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99Emotion 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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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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1587Scientific 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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288Collective 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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. 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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127Reply 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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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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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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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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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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354A 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.
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20II—Adam Morton: Emotional AccuracyAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 76 (1): 265-275. 2002.
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283Lockhart’s problemThe Philosophers' Magazine 25 (30): 25-30. 2014.If we had more powerful minds would we be puzzled by less - because we could make better theories - or by more - because we could ask more difficult questions? This paper focuses on clarifying the question, with an emphasis on comparisons between actual and possible species of thinker. A pre-publication version of the paper is available on my website at http://www.fernieroad.ca/a/PAPERS/papers.html .
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556Contrastive knowledgePhilosophical Explorations 6 (2). 2003.We describe the three place relation of contrastive knowledge, which holds between a person, a target proposition, and a contrasting proposition. The person knows that p rather than that q. We argue for three claims about this relation. (a) Many common sense and philosophical ascriptions of knowledge can be understood in terms of it. (b) Its application is subject to fewer complications than non-contrastive knowledge is. (c) It applies over a wide range of human and nonhuman cases.
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312Did 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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463If I were a Dry Well-Made MatchDialogue 12 (2): 322-324. 1973.I discuss Goodman's claim that when 'all As are Bs' is a law then the counterfactual 'if a were an A, it would be a B' is tue. I give counterexamples, and link the failure of the connection to the contrast between higher level and lower level laws
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545Shared Knowledge from Individual Vice: the role of unworthy epistemic emotionsPhilosophical Inquiries. 2014.This paper begins with a discussion the role of less-than-admirable epistemic emotions in our respectable, indeed admirable inquiries: nosiness, obsessiveness, wishful thinking, denial, partisanship. The explanation for their desirable effect is Mandevillian: because of the division of epistemic labour individual epistemic vices can lead to shared knowledge. In fact it is sometimes essential to it.
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259Saving 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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415Contrastive 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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217Review 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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471Contrastivity and indistinguishabilitySocial Epistemology 22 (3). 2008.We give a general description of a class of contrastive constructions, intended to capture what is common to contrastive knowledge, belief, hope, fear, understanding and other cases where one expresses a propositional attitude in terms of “rather than”. The crucial element is the agent's incapacity to distinguish some possibilities from others. Contrastivity requires a course-graining of the set of possible worlds. As a result, contrastivity will usually cut across logical consequence, so that a…Read more
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