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323Theories of consciousnessIn Quentin Smith & Aleksandar Jokic (eds.), Consciousness: New Philosophical Essays, Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 353. 2003.My target in this paper is "theories of consciousness". There are many theories of consciousness around, and my view is that they are all misconceived. Consciousness is not a normal scientific subject, and needs handling with special care. It is foolhardy to jump straight in and start building a theory, as if consciousness were just like electricity or chemical valency. We will do much better to reflect explicitly on our methodology first. When we do this, we will see that theories of consciousn…Read more
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1Laws and AccidentsIn Crispin Wright & Graham Frank Macdonald (eds.), Fact, Science and Morality: Essays on A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic, Blackwell. 1986.
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241Many Minds are No Worse than OneBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 (2): 233-241. 1996.
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36There is No Trace of Any Soul Linked to the BodyIn Keith Augustine & Michael Martin (eds.), The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life After Death, Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 369-376. 2015.This paper argues that all apparently special forces characteristically reduce to a few fundamental physical forces which conserve energy and operate throughout nature. Consequently, there are probably no special mental forces originating from souls and acting upon bodies and brains in addition to the basic, energy-conserving physical forces. Moreover, physiological and biochemical research have failed to uncover any evidence of forces over and above the basic physical forces acting on living bo…Read more
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8Normativity and JudgementAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 73 17-61. 1999.[David Papineau] This paper disputes the common assumption that the normativity of conceptual judgement poses a problem for naturalism. My overall strategy is to argue that norms of judgement derive from moral or personal values, particularly when such values are attached to the end of truth. While there are philosophical problems associated with both moral and personal values, they are not special to the realm of judgement, nor peculiar to naturalist philosophies. This approach to the normativi…Read more
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1The vis viva controversyIn Roger Stuart Woolhouse (ed.), Leibniz, Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science, Oxford University Press. 1981.
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Does the sociology of science discredit science?In Relativism and Realism in Science, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 37-57. 1988.
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4The Causal Closure of the Physical and NaturalismIn Brian McLaughlin, Ansgar Beckermann & Sven Walter (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind, Oxford University Press. 2009.
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60Mathematical fictionalismInternational Studies in the Philosophy of Science 2 (2). 1988.No abstract
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224The status of teleosemantics, or how to stop worrying about swampmanAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 79 (2): 279-89. 2001.This Article does not have an abstract
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10The Structure of Social Science. A Philosophical Introduction By Michael Lessnoff London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974, 173 pp., £3.60 cloth, £1.85 paperback (review)Philosophy 50 (193): 364-. 1975.
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350Causation is macroscopic but not irreducibleIn Sophie C. Gibb & Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson (eds.), Mental Causation and Ontology, Oxford University Press. pp. 126. 2013.In this paper I argue that causation is an essentially macroscopic phenomenon, and that mental causes are therefore capable of outcompeting their more specific physical realizers as causes of physical effects. But I also argue that any causes must be type-identical with physical properties, on pain of positing inexplicable physical conspiracies. I therefore allow macroscopic mental causation, but only when it is physically reducible
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307There Are No Norms of BeliefIn Timothy Chan (ed.), The Aim of Belief, Oxford University Press. 2013.This paper argues that there is no distinctive species of normativity attaching to the adoption of beliefs.
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233In the ZoneRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 73 175-196. 2013.On the Friday afternoon of the 3 rd test at Trent Bridge in 2001, the series was in the balance. The Australians had won the first two tests easily, but England now found themselves in a position of some strength. They had restricted Australia to a first-innings lead of just 5 runs, and had built a lead of 120 with six wickets in hand. Mark Ramprakash was in and had been batting steadily for well over an hour. Even though this Australian side was as strong as any in cricket history, England had …Read more
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28Pure, mixed, and spurious probabilities and their significance for a reductionist theory of causationMinnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 13 307-348. 1989.
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392The poverty of analysisAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 83 (1): 1-30. 2009.I argue that philosophy is like science in three interesting and non-obvious ways. First, the claims made by philosophy are synthetic, not analytic: philosophical claims, just like scientific claims, are not guaranteed by the structure of the concepts they involve. Second, philosophical knowledge is a posteriori, not a priori: the claims established by philosophers depend on the same kind of empirical support as scientific theories. And finally, the central questions of philosophy concern actual…Read more
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650What Exactly is the Explanatory Gap?Philosophia 39 (1): 5-19. 2011.It is widely agreed among contemporary philosophers of mind that science leaves us with an ‘explanatory gap’—that even after we know everything that science can tell us about the conscious mind and the brain, their relationship still remains mysterious. I argue that this agreed view is quite mistaken. The feeling of a ‘explanatory gap’ arises only because we cannot stop ourselves thinking about the mind–brain relation in a dualist way
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12Who would have thought it? Poker has become a mass-audience spectator sport. Names like Chris ‘Jesus’ Ferguson, Phil ‘Unabomber’ Laak, and Dave ‘The Devilfish’ Ulliott may not be familiar to all readers of the TLS, but on any normal night you can see these top poker professionals on the nether reaches of the satellite channels, as they bluff and bully their way to pots worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Like their counterparts in tennis and golf, they tour the world, playing in lucrative to…Read more
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6Review: Correlations and Causes (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 42 (3). 1991.
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
General Philosophy of Science |
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Areas of Interest
Metaphilosophy |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
General Philosophy of Science |