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317Review 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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721Comparatives 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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487The Variety of RationalityAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 59 (1): 139-176. 1985.I discuss the connections between rationality and intentional action, emphasising that different kinds of action are rational an intentional in different ways.
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301HypercomparativesSynthese 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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458Because 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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376The Presidential Address: Where Demonstratives Meet Vagueness: Possible LanguagesProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 99 (1). 1999.I present three invented languages, in order to support a claim that vagueness and demonstrativity are related. One of them handles vagueness like English handles demonstratives, the second handles demonstratives like English handles vagueness, and the third combines the resources of the first two. The argument depends on the claim that all three can be learned and used by anyone who can speak English.
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6Freudian commonsenseIn Richard Wollheim & James Hopkins (eds.), Philosophical Essays on Freud, Cambridge University Press. 1982.I discuss aspects of Freudian theory that have entered folk psychology
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54110 The evolution of strategic thinkingIn Peter Carruthers & A. Chamberlain (eds.), Evolution and the Human Mind: Modularity, Language and Meta-Cognition, Cambridge University Press. pp. 218. 2000.I discuss ways in which innate human psychology facilitates the quasi-game-theoretical reasoning required for group life.
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100Emotion and ImaginationPolity. 2013.I argue that on an understanding of imagination that relates it to an individual's environment rather than her mental contents imagination is essential to emotion, and brings together affective, cognitive, and representational aspects to emotion. My examples focus on morally important emotions, especially retrospective emotions such as shame, guilt, and remorse, which require that one imagine points of view on one's own actions. PUBLISHER'S BLURB: Recent years have seen an enormous amount of phi…Read more
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433Mathematical 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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434Accomplishing AccomplishmentActa Analytica 27 (1): 1-8. 2012.The concepts of knowledge and accomplishment are duals. There are many parallels between them. In this paper I discuss the "AA" thesis, which is dual to the well known KK thesis. The KK thesis claims that if someone knows something, then she knows that she knows it. This is generally thought to be false, and there are powerful reasons for rejecting it. The AA thesis claims that if someone accomplishes something, then she accomplishes that she accomplishes it. I argue that this, too, is false, an…Read more
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1589Scientific 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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289Collective 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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423If 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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260Review: If (review)Mind 115 (458): 409-412. 2006.review of Evans & Over *ifs*, a book on the psychology of conditionals.
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345Consciousness ExplainedCogito 7 (2): 159-161. 1993.reviews of Dennett & McGinn on consciousness for an unsophisticated audience.
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18What 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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. Imagination and MisimaginationIn Shaun Nichols (ed.), The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction, Clarendon Press. 2006.
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221Acting 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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128Reply 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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17But what is the intentional schema?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 19 (1): 133-134. 1996.The intentional schema may not be sufficiently characterized to make questions about its role in individual and species development intelligible. The idea of metarepresentation may perhaps give it enough content. The importance of metarepresentation itself, however, can be called into question.
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117This 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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1106Folk psychology is not a predictive deviceMind 105 (417): 119-37. 1996.I argue that folk psychology does not serve the purpose of facilitating prediction of others' behaviour but if facilitating cooperative action. (See my subsequent book *The Importance of Being Understood*
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20II—Adam Morton: Emotional AccuracyAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 76 (1): 265-275. 2002.
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Partisanship'In Brian P. McLaughlin & Amelie O. Rorty (eds.), Perspectives on Self-Deception, University of California Press. pp. 170--182. 1988.I argue that to have a chance of acquiring valuable beliefs one must take a risk of self-deception.
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357A solution to the donkey sentence problemAnalysis 75 (4): 554-557. 2015.The problem concerns quantifiers that seem to hover between universal and existential readings. I argue that they are neither, but a different quantifier that has features of each. NOTE the published paper has a mistake. I have corrected this in the version on this site. A correction note will appear in Analysis.