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Mark Jago

Professor of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts

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Biography

My first research was in Nottingham's computer science department, working on how artificially intelligent (AI) agents should go about revising their beliefs upon learning new information. After my PhD, I moved to Macquarie in Sydney, where I worked on the philosophy and logic of resource-bounded reasoning. (That's reasoning that's logical and mathematical, but subject to real-world restrictions of time, memory and patience - the kind of reasoning we do when we're trying to work through some difficult problem.)

Whilst in Sydney, I began working on metaphysical questions about truth and about how reality is ultimately made up. I now work in the philosophy department at Nottingham, writing about truth, knowledge, reasoning and paradox.

For me, the big questions are about how the world ultimately is, and how we can think and know about it. I like to approach these difficult questions by combining the logical, technical approach of mathematics and computer science with the inventiveness of philosophy.

Expertise Summary

I've published and given research talks in the following areas:

  • Metaphysics: Truth and truthmaking, constitution, facts and states of affairs, modality and counterpart theory, existence and absence

  • Epistemology: Knowability, epistemic logic, belief revision

  • Formal and philosophical logic: Modal logic, relevant logic, Fitch's paradox

  • Philosophy of Language: Propositions, vagueness, content, what is said, indexicals, semantic paradoxes

  • Philosophy of Mind: Mental causation, mental content

Teaching Summary

The primary aim of my teaching is to enable students to think clearly and think for themselves; and to learn how to discern arguments and evaluate them logically. I also aim to improve students'… read more

Research Summary

My current research centers around three themes:

​1. Thinking about the impossible

(a) An account of propositions as sets of possible and (non-trivial) impossible worlds. This allows an account of same-saying. It also explains how logically equivalent propositions can be distinct and hence how they can be made true by distinct entities.

(b) An account of epistemic possibility, which is non-trivial in the sense that not every set of sentences represents some epistemic/doxastic possibility, and non-ideal in the sense that some epistemic possibilities are logically impossible. The account can be used to give a semantics for 'knows' and 'believes' (and possibly other psychological attitudes).

I bring this work together in my book, The Impossible (OUP, 2014). A further book on the topic, Impossible Worlds, which I'll co-write with Franz Berto (Amsterdam), is under contract with OUP.

2. The Nature of Truth

This project sets out the metaphysical nature of truth. It seeks to explain the ontological basis of the property being true. Along the way, I'll explain three crucial aspects of truth:

  1. The truth makers: the bits of the world responsible for making truths true (and for making falsehoods false). I develop an account of states of affairs for this purpose.
  2. The truth bearers: the things that are true or false. I argue that propositions do this job, and I develop a metaphysical theory of what they are.
  3. The truthmaking relationship between truthmakers and truthbearers. I give both a metaphysical and a formal logical characterisation of the relationship.

Along the way, I'll develop a response to the liar paradox (and other semantic paradoxes, such as Curry's paradox). The project is primarily metaphysical, but it takes in aspects of philosophy of language (theory of truth, propositions), philosophical logic (the liar paradox) and formal logic (truthmaker entailment).

I present this work in a book, What Truth Is (under contract with OUP).

​3. Making up the world

The metaphysics of making: how a lump of stuff makes up some thing (material constitution); how some parts get together to make a unified whole (composition); whether (and if so, how) bundles of qualities make up a particular.

Selected Publications

  • MARK JAGO, 2018. What Truth Is Oxford University Press. (In Press.)
  • FRANZ BERTO and MARK JAGO, 2019. Impossible Worlds Oxford University Press. (In Press.)
  • MARK JAGO, 2018. From Nature to Grounding. In: RICKI BLISS and GRAHAM PRIEST, eds., Reality and its Structure: Essays in Fundamentality Oxford University Press.. (In Press.)
  • MARK JAGO, 2017. Propositions as Truthmaker Conditions Argumenta: special issue on Thinking the (Im)possible. (In Press.)

Department of Philosophy

University of Nottingham
University Park
Nottingham, NG7 2RD

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