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378But are they right? The prospects for empirical conceptologyJournal of Cognition and Culture 6 (1-2): 193-197. 2006.This is exciting stuff. Philosophers have long explored the structure of human concepts from the inside, by manipulating their skills as users of those concepts. And since Quine most reasonable philosophers have accepted that the structure is a contingent matter – we or not too different creatures could have thought differently – which in principle can be..
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968The architecture of reason: The Structure and Substance of Rationality (review)Philosophy 77 (3): 454-471. 2002.I admire Audi's intentions in discussing the rationality of beliefs, desires, and actions together, and doubt that this can be done internalistically, as he tries.
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25Domains of discourse and common-sense metaphysicsIn Charles Travis (ed.), Meaning and interpretation, Blackwell. 1986.a discussion of contextual factors determining the domains of quantifiers. Since the time it was written, much more satisfying work on the topic has been done by Stanley, Williamson, Bach, and Gauker.
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25II—Adam Morton: Emotional AccuracyAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 76 (1): 265-275. 2002.
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334Book Review:Studies in Perception Peter K. Machamer, Robert G. Turnbull (review)Philosophy of Science 46 (4): 657-. 1979.
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620Saving epistemology from the epistemologists: recent work in the theory of knowledgeBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 51 (4): 685-704. 2000.This is a very selective survey of developments in epistemology, concentrating on work from the past twenty years that is of interest to philosophers of science. The selection is organized around interesting connections between distinct themes. I first connect issues about skepticism to issues about the reliability of belief-acquiring processes. Next I connect discussions of the defeasibility of reasons for belief to accounts of the theory-independence of evidence. Then I connect doubts about Ba…Read more
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256Heuristics all the way up?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (5): 758-759. 2000.I investigate whether heuristics similar to those studied by Gigerenzer and his co-authors can apply to the problem of finding a suitable heuristic for a given problem. I argue that not only can heuristics of a very similar kind apply but they have the added advantage that they need not incorporate specific trade-off parameters for balancing the different desiderata of a good decision-procedure.
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357Review of Sosa Knowing Full Well (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 23. 2011.A review of Ernest Sosa's *Knowing Full Well* focusing on the safety/reliability contrast and the relation between knowledge and action. There are also remarks on the issue of what value knowledge adds to true belief.
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506Causation: A Realist ApproachPhilosophical Books 30 (3): 157-161. 1989.a review of Tooley's Causation: a realist approach*, with emphasis on his use of probability and Ramsey sentences.
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240Review of VaguenessPhilosophical Books 36 (4): 272-276. 1995.review of Williamson's *Vagueness*
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474Review of Armstrong & Malcolm *Consciousness and Causality* (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 36 (3): 341-344. 1985.Malcolm and Armstrong think they are disagreeing, but in fact they share some's apprehensions about mental states, particularly perceptual states
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249Review of McLennen *Rationality and Dynamic Choice* (review)Mind 101 (402): 381-383. 1992.review of McLennen's *Rationality and Dynamic Choice*. The topic is important and the discussion is powerful. Some connection with modelling and simulation would be valuable.
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323The possible in the actualNoûs 7 (4): 394-407. 1973.I give models for modal languages in which all individuals are actual.
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478Folk PsychologyIn Brian McLaughlin, Ansgar Beckermann & Sven Walter (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind, Oxford University Press. 2009.I survey the previous 20 years work on the nature of folk psychology, with particular emphasis on the original debate between theory theorists and simulation theorists, and the positions that have emerged from this debate.
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299A note on comparing death and painBioethics 2 (2). 1988.I give ways of comparing the disvalue of death and of pain by comparing each to other evils.
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2890Epistemic EmotionsIn Peter Goldie (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion, Oxford University Press. pp. 385--399. 2009.I discuss a large number of emotions that are relevant to performance at epistemic tasks. My central concern is the possibility that it is not the emotions that are most relevant to success of these tasks but associated virtues. I present cases in which it does seem to be the emotions rather than the virtues that are doing the work. I end of the paper by mentioning the connections between desirable and undesirable epistemic emotions.
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248Knowing what to think about: When epistemology meets the theory of choiceIn Stephen Hetherington (ed.), Epistemology Futures, Oxford University Press. pp. 111--30. 2006.
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40CorrespondencePhilosophy and Public Affairs 2 (4): 407-432. 1973.I discuss Tooley's use of the concept of a person with respect to other moral issues such as justifiable suicide.
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590Inequity/Iniquity: Card on Balancing Injustice and evilHypatia 19 (4): 199-203. 2004.Card argues that we should not give injustice priority over evil. I agree. But I think Card sets us up for some difficult balancings, for example of small evils against middle sized injustices. I suggest some ways of staying off the tightrope.
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169Comment on RortyIn A. J. Holland (ed.), Philosophy, Its History and Historiography, Reidel. pp. 85-86. 1985.Hesse and Pettit present somewhat different reconstructions of Rorty’s suggestions about the discipline that might survive the collapse of foundationalistic epistemology. They both treat Rorty’s argument very respectfully, as opening the way to an interesting new possibility. I think that they are both too charitable to him; I think that there are a lot of bad arguments in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and a quantity of simple silliness. This is not to say that the openings up of the subj…Read more
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351I identify two components in the perception of musical pitches, which make pitch perception more like colour perception than it is usually taken to be. To back up this implausible claim I describe a programme whereby individuals can learn to identify the components in musical tones. I also claim that following this programme can affect one's pitch-recognition capacities
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345Can Edgington Gibbard counterfactuals?Mind 106 (421): 101-105. 1997.A criticism of Dorothy Edgington's attempt to make Gibbard's problem for indicative conditionals apply to counterfactuals.
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667Emotional TruthAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 76 247-275. 2002.[Ronald de Sousa] Taking literally the concept of emotional truth requires breaking the monopoly on truth of belief-like states. To this end, I look to perceptions for a model of non-propositional states that might be true or false, and to desires for a model of propositional attitudes the norm of which is other than the semantic satisfaction of their propositional object. Those models inspire a conception of generic truth, which can admit of degrees for analogue representations such as emotions…Read more
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227From tracking relations to propositional attitudesEuropean Journal of Analytic Philosophy 5 (2): 7-18. 2009.I explore the possibility that propositional attitudes are not basic in folk psychology, and that what we really ascribe to people are relations to individuals, those that the apparently propositional contents of beliefs, desires, and other states concern. In particular, the relation between a state and the individuals that it tracks shows how ascription of propositional attitudes could grow out of ascription of relations between people and objects.
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27Review: Mark Platts, Reference, Truth and Reality: Essays on the Philosophy of Language (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 48 (1): 208-211. 1983.