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1207Denying 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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623Knowing 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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616Review of McGinn *Ethics, Evil, and Fiction* (review)The Times Literary Supplement (4946): 28-29. 1998.I try to distinguish McGinn's separation of evil from mere wrong from his aesthetic theory of morality. I argue that the combination is dangeroous.
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1189The 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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1407Conventional 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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1384Inequity/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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786Skookumchuck, 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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1133Causation: A Realist ApproachPhilosophical Books 30 (3): 157-161. 1989.a review of Tooley's Causation: a realist approach*, with emphasis on his use of probability and Ramsey sentences.
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564From 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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643Review 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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579Review 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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64Who 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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791A 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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83Teaching PhilosophyCogito 8 (1): 73-79. 1994.I discuss techniques for group discussion in a large class.
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1164Epistemic 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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765Imaginary 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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622Review: If (review)Mind 115 (458): 409-412. 2006.review of Evans & Over *ifs*, a book on the psychology of conditionals.
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35The inevitability of folk psychologyIn Radu J. Bogdan (ed.), Mind and Common Sense: Philosophical Essays on Common Sense Psychology, Cambridge University Press. 1991.
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457Deviant Logic (review)Journal of Philosophy 74 (5): 308-311. 1977.review of Susan Haack's *Deviant Logic*
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1131Indicative 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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544Acting 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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898Talk About BeliefsPhilosophical Books 35 (1): 47-49. 1994.review of Mark Crimmins' *Talk about Beliefs*
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1426Complex individuals and multigrade relationsNoûs 9 (3): 309-318. 1975.I relate plural quantification, and predicate logic where predicates do not need a fixed number of argument places, to the part-whole relation. For more on these themes see later work by Boolos, Lewis, and Oliver & Smiley.
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978Human 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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571Colour appearances and the colour solidIn Andrew Harrison (ed.), Philosophy And The Visual Arts, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1987.
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109The reality of the symbolic and subsymbolic systemsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (1): 58-58. 1988.
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1555Folk PsychologyIn Brian 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.
