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257Review of VaguenessPhilosophical Books 36 (4): 272-276. 1995.review of Williamson's *Vagueness*
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269Heuristics 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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446Review of Armstrong & Malcolm *Consciousness and Causality* (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 36 (3): 341-344. 1985.Malcolm and Armstrong think they are disagreeing, but in fact they share some's apprehensions about mental states, particularly perceptual states
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269Review 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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346The possible in the actualNoûs 7 (4): 394-407. 1973.I give models for modal languages in which all individuals are actual.
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528Folk PsychologyIn Brian P. 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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316A 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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2960Epistemic EmotionsIn Peter Goldie (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion, Oxford University Press. pp. 385--399. 2009.I discuss a large number of emotions that are relevant to performance at epistemic tasks. My central concern is the possibility that it is not the emotions that are most relevant to success of these tasks but associated virtues. I present cases in which it does seem to be the emotions rather than the virtues that are doing the work. I end of the paper by mentioning the connections between desirable and undesirable epistemic emotions.
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268Knowing what to think about: When epistemology meets the theory of choiceIn Stephen Cade Hetherington (ed.), Epistemology futures, Oxford University Press. pp. 111--30. 2006.
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40CorrespondencePhilosophy and Public Affairs 2 (4): 407-432. 1973.I discuss Tooley's use of the concept of a person with respect to other moral issues such as justifiable suicide.
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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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360I 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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699Emotional 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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609Inequity/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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222Colour 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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50Benacerraf 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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388Imaginary 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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426The 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.