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17But what is the intentional schema?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 19 (1): 133-134. 1996.The intentional schema may not be sufficiently characterized to make questions about its role in individual and species development intelligible. The idea of metarepresentation may perhaps give it enough content. The importance of metarepresentation itself, however, can be called into question.
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20II—Adam Morton: Emotional AccuracyAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 76 (1): 265-275. 2002.
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Partisanship'In Brian P. McLaughlin & Amelie O. 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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357A solution to the donkey sentence problemAnalysis 75 (4): 554-557. 2015.The problem concerns quantifiers that seem to hover between universal and existential readings. I argue that they are neither, but a different quantifier that has features of each. NOTE the published paper has a mistake. I have corrected this in the version on this site. A correction note will appear in Analysis.
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312Did Lewis Carroll Write Genesis?Cogito 2 (1): 12-15. 1988.I discuss the intelligibility of belief in God, presenting a neo-positivist view. It is aimed at a non-professional audience.
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283Lockhart’s problemThe Philosophers' Magazine 25 (30): 25-30. 2014.If we had more powerful minds would we be puzzled by less - because we could make better theories - or by more - because we could ask more difficult questions? This paper focuses on clarifying the question, with an emphasis on comparisons between actual and possible species of thinker. A pre-publication version of the paper is available on my website at http://www.fernieroad.ca/a/PAPERS/papers.html .
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556Contrastive 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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463If I were a Dry Well-Made MatchDialogue 12 (2): 322-324. 1973.I discuss Goodman's claim that when 'all As are Bs' is a law then the counterfactual 'if a were an A, it would be a B' is tue. I give counterexamples, and link the failure of the connection to the contrast between higher level and lower level laws
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545Shared 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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260Saving belief from (internalist) epistemologyFacta Philosophica 5 (2): 277-95. 2003.I point out that internalist conceptions of belief that have become outmoded in the philosophy of mind are still current in epistemology (or at any rate they were in 2003). I explore the consequences of bringing epistemology up to speed with a more contemporary conception of belief.
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416Contrastive KnowledgeIn Martijn Blaauw (ed.), Contrastivism in philosophy, Routledge/taylor & Francis Group. pp. 101-115. 2013.The claim of this paper is that the everyday functions of knowledge make most sense if we see knowledge as contrastive. That is, we can best understand how the concept does what it does by thinking in terms of a relation “a knows that p rather than q.” There is always a contrast with an alternative. Contrastive interpretations of knowledge, and objections to them, have become fairly common in recent philosophy. The version defended here is fairly mild in that there is no suggestion that we canno…Read more
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217Review of Paul Weirich, Realistic Decision Theory: Rules for Nonideal Agents in Nonideal Circumstances (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2005 (8). 2005.
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472Contrastivity and indistinguishabilitySocial Epistemology 22 (3). 2008.We give a general description of a class of contrastive constructions, intended to capture what is common to contrastive knowledge, belief, hope, fear, understanding and other cases where one expresses a propositional attitude in terms of “rather than”. The crucial element is the agent's incapacity to distinguish some possibilities from others. Contrastivity requires a course-graining of the set of possible worlds. As a result, contrastivity will usually cut across logical consequence, so that a…Read more
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306The Party-Goer's Guide to PhilosophyCogito 4 (2): 134-134. 1990.some lighthearted definitions of philosophical terms.
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361Feelings of being: Phenomenology, psychiatry and the sense of reality – Matthew RatcliffePhilosophical Quarterly 60 (240): 661-662. 2010.No Abstract
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209Peter Smith, "Realism and the Progress of Science" (review)Philosophical Quarterly 32 (28): 288. 1982.I describe Smith's very modest aims and argue that there is an over-expenditure of sophisticated philosophy of language to defend a common sense realism about relatively recent science.
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415Review of Maher *Betting on Theories* (review)Philosophical Books 35 (3): 213-215. 1994.I describe Maher's utility-based account of theory acceptance, generally approvingly but with a few questions and doubts.
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440Extensional and non-truth-functional contextsJournal of Philosophy 66 (6): 159-164. 1969.I discuss Frege's argument - later called the slingshot - that if a construction is extensional and preserves logical equivalence then it is truth-functional. I consider some simple apparent counterexamples and conclude that they are not sentence-embedding in the required way.
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142Mathematical models: Questions of trustworthinessBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 44 (4): 659-674. 1993.I argue that the contrast between models and theories is important for public policy issues. I focus especially on the way a mathematical model explains just one aspect of the data.
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6Review of David Malet Armstrong and Norman Malcolm: Consciousness and Causality: A Debate on the Nature of Mind (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 36 (3): 341-344. 1985.Armstrong and Malcolm have a debate on materialism and the everyday concept of mind that was a bit antiquated even in 1985. I try to isolate the issues driving the debate - on phenomenal properties and the role of theory in our thinking - and I make some guesses about the questions that were still live when the debate was published
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329Double ConditionalsAnalysis 50 (2). 1990.I consider embeddings of one subjunctive conditional in the consequent of another, and argue that (if A then (if B then C)) is not equivalent to (if (A & B) then C ), given the meanings we usually give to the outer and the inner 'if'.
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440Kinds of ModelsIn Malcolm G. Anderson & Paul D. Bates (eds.), Model Validation: perspectives in hydrological science, Wiley. pp. 11-22. 2001.We separate metaphysical from epistemic questions in the evaluation of models, taking into account the distinctive functions of models as opposed to theories. The examples a\are very varied.
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451Review: John L. Pollock: Thinking About Acting: Logical Foundations for Rational Decision Making (review)Mind 117 (467): 716-719. 2008.a review of John Pollock's *Thinking about Acting* with a focus on his aim of describing psychological mechanisms which are humanly feasible.
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309Suppose, SupposeAnalysis 53 (1). 1993.I give reasons stemming from the nature of narrative thinking why two-antecedent conditionals, most naturally expressed as "Suppose A. Suppose moreover B. Then C" the two antecedents play different roles. I formalise this idea with a two-dimensional similarity relation between possible worlds.