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644Did 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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983If 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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839The 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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823Contrastive 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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. Imagination and MisimaginationIn Shaun Nichols (ed.), The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction, Oxford University Press Uk. 2006.
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683Saving 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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1342Comparatives 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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1295Folk psychology does not existIn Daniel D. Hutto & Matthew Ratcliffe (eds.), Folk Psychology Re-Assessed, Springer Press. pp. 211--221. 2007.I discuss the possibility that there is no intrinsic unity to the capacities which are bundled under the label "folk psychology". Cooperative skills, attributional skills, and predictive skills may be scattered as parts of other non--psychological capacities. I discuss how some forms of social life bring these different skills together. I end with some remarks on how abilities that are not unified in their essential mechanisms may still form a rough practical unity. (Remark: the paper is conject…Read more
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601Review of Paul Weirich, Realistic Decision Theory: Rules for Nonideal Agents in Nonideal Circumstances (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2005 (8). 2005.
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1036Because he thought he had insulted himJournal of Philosophy 72 (1): 5-15. 1975.I compare our idioms for quantifying into belief contexts to our idioms for quantifying into intention contexts. The latter is complicated by the fact that there is always a discrepancy between the action as intended and the action as performed. The article contains - this is written long after it appeared - an early version of a tracking or sensitivity analysis of the relation between a thought and its object.
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84Phenomenal and attentional consciousness may be inextricableBehavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (2): 263-264. 1995.In common sense consciousness has a fairly determinate content – the (single) way an experience feels, the (single) line of thought being consciously followed. The determinacy of the object may be achieved by linking Block's two concepts, so that as long as we hold on to the determinacy of content we are unable to separate P and A.
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649The Party-Goer's Guide to PhilosophyCogito 4 (2): 134-134. 1990.some lighthearted definitions of philosophical terms.
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1050Extensional and non-truth-functional contextsJournal of Philosophy 66 (6): 159-164. 1969.I discuss Frege's argument - later called the slingshot - that if a construction is extensional and preserves logical equivalence then it is truth-functional. I consider some simple apparent counterexamples and conclude that they are not sentence-embedding in the required way.