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70What 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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789HypercomparativesSynthese 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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562Peter 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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980Abstracts 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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349This 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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966Review: 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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641Did 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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940Mathematical 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.
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831The concepts of knowledge and of accomplishment have many similarities. In fact they are duals, in a sense that I explain. Similar issues arise about both of them, deriving from the functions they serve in everyday evaluation of inquiry and action.
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818Contrastive KnowledgeIn Martijn Blaauw (ed.), Contrastivism in philosophy, Routledge/taylor & Francis Group. pp. 101-115. 2013.The claim of this paper is that the everyday functions of knowledge make most sense if we see knowledge as contrastive. That is, we can best understand how the concept does what it does by thinking in terms of a relation “a knows that p rather than q.” There is always a contrast with an alternative. Contrastive interpretations of knowledge, and objections to them, have become fairly common in recent philosophy. The version defended here is fairly mild in that there is no suggestion that we canno…Read more
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974If you're so smart why are you ignorant? Epistemic causal paradoxesAnalysis 62 (2): 110-116. 2002.I describe epistemic versions of the contrast between causal and conventionally probabilistic decision theory, including an epistemic version of Newcomb's paradox.
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681Saving belief from (internalist) epistemologyFacta Philosophica 5 (2): 277-95. 2003.I point out that internalist conceptions of belief that have become outmoded in the philosophy of mind are still current in epistemology (or at any rate they were in 2003). I explore the consequences of bringing epistemology up to speed with a more contemporary conception of belief.
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1329Comparatives and DegreesAnalysis 44 (1). 1984.I describe a way of handling comparative adjectives "a is P-er than b", in terms of degrees "a has P to degree d". I defend this approach against attacks due to C J F Williams in an article in the same issue of *Analysis*, by tracing his objections to the assumption that degrees must be linearly ordered. Since this abstract is written years later, I can mention that some of the ideas were taken further in my Hypercomparatives. Synthese 111, 1997, 97-114 .
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. Imagination and MisimaginationIn Shaun Nichols (ed.), The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction, Oxford University Press Uk. 2006.
