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801A note on comparing death and painBioethics 2 (2). 1988.I give ways of comparing the disvalue of death and of pain by comparing each to other evils.
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35The inevitability of folk psychologyIn Radu J. Bogdan (ed.), Mind and Common Sense: Philosophical Essays on Common Sense Psychology, Cambridge University Press. 1991.
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462Deviant Logic (review)Journal of Philosophy 74 (5): 308-311. 1977.review of Susan Haack's *Deviant Logic*
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776Imaginary EmotionsThe Monist 96 (4): 505-516. 2013.I give grounds for taking seriously the possibility that some of the emotions we ascribe do not exist. I build on the premise that the experience of imagining an emotion resembles that of having one. First a person imagines having an emotion. This is much like an emotion, so the person takes herself to be having the emotion that she imagines, and acts or expects a disposition to act accordingly. The view sketched here contrasts possibly impossible emotions such as disembodied passion, blind rag…Read more
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629Review: If (review)Mind 115 (458): 409-412. 2006.review of Evans & Over *ifs*, a book on the psychology of conditionals.
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1449Complex individuals and multigrade relationsNoûs 9 (3): 309-318. 1975.I relate plural quantification, and predicate logic where predicates do not need a fixed number of argument places, to the part-whole relation. For more on these themes see later work by Boolos, Lewis, and Oliver & Smiley.
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1141Indicative versus subjunctive in future conditionalsAnalysis 64 (4): 289-293. 2004.I give cases where the contrast between "if Shakespeare had not written Hamlet someone else would have" and "if Shakespeare did not write Hamlet and someone else did"is found in future tense sentences. This is often denied.
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551Acting to KnowIn Abrol Fairweather (ed.), Virtue Epistemology Naturalized: Bridges between Virtue Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. Synthese Library, Vol. 366,, Springer. pp. 195-207. 2014.Experiments are actions, performed in order to gain information. Like other acts, there are virtues of performing them well. I discuss one virtue of experimentation, that of knowing how to trade its information-gaining potential against other goods.
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903Talk About BeliefsPhilosophical Books 35 (1): 47-49. 1994.review of Mark Crimmins' *Talk about Beliefs*
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583Colour appearances and the colour solidIn Andrew Harrison (ed.), Philosophy And The Visual Arts, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1987.
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112The reality of the symbolic and subsymbolic systemsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (1): 58-58. 1988.
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991Human bounds: rationality for our speciesSynthese 176 (1). 2010.Is there such a thing as bounded rationality? I first try to make sense of the question, and then to suggest which of the disambiguated versions might have answers. We need an account of bounded rationality that takes account of detailed contingent facts about the ways in which human beings fail to perform as we might ideally want to. But we should not think in terms of rules or norms which define good responses to an individual's limitations, but rather in terms of desiderata, situations that l…Read more
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892The Variety of RationalityAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 59 (1): 139-176. 1985.I discuss the connections between rationality and intentional action, emphasising that different kinds of action are rational an intentional in different ways.
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1582Folk PsychologyIn Brian McLaughlin, Ansgar Beckermann & Sven Walter (eds.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy of mind, Oxford University Press. 2007.I survey the previous 20 years work on the nature of folk psychology, with particular emphasis on the original debate between theory theorists and simulation theorists, and the positions that have emerged from this debate.
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112Benacerraf and His Critics (edited book)Blackwell. 1996.a collection of articles by philosophers of mathematics on themes associated with the work of Paul Benacceraf
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922The Presidential Address: Where Demonstratives Meet Vagueness: Possible LanguagesProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 99 (1). 1999.I present three invented languages, in order to support a claim that vagueness and demonstrativity are related. One of them handles vagueness like English handles demonstratives, the second handles demonstratives like English handles vagueness, and the third combines the resources of the first two. The argument depends on the claim that all three can be learned and used by anyone who can speak English.
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182Emotion and ImaginationPolity. 2013.I argue that on an understanding of imagination that relates it to an individual's environment rather than her mental contents imagination is essential to emotion, and brings together affective, cognitive, and representational aspects to emotion. My examples focus on morally important emotions, especially retrospective emotions such as shame, guilt, and remorse, which require that one imagine points of view on one's own actions. PUBLISHER'S BLURB: Recent years have seen an enormous amount of phi…Read more
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12PartisanshipIn Brian P. McLaughlin & Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (eds.), Perspectives on Self-Deception, University of California Press. pp. 170-182. 1988.I argue that to have a chance of acquiring valuable beliefs one must take a risk of self-deception.
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1062Contrastive knowledgePhilosophical Explorations 6 (2). 2003.We describe the three place relation of contrastive knowledge, which holds between a person, a target proposition, and a contrasting proposition. The person knows that p rather than that q. We argue for three claims about this relation. (a) Many common sense and philosophical ascriptions of knowledge can be understood in terms of it. (b) Its application is subject to fewer complications than non-contrastive knowledge is. (c) It applies over a wide range of human and nonhuman cases.
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926Collective Rationality and Collective ReasoningPhilosophical Review 112 (1): 118-120. 2003.McMahon's connections between collective reasoning and collective action are real and important. I suspect that they do not go deep enough, and that far more that we usually classify as individual is in fact collective.
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81Lore-Abiding PeopleStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 32 (3): 601-606. 2001.I evaluate Kusch's arguments that everyday and scientific psychological beliefs are made true by the institutional facts about the people to whom they are applied. I conclude that institutional facts are among the truth-makers of such beliefs, and that this is a very significant point to have made, but that they are unlikely to be the sole such truth-makers.
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1175Shared Knowledge from Individual Vice: the role of unworthy epistemic emotionsPhilosophical Inquiries. 2014.This paper begins with a discussion the role of less-than-admirable epistemic emotions in our respectable, indeed admirable inquiries: nosiness, obsessiveness, wishful thinking, denial, partisanship. The explanation for their desirable effect is Mandevillian: because of the division of epistemic labour individual epistemic vices can lead to shared knowledge. In fact it is sometimes essential to it.
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124510 The evolution of strategic thinkingIn Peter Carruthers & Andrew Chamberlain (eds.), Evolution and the Human Mind: Modularity, Language and Meta-Cognition, Cambridge University Press. pp. 218. 2000.I discuss ways in which innate human psychology facilitates the quasi-game-theoretical reasoning required for group life.
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1053Incommensurability, incomparability, and practical reason, Ruth Chang (ed.), Harvard university press, 1998, 303 pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 16 (1): 147-174. 2000.review of Ruth Chang's collection in which I argue that the apparent agreements between the authors disguise underlying important differences.
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2952Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of MindPhilosophical Review 91 (2): 299. 1982.I assess Churchland's views on folk psychology and conceptual thinking, with particular emphasis on the connection between these topics.
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68What is rank?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (4): 585-585. 1998.The concept of rank is not a very clear one. Claims that two concepts occupy the same rank in different domains are in danger of being unintelligible. Examples show how hard it is to understand Atran's claim that the most significant concepts in folk biology occur at a higher level than nonbiological concepts. A reformulation preserves some of what Atran wants to claim.
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776HypercomparativesSynthese 111 (1): 97-114. 1997.In natural language we rarely use relation-words with more than three argument places. This paper studies one systematic device, rooted in natural language, by which relations of greater adicity can be expressed. It is based on a higher-order relation between 1-place, 2-place, and 4-place relations (and so on) of which the relation between the positive and comparative degrees of a predicate is a special case. Two formal languages are presented in this connection, one of which represents the lang…Read more
