Andrej Jovićević

I am an undergraduate student in Philosophy at KU Leuven (Belgium).

My areas of interest and research include philosophical logic, (modal) metaphysics, formal epistemology, philosophy of language, and formal semantics, among others. I'm deeply inspired by the use of formal/mathematical methods in philosophy. In terms of logic and mathematics, I have special interests in modal logic, higher-order logic, type theory, algebraic logic, and category theory.

Publications

• A Semantics for Weak, Question-Sensitive Belief (2024) [Abstract]
Proceedings of the 24th Amsterdam Colloquium

Recent work in epistemology defends the unorthodox theses that belief is (1) an evidentially weak, and (2) question-sensitive attitude, and (3) that forming beliefs is sometimes a matter of guessing. What motivates these theses are examples of rationally permissible belief-ascriptions that exhibit these traits. The main aim of this paper is to outline a semantic account of categorical and conditional belief-ascriptions that captures the motivating data. We then survey some consequences of the proposed semantics, particularly with respect to the question of whether closure under rules of inference is rationally required for weak, question-sensitive belief.

In Progress

• Expressivist Conversational Dynamics [Abstract]
Under Review (Email for Draft)

A standard account of conversational dynamics maintains a tight connection between the semantic content of a sentence and its assertive effect. Provided sentences express conditions on worlds, asserting a sentence amounts to eliminating worlds that do not meet the condition from the context set. Semantic expressivism about epistemic modals proposes that modalised sentences express conditions on information states rather than worlds. This paper develops an expressivist account of conversational dynamics that preserves the tight connection between semantic content and assertive effects by construing context sets as sets of information states rather than sets of worlds. The proposed account offers a unified treatment of the assertive effects and support conditions for both modalised and descriptive sentences, while serving as a conservative extension of the standard account.

• A Semantics for Weak Question-Sensitive Belief [Abstract]
Under review—Comments welcome!

Recent work in epistemology defends the unorthodox theses that (1) belief is an evidentially weak, (2) question-sensitive attitude, and that (3) rationally permitted belief is sometimes a matter of guessing. These theses fit together naturally to form a unified account of weak, question-sensitive belief. A formal account of weak, question-sensitive belief as a coherent phenomenon is still forthcoming, however. The main aim of this paper is to develop a formal account that captures belief’s weakness and question-sensitivity in the setting of epistemic logic. We introduce a class of models in which the points of evaluation are situations, or world-evidence pairs, with evidence understood liberally to include sets of live possibilities, measures of uncertainty, and QUDs. A proposition is believed at a situation just in case it is implied by the most informative probabilistically dominant answer to the QUD, on some way of specifying the threshold of probabilistic dominance. The second aim of the paper is to explore two sets of epistemological implications in our formal setting. First, we consider whether beliefs are preserved between situations upon shifting the QUD parameter; specifically, we consider whether beliefs are preserved upon updating with learned information, under refining and coarsening questions, and whether belief is closed under conjunction. Second, we consider the interaction of knowledge and belief; specifically, we consider whether the principles governing the interaction of knowledge and belief in Stalnaker’s KD45 also hold in our setting.

• There is no Sufficiently Weak Being Constraint [Abstract]
Under review—Comments welcome!

By a familiar argument, contingentists cannot accept both the Being Constraint and the principle of λ-Abstraction, on pain of necessitism. Given the wide endorsement and intuitive plausibility of these two principles, contingentists might be faced with an unpalatable choice. A plausible way out for contingentists is weakening the Being Constraint so that the argument for necessitism fails to go through. This article considers the prospects of such a strategy. The article has two aims: First, I schematise the weakening strategy and situate two kinds of weakening proposed in the literature within this schema; Second, I propose two arguments for necessitism that go through even on the weakened version of the Being Constraint. I conclude that this should shake our confidence in there being a sufficiently weak Being Constraint.

• Aboutness and Higher-Order Contingentism [Abstract]
In Progress (Email for Draft)

Higher-order contingentism is often motivated by constraints on what it takes for properties and propositions to exist, where the constraints involve the existence of first-order entities. A plausible strategy maintains that, provided a property or proposition is about some individual, it fails to exist at worlds at which the individual fails to exist. However, extending this strategy beyond examples requires a general theory of aboutness for entities of higher types. This article looks at two extant approaches to aboutness—the fine-grained structured approach and the coarse-grained Lewisian approach—and the higher-order contingentist accounts thereby motivated. I argue that such theories of aboutness either overgenerate or undergenerate.

• Fictionalism and Counterpossibles [Abstract] [Extended Abstract]
In Progress (Email for Draft)

A strand of nominalist fictionalism about mathematics captures the truth conditions of mathematical statements by counterfactually supposing the existence of abstract objects. Provided nominalism holds of necessity, the resulting counterfactuals are counterpossibles. On the orthodox semantics for counterfactuals, counterpossibles are vacuously true. Adopting the orthodox semantics for counterfactuals thus trivialises counterfactualist fictionalism. This article outlines a novel variant of counterfactualist fictionalism that is not trivialised by the orthodox semantics.

Talks

• A Semantics for Weak, Question-Sensitive Belief [Poster]
24th Amsterdam Colloquium (ILLC)

• Aboutness and Higher-Order Contingentism [Handout]
Salzburg Conference for Young Analytic Philosophy 2024, University of Salzburg (Austria)

• Fictionalism and Counterpossibles [Handout]
Conference on the Philosophy of Mathematical Practice, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) 34th Novembertagung on the History and Philosophy of Mathematics