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3Reference, Truth and Reality: Essays on the Philosophy of LanguageJournal of Symbolic Logic 48 (1): 208-211. 1983.
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284Decisions, Uncertainty, and the BrainMind 114 (455): 737-739. 2005.I consider Glimcher's claim to have given an account of mental functioning that is at once neurological and decision-theoretical. I am skeptical, but remark on some good ideas of Glimcher's.
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10Reasoning: A Social Picture (review)Philosophical Quarterly 63 (253): 843-846. 2013.The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 63, Issue 253, Page 843-846, October 2013.
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42Scientific Explanation and Trade-Offs Between Explanatory VirtuesFoundations of Science 26 (4): 1075-1087. 2019.“Explanation” refers to a wide range of activities, with a family resemblance between them. Most satisfactory explanations in a discipline for a domain fail to satisfy some general desiderata, while fulfilling others. This can happen in various ways. Why? An idealizing response would be to say that in real science explanations fall short along some dimensions, so that for any explanatory failure there is a conceivable improvement that addresses its shortcomings. The improvement may be more accur…Read more
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9John L. Pollock. Language and thought. Princeton University Press, Princeton 1982, xii + 297 pp (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 50 (1): 252. 1985.
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417Should We Colonize Other Planets?Polity. 2018.A critical exposition of plans to colonize other planets , especially Mars, and their costs. The final chapter links with issues about the value and future of human life. See the extended summary uploaded to this site.
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1279Moral incompetenceIn Timothy Chappell (ed.), Values and virtues: Aristotelianism in contemporary ethics, Oxford University Press. 2006.Moral high-performers have characteristic faults. I describe difficulties in handling moral problems that arise not out of faulty intentions or defective values but because the agents underestimate the complexity of the situation.
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44Bounded Thinking: Intellectual Virtues for Limited AgentsOxford University Press. 2012.An account of the virtues of limitation management: intellectual virtues of adapting to the fact that we cannot solve many of the problems that we can describe. I argue that the best response to many problems depends not on the most rationally promising solution, but on the most likely route to success. I argue against techniques that assume that one will fulfil ones intentions, and distinguish between failures of rationality and failures of intelligence. I describe the trap of supposing that on…Read more
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662The Paradox of Self-Consciousness (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63 (3): 727-730. 2001.I discuss Bermudez' minimalist approach to self-consciousness approvingly, connecting it with other positions in philosophy and trying to separate it from ideas about non-conceptual content.
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288The roots of evil (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (2). 2008.a review of John Kekes' *The Roots of Evil*. I express admiration for the aims and scope of the book, and disagree with some of Kekes' accounts of some historical cases.
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43The Importance of Being Understood: Folk Psychology as EthicsRoutledge. 2002.I discussed the ways in which folk psychology is influenced by the need for small-scale cooperation between people. I argue that considerations about cooperation and mutual benefit can be found in the everyday concepts of belief, desire, and motivation. I describe what I call "solution thinking", where a person anticipates another person's actions by first determining the solution to the cooperative problem that the person faces and then reasoning backwards to a prediction of individual action.
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20Orders and procedures: Comments on Boltanski and ThévenotPhilosophical Explorations 3 (3). 2000.I give a simplified model of Boltanski & Thévenot's account of justice, which no doubt omits some important aspects of what they say. Using this model I explain how some properties of their account can be accounted for, and suggest that it is not clear that some others really are features of justice as described by them. My negative claims should not be taken as criticisms of their account, but rather as challenges to specify the features that are ignored by my simple model.
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1620Theory and Evidence. Clark Glymour (review)Philosophy of Science 48 (3): 498-500. 1981.review of Glymour's *Theory and Evidence* focusing on the arguments against holism.
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24Review. How to live forever: science fiction and philosophy. SRL ClarkBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48 (2): 310-312. 1997.While admiring the breadth and interest of Clark's discussion of a persistent theme in science fiction, I worry about its capacity to reveal fundamental features of the genre. I also try to make explicit some of Clark's unstated assumptions
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10Rediscovering Empathy: Agency, Folk Psychology, and the Human Sciences – Karsten R. StueberPhilosophical Quarterly 59 (237): 754-756. 2009.No Abstract
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302Reasoning: A Social Picture. By Anthony Simon LadenPhilosophical Quarterly 63 (253): 843-846. 2013.review of Laden's *Reasoning: a social picture* praising the aim and expressing puzzlement at the details,.
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1310Pride versus self-respectIn Joseph Adam Carter & Emma C. Gordon (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Pride, Rowman & Littlefield. 2017.
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97Philosophy in Practice: An Introduction to the Main QuestionsWiley-Blackwell. 1996.This is an introductory textbook of philosophy meant to enable group work in a large lecture. It has many questionnaires and materials for controlled discussions, to facilitate disgnoses of the reasons for disagreements about cases. contents: Certainty and doubt -- Sources of conviction -- Rationalism -- Rationalism versus relativism in morals -- Induction and deduction -- The retreat from certainty -- Utilitarianism -- Kantian ethics -- Empiricism -- Beyond empiricism -- Objectivity -- Material…Read more
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266Psychology for cooperatorsIn Christopher W. Morris & Arthur Ripstein (eds.), Practical Rationality and Preference: Essays for David Gauthier, Cambridge University Press. pp. 153. 2001.I discuss what learned and innate routines of self and other attribution agents need to possess if they are to enter into cooperative arrangements as described game theoretically. I conclude that these are not so different from belief desire psychology as described by philosophers of mind.
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339Philosophy goes to the movies: An introduction to philosophyBritish Journal of Aesthetics 43 (3): 332-334. 2003.review of Falzon *Philosophy goes to the Movies*
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295Review of Mark Kaplan: Decision Theory as Philosophy (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 50 (3): 505-507. 1999.
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10Hume’s Skeptical Crisis (review)International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 3 (3): 229-231. 2013.