This talk addresses the intersection of issues having to do with the supervenience of the moral on the non-moral, the mental on the physical, and the debate between one and two spacers about logical space.

Ontology perplexes—mostly because its epistemology is so unclear. Ontological deflationism is therefore tempting; it is tempting to think that ontological disputes are, in some sense, merely verbal. Ontological deflationism ultimately rests on the view that quantifiers do not "carve at the joints"; that reality contains no distinguished quantificational structure. This is a coherent piece of metaphysics. But its epistemology is no clearer than ontology's. And a general criterion for discerning reality's fundamental structure—for revealing ideological commitment—suggests that it is false.

In this paper I argue in light of two intuitive points about promising that three standard philosophical assumptions (the "three dogmas") about promissory obligation are problematic. A rough account of promising is offered that eschews the three dogmas and respects the two intuitive points.

Some philosophers worry that the higher-level properties used to characterise systems in the special sciences must be causally inefficacious since the lower-level physical properties on which they supervene are doing all the causal work. This worry is sometimes formulated in terms of an exclusion principle to the effect that if a higher-level property F supervenes on a physical property F* that is causally sufficient for a property G, then F does not cause G. Recently a number of philosophers have used contrastive accounts of causation to cast doubt on versions of the exclusion principle. This paper explores the proper formulation of the exclusion principle and employs a generalised contrastive or difference-making account of causation to investigate the scope and limits of this principle. The paper argues that there are several alternative formulations of the exclusion principle which are actually supported by the contrastive or difference-making account of causation. But far from posing a problem for non-reductive physicalism, this fact actually vindicates the causal autonomy of the higher-level special science properties.

There are some things which occur in the world, like the sun and the moon, and as Moore pointed out, our own hands. Others are products of human institutions, like Hillary's lead in the polls, or the value of the euro relative to the dollar. These may not exist in the world but they have a well defined objective nature. But where do notions like belief and knowledge sit? Are they dispensable relics from folk psychology, or do they have some actuality?

A related question is whether various uses of the word "belief" have something in common. What does Kripke's Pierre, who "believes" that Londres is jolie and also that London is ugly have in common with Ramsey's chicken which "believes" that worms of a certain kind are poisonous? Wittgenstein said that if the lion were to speak we would not understand him. But he does seem to grant that a lion COULD speak, and of course he neglected his own advice to consider whether "understand" could have more than one meaning.

The psychologist David Premack who cites Wittgenstein seems to be sure that chimps do have beliefs but has doubts about pigeons—he had no experience of lions at the time he wrote.

Meanwhile people in AI resort to the BDI (belief, desire, intention) framework, where robots may be assigned beliefs, and no apology is offered for this decision.

We will not take a stand on these psychological and philosophical disputes, but will propose a formal framework—wider than Kripke structures, and more flexible than "senses" or "modes of presentation," in which various notions of belief can sit comfortably and which will, hopefully, free us from the paradoxes of logical omniscience and inconsistency which current formal approaches to belief have given rise to.

It is plain that an individual's being conscious and an individual's being conscious of various things are both crucial for successful functioning. But it is far less clear how, if at all, it is also useful for an individual's psychological states to occur consciously, as against their occurring but without being conscious.

Restricting attention to cognitive and desiderative states, a number of suggestions are current about how the consciousness of those states may be useful. It has been thought that such consciousness enhances processes of rational thought and planning, intentional action, executive function, and the correction of complex reasoning. I examine these proposals in the light of various empirical findings and theoretical considerations, and conclude that the consciousness of cognitive and desiderative states is unlikely to be useful in these or related ways.

This undermines a reliance on evolutionary selection pressures in explaining why such states so often occur consciously in humans. I briefly conclude with an alternative explanation, on which cognitive and desiderative states come to be conscious as a result of other highly useful psychological developments involving language use. But on this explanation the consciousness of these states adds no significant functionality to that of those other developments.