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256Saving 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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255Heuristics all the way up?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (5): 758-759. 2000.I investigate whether heuristics similar to those studied by Gigerenzer and his co-authors can apply to the problem of finding a suitable heuristic for a given problem. I argue that not only can heuristics of a very similar kind apply but they have the added advantage that they need not incorporate specific trade-off parameters for balancing the different desiderata of a good decision-procedure.
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253Imagining EvilLes Ateliers de L’Ethique 5 (1): 26-33. 2010.It is in a way easier to imagine evil actions than we often suppose, but what it is thus relatively easy to do is not what we want to understand about evil. To argue for this conclusion I distin- guish between imagining why someone did something and imagining how they could have done it, and I try to grasp partial understanding, in part by distinguishing different imaginative pers- pectives we can have on an act. When we do this we see an often unnoticed asymmetry: we do not put the same demands…Read more
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248Review of McLennen *Rationality and Dynamic Choice* (review)Mind 101 (402): 381-383. 1992.review of McLennen's *Rationality and Dynamic Choice*. The topic is important and the discussion is powerful. Some connection with modelling and simulation would be valuable.
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248Knowing what to think about: When epistemology meets the theory of choiceIn Stephen Hetherington (ed.), Epistemology Futures, Oxford University Press. pp. 111--30. 2006.
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244Psychology for cooperatorsIn Christopher W. Morris & Arthur Ripstein (eds.), Practical Rationality and Preference: Essays for David Gauthier, Cambridge University Press. pp. 153. 2001.I discuss what learned and innate routines of self and other attribution agents need to possess if they are to enter into cooperative arrangements as described game theoretically. I conclude that these are not so different from belief desire psychology as described by philosophers of mind.
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240Review of VaguenessPhilosophical Books 36 (4): 272-276. 1995.review of Williamson's *Vagueness*
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238Damage, flourishing, and two sides of moralityEshare: An Iranian Journal of Philosophy 1 (1). forthcoming.I explore how considerations about psychological damage connect with moral theories.
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226From tracking relations to propositional attitudesEuropean Journal of Analytic Philosophy 5 (2): 7-18. 2009.I explore the possibility that propositional attitudes are not basic in folk psychology, and that what we really ascribe to people are relations to individuals, those that the apparently propositional contents of beliefs, desires, and other states concern. In particular, the relation between a state and the individuals that it tracks shows how ascription of propositional attitudes could grow out of ascription of relations between people and objects.
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219Philosophy in Practice: An Introduction to the Main QuestionsWiley-Blackwell. 1996.This is an introductory textbook of philosophy meant to enable group work in a large lecture. It has many questionnaires and materials for controlled discussions, to facilitate disgnoses of the reasons for disagreements about cases. contents: Certainty and doubt -- Sources of conviction -- Rationalism -- Rationalism versus relativism in morals -- Induction and deduction -- The retreat from certainty -- Utilitarianism -- Kantian ethics -- Empiricism -- Beyond empiricism -- Objectivity -- Material…Read more
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218Acting 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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213Review 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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213Why there is no concept of a person. in Gill, ed. *the person and the human mind*:In Christopher Gill (ed.), Ancient and Modern Philosophy, Clarendon Press. 1989.I argue that the Frankfurtian concept of a person ignored the indexical 'I'
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207Explaining CulturePhilosophical Books 38 (4): 235-239. 1997.review of Sperber *Explaining Culture*
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205Peter 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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204Colour appearances and the colour solidIn Philosophy and the Visual Arts, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1987.
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201IX*—Would CauseProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 81 (1): 139-152. 1981.I describe ways in which it is easier to analyse causation in the consequent of a conditional: what an event would cause if it occurred. I consider some possiblereasons forthis.
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187Review: John L. Pollock, Language and Thought (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 50 (1): 252-252. 1985.
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184Great expectationsIn Tim Lewens (ed.), Risk: Philosophical Perspectives, Routledge. 2007.I distinguish between risks in which most people will do badly from those in which few will, though some will do very badly.
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167Comment on RortyIn A. J. Holland (ed.), Philosophy, Its History and Historiography, Reidel. pp. 85-86. 1985.Hesse and Pettit present somewhat different reconstructions of Rorty’s suggestions about the discipline that might survive the collapse of foundationalistic epistemology. They both treat Rorty’s argument very respectfully, as opening the way to an interesting new possibility. I think that they are both too charitable to him; I think that there are a lot of bad arguments in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and a quantity of simple silliness. This is not to say that the openings up of the subj…Read more
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166Deviant Logic (review)Journal of Philosophy 74 (5): 308-311. 1977.review of Susan Haack's *Deviant Logic*
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164Damage and imaginationThe Junkyard (Blog). 2017.Many morally important facts about the way we affect one another, in particular the psychological damage we can inflict, are hard to imagine .
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151I_— _Ronald de SousaAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 76 (1): 247-263. 2002.Taking literally the concept of emotional truth requires breaking the monopoly on truth of belief-like states. To this end, I look to perceptions for a model of non-propositional states that might be true or false, and to desires for a model of propositional attitudes the norm of which is other than the semantic satisfaction of their propositional object. Those models inspire a conception of generic truth, which can admit of degrees for analogue representations such as emotions; belief-like stat…Read more
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149Review (review)Economics and Philosophy 12 (1): 101-104. 1996.Interpersonal Comparisons of Well-being, Jon Elster and John E. Roemer The Quality of Life, Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen
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147describes connections between a series of related papers
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146Empathy for the DevilIn Amy Coplan & Peter Goldie (eds.), Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, Oxford University Press. pp. 318. 2011.I argue that there is a blinkering effect to decency. Being a morally sensitive person, and having internalized a code of behavior that restricts the range of actions that one takes as live options for oneself, constrains one’s imagination. It becomes harder to identify imaginatively with mportant parts of human possibility. In particular—the part of the claim that I will argue for in this chapter—it limits one’s capacity to empathize with those who perform atrocious acts. They become alien to o…Read more
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140Mathematical 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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140Frames of Mind: Constraints on the Common-sense Conception of the MentalOxford University Press USA. 1980.I argue that general constraints on how humans think about humans produce universal features of the concept of mind. Some of these constraints determine how we imagine other people's thinking and action through our own. I formulate this in opposition to what I call the "theory theory". I believe this was the first use of this terminology, and this work was an early version of what has come to be called the simulation theory.