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583Shared 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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479Contrastivity 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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246Review 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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424Review 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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325The Party-Goer's Guide to PhilosophyCogito 4 (2): 134-134. 1990.some lighthearted definitions of philosophical terms.
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383Feelings of being: Phenomenology, psychiatry and the sense of reality – Matthew RatcliffePhilosophical Quarterly 60 (240): 661-662. 2010.No Abstract
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222Peter 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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452Extensional 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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148Mathematical 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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320Suppose, 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.
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342Double 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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453Kinds 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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471Review: 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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428Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting TogetherPhilosophical Quarterly 65 (260): 582-585. 2015.I praise Bratman's minimal account of shared agency, while expressing some doubts about the explanatory force of his central concepts and some puzzlement about what he means by norms.
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3Consciousness Explained (review)Cogito 7 (2): 159-161. 1993.Generally approving review of Dennett for a non-professional audience.
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149IX*—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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417The concepts of knowledge and of accomplishment have many similarities. In fact they are duals, in a sense that I explain. Similar issues arise about both of them, deriving from the functions they serve in everyday evaluation of inquiry and action.
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423Formal Semantics of Natural Language (review)Canadian Journal of Philosophy 12 (4): 805-808. 1982.a review of Keenan, ed. *Formal Semantics of Natural Language*
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196Review: John L. Pollock, Language and Thought (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 50 (1): 252-252. 1985.
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281Against the Ramsey testAnalysis 64 (4): 294-299. 2004.I argue against the Ramsey test connecting indicative conditionals with conditional probability, by means of examples in which conditional probability is high but the conditional is intuitively implausible. At the end of the paper, I connect these issues to patterns of belief revision.
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24A vegetarian argument: We should avoid meat not because we think that animals are like us but because most animals are very different from humans. Most animals are not persons: they think and feel but do not have thoughts and feelings about their thoughts and feelings. With persons the obligation to prevent suffering, and indeed the obligation to preserve life, can be over-ridden by mutual agreement. I'll risk my life and welfare to protect your children if you do the same for mine. And even whe…Read more
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428Epistemic virtues, metavirtues, and computational complexityNoûs 38 (3). 2004.I argue that considerations about computational complexity show that all finite agents need characteristics like those that have been called epistemic virtues. The necessity of these virtues follows in part from the nonexistence of shortcuts, or efficient ways of finding shortcuts, to cognitively expensive routines. It follows that agents must possess the capacities – metavirtues –of developing in advance the cognitive virtues they will need when time and memory are at a premium.
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26Phenomenal and attentional consciousness may be inextricableBehavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (2): 263-264. 1995.In common sense consciousness has a fairly determinate content – the (single) way an experience feels, the (single) line of thought being consciously followed. The determinacy of the object may be achieved by linking Block's two concepts, so that as long as we hold on to the determinacy of content we are unable to separate P and A.