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926Collective Rationality and Collective ReasoningPhilosophical Review 112 (1): 118-120. 2003.McMahon's connections between collective reasoning and collective action are real and important. I suspect that they do not go deep enough, and that far more that we usually classify as individual is in fact collective.
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81Lore-Abiding PeopleStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 32 (3): 601-606. 2001.I evaluate Kusch's arguments that everyday and scientific psychological beliefs are made true by the institutional facts about the people to whom they are applied. I conclude that institutional facts are among the truth-makers of such beliefs, and that this is a very significant point to have made, but that they are unlikely to be the sole such truth-makers.
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2953Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of MindPhilosophical Review 91 (2): 299. 1982.I assess Churchland's views on folk psychology and conceptual thinking, with particular emphasis on the connection between these topics.
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1053Incommensurability, incomparability, and practical reason, Ruth Chang (ed.), Harvard university press, 1998, 303 pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 16 (1): 147-174. 2000.review of Ruth Chang's collection in which I argue that the apparent agreements between the authors disguise underlying important differences.
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463Reply to WillingDialogue 13 (3): 579. 1974.I reply to Willing's criticism of my 'if I were a dry well-made match', and along the way uncover a puzzle about counterfactuals rather like Geach's donkey sentence problem
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115[Book review] mind in action, essays in the philosophy of mind (review)Ethics 102 (4): 844-. 1992.
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68What is rank?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (4): 585-585. 1998.The concept of rank is not a very clear one. Claims that two concepts occupy the same rank in different domains are in danger of being unintelligible. Examples show how hard it is to understand Atran's claim that the most significant concepts in folk biology occur at a higher level than nonbiological concepts. A reformulation preserves some of what Atran wants to claim.
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776HypercomparativesSynthese 111 (1): 97-114. 1997.In natural language we rarely use relation-words with more than three argument places. This paper studies one systematic device, rooted in natural language, by which relations of greater adicity can be expressed. It is based on a higher-order relation between 1-place, 2-place, and 4-place relations (and so on) of which the relation between the positive and comparative degrees of a predicate is a special case. Two formal languages are presented in this connection, one of which represents the lang…Read more
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974Abstracts of Comments: The Saturation of Dyspepsia: Comments on WilsonNoûs 12 (1). 1978.Wilson argued that since for continuants such as people a predicate and a time determine a place, natural language *can* specify just, e,.g. "a is dyspeptic at t" leaving the location of a's dyspepsia unstated. From this he concludes that language *must* leave the location unstated. I query the transition from *may* to *must*.
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337This is a very useful sourcebook of classic experiments, giving enough detail to show what is going on in each of them but discussing enough separate experiments that one can see a variety of experimental virtues. Franklin's attention to detail and his epistemological caution inhibit him from tackling some more adventurous questions. On what range of topics can we hope for evidence that is as convincing as this? Do essential aspects of experiment vary from one discipline to another?
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555Peter 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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959Review: 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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632Did Lewis Carroll Write Genesis?Cogito 2 (1): 12-15. 1988.I discuss the intelligibility of belief in God, presenting a neo-positivist view. It is aimed at a non-professional audience.
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934Mathematical Modelling and Contrastive ExplanationCanadian Journal of Philosophy 20 (Supplement): 251-270. 1990.Mathematical models provide explanations of limited power of specific aspects of phenomena. One way of articulating their limits here, without denying their essential powers, is in terms of contrastive explanation.
