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4© Copyright 1999 by the American Geophysical Union.We have measured emissions of CH3C1, CH3Br, and 2S from Holstein cows. In one experiment, two cows were studied in separate metabolic research chambers for a 24-hour period while on a normal diet and were studied for an additional 24-hour period 1 week later after being placed on a diet enhanced in chloride and bromide. Methyl chloride emissions ranged between 0.4 × 10-3 and 1.5 × 10-3 g cow-1 d-1, while methyl bromide emissions were much smalle…Read more
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202Moore’s Paradox: New Essays on Belief, Rationality, and the First Person (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2007.G. E. Moore observed that to assert, 'I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I don't believe that I did' would be 'absurd'. Over half a century later, such sayings continue to perplex philosophers. In the definitive treatment of the famous paradox, Green and Williams explain its history and relevance and present new essays by leading thinkers in the area
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26A Unified Treatment of Moore's Paradox: Belief, Knowledge, Assertion and RationalityOxford University Press. 2023.A Unified Treatment of Moore's Paradox is the culmination of a decades-long engagement with Moore's paradox by the world's leading authority on the subject, the late John Williams. The book offers a comprehensive account of Moore's paradox in thought and speech, both in its comissive and omissive forms. Williams argues that Moorean absurdity comes in degrees, and shows that contrary to one tradition in the literature on Moore's Paradox, we cannot explain Moorean absurdity in speech in terms of M…Read more
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41Once you think you’re wrong, you must be right: new versions of the preface paradoxSynthese 198 (Suppl 7): 1801-1825. 2018.I argue that there are living and everyday case in which rationality requires you, as a non-idealized human thinker, to have inconsistent beliefs while recognizing the inconsistency. I defend my argument against classical and insightful objections by Doris Olin, as well as others. I consider three versions of the preface paradox as candidate cases, including Makinson’s original version. None is free from objection. However, there is a fourth version, Modesty, that supposes that you believe that …Read more
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23Fact-tracking belief and the backward clock: A reply to Adams, Barker and ClarkeManuscrito 41 (3): 29-50. 2018.In “The Backward Clock, Truth-Tracking, and Safety”, Neil Sinhababu and I gave Backward Clock, a counterexample to Robert Nozick’s truth-tracking analysis of knowledge. In “Knowledge as Fact-Tracking True Belief”, Fred Adams, John Barker and Murray Clarke propose that a true belief constitutes knowledge if and only if it is based on reasons that are sensitive to the fact that makes it true, that is, reasons that wouldn’t obtain if the belief weren’t true. They argue that their analysis evades Ba…Read more
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305Moore’s Paradoxes and Conscious BeliefPhilosophical Studies 127 (3): 383-414. 2006.For Moore, it is a paradox that although I would be absurd in asserting that (it is raining but I don
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81An Introduction to Critical and Creative Thinking: Analyzing and Evaluating Ordinary Language ReasoningInstitutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University. 2015.The book aims at equipping you with 21st Century Skills key life skills that will drive your future employability, promotion and career success. These are required for effective reasoning, writing and decision-making in changing, evolving environments. You give reasons for what you do and think every day. You argue. You often argue about things that matter to you. For example you might argue that you are the best candidate for promotion, about whether your company should invest in China, about t…Read more
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51'p, and I have Absolutely no Justification for Believing that p': The Necessary Falsehood of Orthodox BayesianismResearch Collection School of Social Sciences. 2006.Orthodox Bayesianism tells a story about the epistemic trajectory of an ideally rational agent. The agent begins with a ‘prior’ probability function; thereafter, it conditionalizes on its evidence as it comes in. Consider, then, such an agent at the very beginning of its trajectory. It is ideally rational, but completely ignorant of which world is actual. Call this agent ‘Superbaby’.1 Superbaby personifies the Bayesian story. We argue that it must believe ‘Moorish’ propositions of the form.
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34'p, And I Have Absolutely No Justification for Believing that p': The Incoherence of BayesianismResearch Collection School of Social Sciences. 2005.Bayesianism tells a story about the epistemic trajectory of an ideally rational agent. The agent begins with a ‘prior’ probability function; thereafter, it conditionalizes on its evidence as it comes in. Consider, then, such an agent at the very beginning of its trajectory. It is ideally rational, but completely ignorant of which world is actual. Let us call this agent ‘superbaby’. We show that superbaby is committed to sincerely asserting propositions of the form [p and I am not justified in be…Read more
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15Sosa’s Safety Needs Supplementing, Not SavingLogos and Episteme 9 (3): 343-351. 2018.Juan Comesaña argues that Halloween Party shows that Sosa’s (2002) disjunctive safety condition on knowledge is too strong. Mark McBride agrees, and proposes a modification to that condition in order to evade Halloween Party. I show that that Halloween Party is not a counterexample to Sosa’s disjunctive safety condition. However the condition, as well as McBride’s modification to it, is insufficient for true belief (or acceptance) to be knowledge. Sosa’s condition needs supplementing in some way…Read more
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24Classifying Generalization: Paradigm War or Abuse of Terminology?Journal of Information Technology 30 (1): 18-19. 2015.Lee and Baskerville (2003) attempted to clarify the concept of generalization and classify it into four types. In Tsang and Williams (2012) we objected to their account of generalization as well as their classification and offered repairs. Then we proposed a classification of induction, within which we distinguished five types of generalization. In their (2012) rejoinder, they argue that their classification is compatible with ours, claiming that theirs offers a ‘new language.’ Insofar as we res…Read more
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22Confucius, mencius, and the notion of true successionPhilosophy East and West 38 (2): 157-171. 1988.
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13The Surprise Exam ParadoxJournal of Philosophical Research 32 67-94. 2007.One tradition of solving the surprise exam paradox, started by Robert Binkley and continued by Doris Olin, Roy Sorensen and Jelle Gerbrandy, construes surpriseepistemically and relies upon the oddity of propositions akin to G. E. Moore’s paradoxical ‘p and I don’t believe that p.’ Here I argue for an analysis that evolves from Olin’s. My analysis is different from hers or indeed any of those in the tradition because it explicitly recognizes that there are two distinct reductios at work in the st…Read more
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111Kovesi and the Formal and Material Elements of ConceptsPhilosophia 39 (4): 699-720. 2010.In his seminal work Moral Notions , Julius Kovesi presents a novel account of concept formation. At the heart of this account is a distinction between what he terms the material element and the formal element of concepts. This paper elucidates his distinction in detail and contrasts it with other distinctions such as form-matter, universal-particular, genus-difference, necessary-sufficient, and open texture-closed texture. We situate Kovesi’s distinction within his general philosophical method, …Read more
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91Propositional knowledge and know-howSynthese 165 (1): 107-125. 2008.This paper is roughly in two parts. The first deals with whether know-how is constituted by propositional knowledge, as discussed primarily by Gilbert Ryle (1949) The concept of mind. London: Hutchinson, Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson (2001). Knowing how. Journal of Philosophy, 98, pp. 411–444 as well as Stephen Hetherington (2006). How to know that knowledge-that is knowledge-how. In S. Hetherington (Ed.) Epistemology futures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The conclusion of this first …Read more
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238Moore’s Paradox, Defective Interpretation, Justified Belief and Conscious BeliefTheoria 76 (3): 221-248. 2010.In this journal, Hamid Vahid argues against three families of explanation of Moore-paradoxicality. The first is the Wittgensteinian approach; I assert that p just in case I assert that I believe that p. So making a Moore-paradoxical assertion involves contradictory assertions. The second is the epistemic approach, one committed to: if I am justified in believing that p then I am justified in believing that I believe that p. So it is impossible to have a justified omissive Moore-paradoxical belie…Read more
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48Defining the 'social' in 'social entrepreneurship': Altruism and entrepreneurshipInternational Entrepreneurship and Management Journal 1 353-365. 2005.What is social entrepreneurship? In, particular, what’s so social about it? Understanding what social entrepreneurship is enables researchers to study the phenomenon and policy-makers to design measures to encourage it. However, such an understanding is lacking partly because there is no universally accepted definition of entrepreneurship as yet. In this paper, we suggest a definition of social entrepreneurship that intuitively accords with what is generally accepted as entrepreneurship and that…Read more
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104Moore’s Paradox, Truth and Accuracy: A Reply to Lawlor and PerryActa Analytica 26 (3): 243-255. 2011.G. E. Moore famously observed that to assert ‘I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I do not believe that I did’ would be ‘absurd’. Moore calls it a ‘paradox’ that this absurdity persists despite the fact that what I say about myself might be true. Krista Lawlor and John Perry have proposed an explanation of the absurdity that confines itself to semantic notions while eschewing pragmatic ones. We argue that this explanation faces four objections. We give a better explanation of the absurdity b…Read more
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41Valuable Asymmetrical FriendshipsPhilosophy 92 (1): 51-76. 2016.Aristotle distinguishes friendships of pleasure or utility from more valuable ‘character friendships’ in which the friend cares for the other qua person for the other’s own sake. Aristotle and some neo-Aristotelians require such friends to be fairly strictly symmetrical in their separateness of identity from each other, in the degree to which they identify with each other, and in the degree to which they are virtuous. We argue that there is a neglected form of valuable friendship–neither of frie…Read more
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38Moore’s Paradox for GodPhilosophia 47 (1): 265-270. 2019.I argue that ‘Moore’s paradox for God’. I do not believe this proposition shows that nobody can be both omniscient and rational in all her beliefs. I then anticipate and rebut three objections to my argument.
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34Assertion and Its Many NormsManuscrito 40 (4): 39-76. 2017.ABSTRACT Timothy Williamson offers the ordinary practice, the lottery and the Moorean argument for the ‘knowledge account’ that assertion is the only speech-act that is governed by the single rule that one must know its content. I show that these fail to support it and that the emptiness of the knowledge account renders mysterious why breaking the knowledge rule should be a source of criticism. I argue that focussing exclusively on the sincerity of the speech-act of letting one know engenders a …Read more
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25Still Stuck on the Backward ClockLogos and Episteme 8 (2): 243-269. 2017.Neil Sinhababu and I presented Backward Clock, an original counterexample to Robert Nozick’s truth-tracking analysis of propositional knowledge. In their latest defence of the truth-tracking theories, “Methods Matter: Beating the Backward Clock,” Fred Adams, John A. Barker and Murray Clarke try again to defend Nozick’s and Fred Dretske’s early analysis of propositional knowledge against Backward Clock. They allege failure of truth-adherence, mistakes on my part about methods, and appeal to chari…Read more
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16Doxastic logic, beginning with Hintikka’s Knowledge and Belief. An Introduction to the Logic of the Two Notions, studies relations between propositions about what we believe. Using ‘a’ as a proper name like ‘Ann’, ‘→’ for ‘if’ as opposed to material implication, propositional variables such as ‘p’, ‘q’ and ‘B’ to represent the two-place relation, ‘... believes that... ’.
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127Belief-in and Belief in GodReligious Studies 28 (3). 1992.It is first argued that there are two types of beliefs-in; beliefs in X which are identical with the belief that X exists and beliefs-in which entail no existential belief but which do entail a commendatory attitude. It is then shown that belief in God is not identical with, but rather entails, the belief that God exists. Pace Norman Malcolm, the converse holds neither as a logical nor psychological claims
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140The Surprise Exam Paradox: Disentangling Two ReductiosJournal of Philosophical Research 32 67-94. 2007.One tradition of solving the surprise exam paradox, started by Robert Binkley and continued by Doris Olin, Roy Sorensen and Jelle Gerbrandy, construes surpriseepistemically and relies upon the oddity of propositions akin to G. E. Moore’s paradoxical ‘p and I don’t believe that p.’ Here I argue for an analysis that evolves from Olin’s. My analysis is different from hers or indeed any of those in the tradition because it explicitly recognizes that there are two distinct reductios at work in the st…Read more
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27An Introduction to Historical Epistemology [book review] (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (1): 312-314. 1996.
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64Wittgenstein, Moorean Absurdity and its Disappearance from SpeechSynthese 149 (1): 225-254. 2006.G. E. Moore famously observed that to say, “ I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I don’t believe that I did” would be “absurd”. Why should it be absurd of me to say something about myself that might be true of me? Moore suggested an answer to this, but as I will show, one that fails. Wittgenstein was greatly impressed by Moore’s discovery of a class of absurd but possibly true assertions because he saw that it illuminates “the logic of assertion”. Wittgenstein suggests a promising relation o…Read more
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