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183Comment on RortyIn Alan 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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359I identify two components in the perception of musical pitches, which make pitch perception more like colour perception than it is usually taken to be. To back up this implausible claim I describe a programme whereby individuals can learn to identify the components in musical tones. I also claim that following this programme can affect one's pitch-recognition capacities
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354Can Edgington Gibbard counterfactuals?Mind 106 (421): 101-105. 1997.A criticism of Dorothy Edgington's attempt to make Gibbard's problem for indicative conditionals apply to counterfactuals.
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697Emotional TruthAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 76 247-275. 2002.[Ronald de Sousa] 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…Read more
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608Inequity/Iniquity: Card on Balancing Injustice and evilHypatia 19 (4): 199-203. 2004.Card argues that we should not give injustice priority over evil. I agree. But I think Card sets us up for some difficult balancings, for example of small evils against middle sized injustices. I suggest some ways of staying off the tightrope.
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11Review: Mark Platts, Reference, Truth and Reality: Essays on the Philosophy of Language (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 48 (1): 208-211. 1983.
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218Colour appearances and the colour solidIn Andrew Harrison (ed.), Philosophy And The Visual Arts, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1987.
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284The Theory of Knowledge: Saving Epistemology from the EpistemologistsIn Peter Clark & Katherine Hawley (eds.), Philosophy of science today, Oxford University Press. pp. 39. 2003.
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236From 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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49Benacerraf 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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48The Matter of Chance. By D. H. Mellor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Toronto, Macmillan of Canada. 1971. Pp. xiii, 190. $12.95 (review)Dialogue 12 (1): 154-156. 1973.review of Mellor's *The Matter of Chance*
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386Imaginary 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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423The chaology of mindAnalysis 48 (3): 135. 1988.I explore the possibility that mentality can be characterized as a level in between the functional and the neurological, namely as a physical system exhibiting a specific kind of chaos. The argument is meant to make a case for this kind of characterization rather than giving one in specific detail.
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721Denying the doctrine and changing the subjectJournal of Philosophy 70 (15): 503-510. 1973.I discuss Quine's claim that anyone denying what we now take to be a logical truth would be using logical words in a novel way. I trace this to a confusions between outright denial and failure to assert, and assertion of a negation. (This abstract is written from memory decades after the article.)
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38Game theory and knowledge by simulationRatio 7 (1): 14-25. 1994.I discuss how simulating another agent can be useful in some game-theoretical situations, particularly iterated games such as the centipede game.
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364Skookumchuck, Kiidk’yaas, Gibbard: normativity, meaning, and idealizationCanadian Journal of Philosophy 44 (1): 148-161. 2014.I tried to tease out what Gilbert means by "normative". It isn't obvious. I conclude that assumptions about ideal agents – not just ideal in the sense of error-free but also ideal in the sense of unlimited – and assumptions about ideal placement of oneself in another person's situation, are essential to what he means. I conclude that what he says is very plausible given these assumptions, though they themselves are very problematic. Especially problematic is the idea of an unlimited simulation o…Read more
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898Conventional Norms of ReasoningDialogue 50 (2): 247-260. 2011.I describe conventions not of correct reasoning but of giving and taking advice about reasoning. This article is asn anticipation of part of the first chapter of my forthcoming *Bounded Thinking*, OUP 2012.
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404Indicative 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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414Review of Yablo *Aboutness* (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2014-09-14). 2014.expanded version of NDPR review of Yablo's Abpoutness
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350
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34Who Am I?Cogito 4 (3): 186-191. 1990.This is a popularisation of ideas current when it was written, on personal identity and the concept of a person, making a link with problems about 'knowing who' on the border of epistemology and the philosophy of language.
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487Human 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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169Review (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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37[Book review] mind in action, essays in the philosophy of mind (review)Ethics 102 (4): 844-. 1992.
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32Teaching PhilosophyCogito 8 (1): 73-79. 1994.I discuss techniques for group discussion in a large class.
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610Folk psychology does not existIn Daniel D. Hutto & Matthew Ratcliffe (eds.), Folk Psychology Re-Assessed, Springer Press. pp. 211--221. 2007.I discuss the possibility that there is no intrinsic unity to the capacities which are bundled under the label "folk psychology". Cooperative skills, attributional skills, and predictive skills may be scattered as parts of other non--psychological capacities. I discuss how some forms of social life bring these different skills together. I end with some remarks on how abilities that are not unified in their essential mechanisms may still form a rough practical unity. (Remark: the paper is conject…Read more