and knowledge: Uneasy bedfellows
In this paper we explore the connection between the act of teaching and the imparting of knowledge. Our overarching aim is to demonstrate that the connection between them is less tight than one might suppose. Our stepping off point is a recent paper by David Bakhurst who (on one reading, at least) takes a strong view, opposed to our own. On our reading, Bakhurst argues that there is a tight conceptual connection between teaching and the imparting…
Presentism and representation: Saying it without words
The Triviality Argument against presentism maintains that we should reject presentism because there is no way to define the view that is not either trivially true or obviously false. We suggest that this style of argument over-emphasises purely linguistic means of representing a philosophical thesis. We argue that there is no reason to suppose that all philosophical theses must be linguistically representable, and thus that the failure to linguis…
Hazardous Conditions Persist
The harmony of grounding
Mereological harmony is the idea that the mereological structure of objects mirrors the mereological structure of locations. Grounding harmony is the idea that there is a similar mirroring between the grounding structure of objects and locations. Our goal in this paper is exploratory: we introduce and then explore two notions of grounding harmony: locative and structural. We outline potential locative and structural harmony principles for groundi…
It’s one thing to rule them all and another thing to bind them
In this paper we offer a response to one argument in favour of Priority Monism, what Jonathan Schaffer calls the nomic argument for monism. We proceed in three stages. We begin by introducing Jonathan Schaffer’s Priority Monism and the nomic argument for that view. We then consider a response to the nomic argument that we presented in an earlier paper (Baron and Tallant in Philos Phenomenol Res 93:583–606, 2016). We show that this argument suffer…
The rotten core of presentism
Recently, some have attempted to reformulate debates in first-order metaphysics, particularly in the metaphysics of time and modality, for reasons due to Williamson (Modal logic as metaphysics, Oxford University Press, 2013). In this paper, we focus on the ways in which the likes of Cameron, Correia and Rosenkranz, Deasy, Ingram, Tallant, Viebahn, inter alia , have initiated and responded to attempts to capture the core of presentism using a form…
A Defence of Lucretian Presentism
In this paper, we defend Lucretian Presentism (‘Lucretianism’). Although the view faces many objections and has proven unpopular with presentists, we rehabilitate Lucretianism and argue that none of the objections stick
You Can Trust the Ladder, But You Shouldn't
My claim in this article is that, contra what I take to be the orthodoxy in the wider literature, we do trust inanimate objects – per the example in the title, there are cases where people really do trust a ladder (to hold their weight, for instance), and, perhaps most importantly, that this poses a challenge to that orthodoxy. My argument consists of four parts. In Section 2 I introduce an alleged distinction between trust as mere reliance and t…
Temporal Fictionalism for a Timeless World
Current debate in the metaphysics of time ordinarily assumes that we should be realists about time. Recently, however, a number of physicists and philosophers of physics have proposed that time will play no role in a completed theory of quantum gravity. This paper defends fictionalism about temporal thought, on the supposition that our world is timeless. We argue that, in the face of timeless physical theories, realism about temporal thought is u…
Presentism and the Spans of Time
Trust in education
The philosophy of trust is a relatively small subfield. Nonetheless, it contains within it many important insights. Our contention in this paper is that careful study of this subfield can bring with it many insights that can and should be used to reconsider a variety of arguments that have been brought forward in the literature on the philosophy of education and other areas of educational research. Our focus is largely destructive in section 2 of…
Quantitative Parsimony: Probably for the Better
Our aim in this article is to offer a new justification for preferring theories that are more quantitatively parsimonious than their rivals. We discuss cases where it seems clear that those involved opted for more quantitatively parsimonious theories. We extend previous work on quantitative parsimony by offering an independent probabilistic justification for preferring the more quantitatively parsimonious theories in particular episodes of theory…
Do Not Revise Ockham's Razor Without Necessity
Ockham's razor asks that we not multiply entities beyond necessity. The razor is a powerful methodological tool, enabling us to articulate reasons for preferring one theory to another. There are those, however, who would modify the razor. Schaffer (2010: 313—our italics), for one, tells us that, ‘I think the proper rendering of Ockham's razor should be ‘Do not multiply fundamental entities without necessity’’. Our aim, here, is to challenge such …
Monism: The Islands of Plurality
Priority monism (hereafter, ‘monism’) is the view that there exists one fundamental entity—the world—and that all other objects that exist (a set of objects typically taken to include tables, chairs, and the whole menagerie of everyday items) are merely derivative. Jonathan Schaffer has defended monism in its current guise, across a range of papers. Each paper looks to add something to the monistic picture of the world. In this paper we argue tha…
Presentism, Truthmaking and Necessary Connections
Ross Cameron puts forward a novel solution to the truthmaker problem facing presentism. I claim that, by Cameron's own lights, the view is not in fact a presentist view at all, but rather requires us to endorse a form of Priority Presentism , whereby past objects are derivative and depend for their existence upon present objects. I argue that this view should be rejected
Nefarious Presentism
Presentists, who believe that only present objects exist, face a problem concerning truths about the past. Presentists should (but cannot) locate truth-makers for truths about the past. What can presentists say in response? We identify two rival factions: ‘upstanding’ and ‘nefarious’ presentists. Upstanding presentists aim to meet the challenge, positing presently existing truth-makers for truths about the past; nefarious presentists aim to shirk…
Quantitative Parsimony: Probably for the Better
Our aim in this article is to offer a new justification for preferring theories that are more quantitatively parsimonious than their rivals. We discuss cases where it seems clear that those involved opted for more quantitatively parsimonious theories. We extend previous work on quantitative parsimony by offering an independent probabilistic justification for preferring the more quantitatively parsimonious theories in particular episodes of theory…
Against mereological nihilism
I argue that mereological nihilism fails because it cannot answer (what I describe as) the special arrangement question: when is it true that the xs (the mereological simples) are arranged F-wise? I suggest that the answers given in the literature fail and that the obvious responses that could be made look to undermine the motivations for adopting nihilism in the first place
Quantitative Parsimony and the Metaphysics of Time: Motivating Presentism
In this paper I argue that presentism—the view that only present objects exist—can be motivated, at least to some degree, by virtue of the fact that it is more quantitatively parsimonious than rival views
Do Not Revise Ockham's Razor Without Necessity
Ockham's razor asks that we not multiply entities beyond necessity. The razor is a powerful methodological tool, enabling us to articulate reasons for preferring one theory to another. There are those, however, who would modify the razor. Schaffer (2010: 313—our italics), for one, tells us that, ‘I think the proper rendering of Ockham's razor should be ‘Do not multiply fundamental entities without necessity’’. Our aim, here, is to challenge such …
Nefarious Presentism
Presentists, who believe that only present objects exist, face a problem concerning truths about the past. Presentists should (but cannot) locate truth-makers for truths about the past. What can presentists say in response? We identify two rival factions: ‘upstanding’ and ‘nefarious’ presentists. Upstanding presentists aim to meet the challenge, positing presently existing truth-makers for truths about the past; nefarious presentists aim to shirk…
Optimus prime: Paraphrasing prime number talk
The rotten core of presentism
Recently, some have attempted to reformulate debates in first-order metaphysics, particularly in the metaphysics of time and modality, for reasons due to Williamson (Modal logic as metaphysics, Oxford University Press, 2013). In this paper, we focus on the ways in which the likes of Cameron, Correia and Rosenkranz, Deasy, Ingram, Tallant, Viebahn, inter alia , have initiated and responded to attempts to capture the core of presentism using a form…
Monism: The Islands of Plurality
Priority monism (hereafter, ‘monism’) is the view that there exists one fundamental entity—the world—and that all other objects that exist (a set of objects typically taken to include tables, chairs, and the whole menagerie of everyday items) are merely derivative. Jonathan Schaffer has defended monism in its current guise, across a range of papers. Each paper looks to add something to the monistic picture of the world. In this paper we argue tha…
Intuitions in physics
The Role of Boundary Spanning in Building Trust: A Place-Based Study on Engaging Hardly Reached Groups in Community Healthcare Settings
This paper investigates the impact of boundary spanning activities on building trust as a means of tackling health inequalities in hardly reached communities. Lack of trust has been identified as a barrier to engagement with healthcare services, resulting in poorer health outcomes. Engaging with hardly reached communities is challenging due to the social and symbolic boundaries prevalent in community healthcare settings. Drawing on empirical data…
Temporal Fictionalism for a Timeless World
Current debate in the metaphysics of time ordinarily assumes that we should be realists about time. Recently, however, a number of physicists and philosophers of physics have proposed that time will play no role in a completed theory of quantum gravity. This paper defends fictionalism about temporal thought, on the supposition that our world is timeless. We argue that, in the face of timeless physical theories, realism about temporal thought is u…
Trust in education
The philosophy of trust is a relatively small subfield. Nonetheless, it contains within it many important insights. Our contention in this paper is that careful study of this subfield can bring with it many insights that can and should be used to reconsider a variety of arguments that have been brought forward in the literature on the philosophy of education and other areas of educational research. Our focus is largely destructive in section 2 of…
What is it to “B” a relation
What is it to “B” a relation
Quantitative Parsimony and the Metaphysics of Time: Motivating Presentism
In this paper I argue that presentism—the view that only present objects exist—can be motivated, at least to some degree, by virtue of the fact that it is more quantitatively parsimonious than rival views
A Heterodox Presentism: Kit Fine’s theory
Optimus prime: Paraphrasing prime number talk
Intuitions in physics
Pretense, Mathematics, and Cognitive Neuroscience
A pretense theory of a given discourse is a theory that claims that we do not believe or assert the propositions expressed by the sentences we token (speak, write, and so on) when taking part in that discourse. Instead, according to pretense theory, we are speaking from within a pretense. According to pretense theories of mathematics, we engage with mathematics as we do a pretense. We do not use mathematical language to make claims that express p…
Against mereological nihilism
I argue that mereological nihilism fails because it cannot answer (what I describe as) the special arrangement question: when is it true that the xs (the mereological simples) are arranged F-wise? I suggest that the answers given in the literature fail and that the obvious responses that could be made look to undermine the motivations for adopting nihilism in the first place
Presentism, Truthmaking and Necessary Connections
Ross Cameron puts forward a novel solution to the truthmaker problem facing presentism. I claim that, by Cameron's own lights, the view is not in fact a presentist view at all, but rather requires us to endorse a form of Priority Presentism , whereby past objects are derivative and depend for their existence upon present objects. I argue that this view should be rejected
Nefarious Presentism
Presentists, who believe that only present objects exist, face a problem concerning truths about the past. Presentists should (but cannot) locate truth-makers for truths about the past. What can presentists say in response? We identify two rival factions: ‘upstanding’ and ‘nefarious’ presentists. Upstanding presentists aim to meet the challenge, positing presently existing truth-makers for truths about the past; nefarious presentists aim to shirk…
Do Not Revise Ockham's Razor Without Necessity
Ockham's razor asks that we not multiply entities beyond necessity. The razor is a powerful methodological tool, enabling us to articulate reasons for preferring one theory to another. There are those, however, who would modify the razor. Schaffer (2010: 313—our italics), for one, tells us that, ‘I think the proper rendering of Ockham's razor should be ‘Do not multiply fundamental entities without necessity’’. Our aim, here, is to challenge such …
Monism: The Islands of Plurality
Priority monism (hereafter, ‘monism’) is the view that there exists one fundamental entity—the world—and that all other objects that exist (a set of objects typically taken to include tables, chairs, and the whole menagerie of everyday items) are merely derivative. Jonathan Schaffer has defended monism in its current guise, across a range of papers. Each paper looks to add something to the monistic picture of the world. In this paper we argue tha…
Quantitative Parsimony: Probably for the Better
Our aim in this article is to offer a new justification for preferring theories that are more quantitatively parsimonious than their rivals. We discuss cases where it seems clear that those involved opted for more quantitatively parsimonious theories. We extend previous work on quantitative parsimony by offering an independent probabilistic justification for preferring the more quantitatively parsimonious theories in particular episodes of theory…
You Can Trust the Ladder, But You Shouldn't
My claim in this article is that, contra what I take to be the orthodoxy in the wider literature, we do trust inanimate objects – per the example in the title, there are cases where people really do trust a ladder (to hold their weight, for instance), and, perhaps most importantly, that this poses a challenge to that orthodoxy. My argument consists of four parts. In Section 2 I introduce an alleged distinction between trust as mere reliance and t…
Temporal Fictionalism for a Timeless World
Current debate in the metaphysics of time ordinarily assumes that we should be realists about time. Recently, however, a number of physicists and philosophers of physics have proposed that time will play no role in a completed theory of quantum gravity. This paper defends fictionalism about temporal thought, on the supposition that our world is timeless. We argue that, in the face of timeless physical theories, realism about temporal thought is u…
Presentism and the Spans of Time
Trust in education
The philosophy of trust is a relatively small subfield. Nonetheless, it contains within it many important insights. Our contention in this paper is that careful study of this subfield can bring with it many insights that can and should be used to reconsider a variety of arguments that have been brought forward in the literature on the philosophy of education and other areas of educational research. Our focus is largely destructive in section 2 of…
A Defence of Lucretian Presentism
In this paper, we defend Lucretian Presentism (‘Lucretianism’). Although the view faces many objections and has proven unpopular with presentists, we rehabilitate Lucretianism and argue that none of the objections stick
It’s one thing to rule them all and another thing to bind them
In this paper we offer a response to one argument in favour of Priority Monism, what Jonathan Schaffer calls the nomic argument for monism. We proceed in three stages. We begin by introducing Jonathan Schaffer’s Priority Monism and the nomic argument for that view. We then consider a response to the nomic argument that we presented in an earlier paper (Baron and Tallant in Philos Phenomenol Res 93:583–606, 2016). We show that this argument suffer…
The rotten core of presentism
Recently, some have attempted to reformulate debates in first-order metaphysics, particularly in the metaphysics of time and modality, for reasons due to Williamson (Modal logic as metaphysics, Oxford University Press, 2013). In this paper, we focus on the ways in which the likes of Cameron, Correia and Rosenkranz, Deasy, Ingram, Tallant, Viebahn, inter alia , have initiated and responded to attempts to capture the core of presentism using a form…
Hazardous Conditions Persist
The harmony of grounding
Mereological harmony is the idea that the mereological structure of objects mirrors the mereological structure of locations. Grounding harmony is the idea that there is a similar mirroring between the grounding structure of objects and locations. Our goal in this paper is exploratory: we introduce and then explore two notions of grounding harmony: locative and structural. We outline potential locative and structural harmony principles for groundi…
Empirical and Philosophical Reflections on Trust
A dominant claim in the philosophical literature on trust is that we should stop thinking in terms of group trustworthiness or appropriate trust in groups. In this paper, we push back against this claim by arguing that philosophical work on trust would benefit from being brought into closer contact with empirical work on the nature of trust. We consider data on reactive attitudes and moral responsibility to adjudicate on different positions in th…
Teaching and knowledge: Uneasy bedfellows
In this paper we explore the connection between the act of teaching and the imparting of knowledge. Our overarching aim is to demonstrate that the connection between them is less tight than one might suppose. Our stepping off point is a recent paper by David Bakhurst who (on one reading, at least) takes a strong view, opposed to our own. On our reading, Bakhurst argues that there is a tight conceptual connection between teaching and the imparting…
Presentism and representation: Saying it without words
The Triviality Argument against presentism maintains that we should reject presentism because there is no way to define the view that is not either trivially true or obviously false. We suggest that this style of argument over-emphasises purely linguistic means of representing a philosophical thesis. We argue that there is no reason to suppose that all philosophical theses must be linguistically representable, and thus that the failure to linguis…
Trusting What Ought to Happen
This paper introduces a new account of trust and distrust. The core aim of the paper is to introduce an account of trust that places treats trust and what ‘ought’ to happen as close conceptual companions. Over the course of the paper, I develop the account and compare it with certain rival accounts
Epistemology (26 works) · Philosophy (26 works) · Philosophy and Theoretical Science (18 works) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (16 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Metaphysics (12 works) · Political science (9 works) · Philosophy of language (8 works) · Presentism (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works)