This article discusses why it is the case that we refuse to accept strange evaluative claims as being true in fictions, even though we are happy to go along with other types of absurdities in such contexts. For instance, we would refuse to accept the following statement as true, even in the context of a fiction: (i) In killing her baby, Giselda did the right thing; after all, it was a girl.

This article offers a sensibilist diagnosis of this puzzle, inspired by an observation first made by David Hume. According to sensibilism, the way we feel about things settles their evaluative properties. Thus, when confronted with a fictional scenario where the configuration of non-evaluative facts and properties is relevantly similar to the actual world, we refuse to go along with evaluative properties being instantiated according to a different pattern. It is the attitudes we hold in the actual world that fix the extension of evaluative terms, even in nonactual worlds. When engaging with a fiction, we (to some extent) leave our beliefs about what the world is like behind, while taking our emotional attitudes with us into the fiction.

To substantiate this diagnosis, this paper outlines a sensibilist semantics for evaluative terms based on recent discussion regarding predicates of personal taste, and explains how, together with standard assumptions about the nature of fictional discourse, it makes the relevant predictions with respect to engagement with fictions.

We can find in the passages that set out the Master Argument a precursor to the paradox of knowability. That paradox shows that if all truths are knowable, all truths are known. Similarly, Berkeley might be read as proposing that if all sensible objects are (distinctly) conceivable, then all sensible objects are conceived.

In the explanations of logical laws and inference rules of the mature version of Begriffsschrift in Grundgesetze, Frege uses the predicate “… is the True.” Scholars like Greimann maintain that this predicate is a metalinguistic truth-predicate for Frege. This paper examines an argument for this claim that is based on the “nominal reading” of Frege’s conception of sentences—the claim that for Frege a sentence “$ p $” is equivalent to a nonsentential phrase like “the truth-value of the thought that $ p $.” In particular, this paper attempts to establish two points concerning this argument based on the nominal reading. First, the argument implies a claim about the nature of assertion which Frege repeatedly denies in his mature works. Secondly, the nominal reading on which the argument depends is false. A sentence “$ p $” is not equivalent to a nonsentential phrase like “the truth-value of the thought that $ p $” for Frege. Our discussion will lead to an important lesson about Frege’s conception of sentences and of assertion.

Quasi-realism prominently figures in the expressivist research program. However, many complain that it has become increasingly unclear what exactly quasi-realism involves. This paper offers clarification. It argues that we need to distinguish two distinctive views that might be and have been pursued under the label “quasi-realism”: conciliatory expressivism and quasi-realism properly so-called. Of these, only conciliatory expressivism is a genuinely meta-ethical project, while quasi-realism is a first-order normative view. This paper demonstrates the fruitfulness of these clarifications by using them to address Terence Cuneo’s recent challenge that quasi-realist expressivists lack the resources to plausibly accommodate certain sorts of data points.

Organizations have neither a right to vote nor a right to life. But we can owe them to keep our promises or show them gratitude. So we owe some things to organizations, but not everything we owe to people. What explains this? Individualistic views explain it just in terms of features of organizations’ individual members. Collectivistic views explain it just in terms of features of those organizations. Neither view works. Instead, we need to synthesize these approaches. Some individual interests are distinctively collective. Individuals have an interest in participating in successful collective action. This explains organizations’ apparently fragmented moral status.