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1666The Emperor's New Metaphysics of PowersMind 122 (487): 605-653. 2013.This paper argues that the new metaphysics of powers, also known as dispositional essentialism or causal structuralism, is an illusory metaphysics. I argue for this in the following way. I begin by distinguishing three fundamental ways of seeing how facts of physical modality — facts about physical necessitation and possibility, causation, disposition, and chance — are grounded in the world. The first way, call it the first degree, is that the actual world or all worlds, in their entirety, are t…Read more
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182Truth and the expressing in expressivismIn Terry Horgan & Mark Timmons (eds.), Metaethics After Moore, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 299. 2006.
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497Expressivism About Making and Truth-MakingIn Fabrice Correia & Benjamin Schnieder (eds.), Metaphysical grounding: understanding the structure of reality, Cambridge University Press. pp. 272-293. 2012.My goal is to illuminate truth-making by way of illuminating the relation of making. My strategy is not to ask what making is, in the hope of a metaphysical theory about is nature. It's rather to look first to the language of making. The metaphor behind making refers to agency. It would be absurd to suggest that claims about making are claims about agency. It is not absurd, however, to propose that the concept of making somehow emerges from some feature to do with agency. That's the contention t…Read more
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1701Can Counterfactuals Really Be about Possible Worlds?Noûs 45 (3): 557-576. 2011.The standard view about counterfactuals is that a counterfactual (A > C) is true if and only if the A-worlds most similar to the actual world @ are C-worlds. I argue that the worlds conception of counterfactuals is wrong. I assume that counterfactuals have non-trivial truth-values under physical determinism. I show that the possible-worlds approach cannot explain many embeddings of the form (P > (Q > R)), which intuitively are perfectly assertable, and which must be true if the contingent falsit…Read more
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23Indefinite Descriptions as Referring TermsOrganon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 16 (4): 569-586. 2009.I argue that indefinite descriptions are referring terms. This is not the ambiguity thesis: that sometimes they are referring terms and sometimes something else, such as quantifiers . No. On my view they are always referring terms; and never quantifiers. I defend this thesis by modifying the standard conception of what a referring term is: a modification that needs to be made anyway, irrespective of the treatment of indefinites. I derive this approach from my speech-act theoretic semantics . The…Read more
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239Dispositional monism, relational constitution and quidditiesAnalysis 69 (2): 242-250. 2009.Let us call dispositional monism the view that all natural properties have their identities fixed purely by their dispositional features, that is, by the patterns of stimulus and response in which they participate. DM implies that natural properties are pure powers: things whose natures are fully identified by their roles in determining the potentialities of events to cause or be caused. As pure powers, properties are meant to lack quiddities in Black's sense. A property possesses a quiddity jus…Read more
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Analysing chancy causation without appeal to chance-raisingIn Phil Dowe & Paul Noordhof (eds.), Cause and Chance: Causation in an Indeterministic World, Routledge. 2003.
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1648Truth-Bearers and the UnsaidIn Ken Turner (ed.), Making Semantics Pragmatic, Emerald Group Publishing. 2011.I argue that conventional implicatures embed in logical compounds, and are non-truth-conditional contributors to sentence meaning. This, I argue has significant implications for how we understand truth, truth-conditional content, and truth-bearers.
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93Figurative Speech: Pointing a Poisoned Arrow at the Heart of SemanticsPhilosophical Studies 174 (1): 123-140. 2017.I argue that figurative speech, and irony in particular, presents a deep challenge to the orthodox view about sentence content. The standard view is that sentence contents are, at their core, propositional contents: truth-conditional contents. Moreover, the only component of a sentence’s content that embeds in compound sentences, like belief reports or conditionals, is the propositional content. I argue that a careful analysis of irony shows this view cannot be maintained. Irony is a purely prag…Read more
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185Counterfactuals, probabilistic counterfactuals and causationMind 108 (431): 427-469. 1999.It seems to be generally accepted that (a) counterfactual conditionals are to be analysed in terms of possible worlds and inter-world relations of similarity and (b) causation is conceptually prior to counterfactuals. I argue here that both (a) and (b) are false. The argument against (a) is not a general metaphysical or epistemological one but simply that, structurally speaking, possible worlds theories are wrong: this is revealed when we try to extend them to cover the case of probabilistic cou…Read more
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347Truth and conventional implicatureMind 112 (445): 1-34. 2003.Are all instances of the T-schema assertable? I argue that they are not. The reason is the presence of conventional implicature in a language. Conventional implicature is meant to be a component of the rule-based content that a sentence can have, but it makes no contribution to the sentence's truth-conditions. One might think that a conventional implicature is like a force operator. But it is not, since it can enter into the scope of logical operators. It follows that the semantic content of a s…Read more
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107Material implication and general indicative conditionalsPhilosophical Quarterly 47 (187): 195-211. 1997.This paper falls into two parts. In the first part, I argue that consideration of general indicative conditionals, e.g., sentences like If a donkey brays it is beaten, provides a powerful argument that a pure material implication analysis of indicative if p, q is correct. In the second part I argue, opposing writers like Jackson, that a Gricean style theory of pragmatics can explain the manifest assertability conditions of if p, q in terms of its conventional content – assumed to be merely (p⊃q)…Read more
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907Expressivism About Reference and Quantification Over the Non-existent Without Meinongian MetaphysicsErkenntnis 80 (S2): 215-234. 2015.Can we believe that there are non-existent entities without commitment to the Meinongian metaphysics? This paper argues we can. What leads us from quantification over non-existent beings to Meinongianism is a general metaphysical assumption about reality at large, and not merely quantification over the non-existent. Broadly speaking, the assumption is that every being we talk about must have a real definition. It’s this assumption that drives us to enquire into the nature of beings like Pegasus,…Read more
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217A dilemma for the counterfactual analysis of causationAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 81 (1). 2003.If we seek to analyse causation in terms of counterfactual conditionals then we must assume that there is a class of counterfactuals whose members (i) are all and only those we need to support our judgements of causation, (ii) have truth-conditions specifiable without any irreducible appeal to causation. I argue that (i) and (ii) are unlikely to be met by any counterfactual analysis of causation. I demonstrate this by isolating a class of counterfactuals called non-projective counterfactuals, or…Read more
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47The Experiential Thesis: Audi on Intrinsic ValueSouthern Journal of Philosophy 41 (S1): 57-61. 2003.
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15Hume's Causal Explanation of Causal ThinkingSouthwest Philosophical Studies 10 (3): 21-28. 1988.
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11The Experiential Thesis: Audi on Intrinsic ValueSouthern Journal of Philosophy 41 (S1): 57-61. 2003.
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892Semantic Paradox and Alethic UndecidabilityAnalysis 74 (2): 201-209. 2014.I use the principle of truth-maker maximalism to provide a new solution to the semantic paradoxes. According to the solution, AUS, its undecidable whether paradoxical sentences are grounded or ungrounded. From this it follows that their alethic status is undecidable. We cannot assert, in principle, whether paradoxical sentences are true, false, either true or false, neither true nor false, both true and false, and so on. AUS involves no ad hoc modification of logic, denial of the T-schema's vali…Read more
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68Truth-Making and the Alethic Undecidability of the LiarDiscusiones Filosóficas 13 (21): 13-31. 2012.I argue that a new solution to the semantic paradoxes is possible based on truth-making. I show that with an appropriate understanding of what the ultimate truth and falsity makers of sentences are, it can be demonstrated that sentences like the liar are alethically undecidable. That means it cannot be said in principle whether such sentences are true, not true, false, not-false, neither true nor false, both true and false, and so on. I argue that this leads to a solution to the semantic paradox…Read more
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885I argue that Lewis's counterfactual theory of causation, given his treatment of counterfactuals in terms of world-comparative similarity faces insuperable problems in the form of the problem of effects and the problem of epiphenomena.
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784The Ultimate Argument Against Dispositional Monist Accounts of LawsAnalysis 72 (4): 714-722. 2012.Bird argues that Armstrong’s necessitarian conception of physical modality and laws of nature generates a vicious regress with respect to necessitation. We show that precisely the same regress afflicts Bird’s dispositional-monist theory, and indeed, related views, such as that of Mumford & Anjum. We argue that dispositional monism is basically Armstrongian necessitarianism modified to allow for a thesis about property identity
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661Pure versus Hybrid Expressivism and the Enigma of Conventional ImplicatureIn Guy Fletcher & Michael Ridge (eds.), Having It Both Ways: Hybrid Theories and Modern Metaethics, Oxford University Press. pp. 199-222. 2014.Can hybridism about moral claims be made to work? I argue it can if we accept the conventional implicature approach developed in Barker (Analysis 2000). However, this kind of hybrid expressivism is only acceptable if we can make sense of conventional implicature, the kind of meaning carried by operators like ‘even’, ‘but’, etc. Conventional implictures are a form of pragmatic presupposition, which involves an unsaid mode of delivery of content. I argue that we can make sense of conventional impl…Read more
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23Hybrid Theories of Moral StatementsIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Blackwell. 2013.Hybrid theories are metaethical theories concerning the content of sentences about moral value. These theories claim that sentences with ethical content express two kinds of mental state. One state is an affect‐like state. The other is a belief‐like state. The expressed affect‐like state will involve a moral attitude of some kind, such as approval, but it is not part of the truth‐conditions of the sentence. We can divide hybridists into two kinds.
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21The Experiential Thesis: Audi on Intrinsic ValueSouthern Journal of Philosophy 41 (S1): 57-61. 2003.
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