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94Facts as TruthmakersThe Monist 69 (2): 177-188. 1986.Facts, I am pleased to observe, are back in fashion. For some time now they have had staunch friends in the American Midwest, and these days they are embraced as far afield as Sydney and San Francisco. But what are facts, and what facts are there? My answer to the first part of this question, which I shall not pursue further, is the same as Russell’s and the early Wittgenstein’s: Facts are what constitute the objective world, and what make true sentences and thoughts true and false sentences and…Read more
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56The Projection Strategy and the Truth Conditions of Conditional StatementsMind 98 (390): 179-205. 1989.Drawing on Stalnaker’s projection strategy, a revised version of the Ramsey test, and Dudman’s account of the evaluation of projective conditionals (e.g., “If Hitler invades England, Germany will win the war” and “If Hitler had invaded England, Germany would have won the war”), I offer a novel truth-conditional account of the semantics of a range of English conditionals. This account resolves some key puzzles in the philosophical literature about semantic differences between maximally similar co…Read more
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217Reasons in ActionPhilosophical Papers 42 (3). 2013.When an agent performs an action because she takes something as a reason to do so, does she take it as a normative reason for the action or as an explanatory reason? In Reasons Without Rationalism, Setiya criticizes the normative view and advances a version of the explanatory view. This paper advances a version of the normative view and shows that it is not subject to Setiya's criticisms. It also shows that Setiya's explanatory account is subject to two fatal flaws, viz., that it raises question…Read more
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376Making Sense of Kant’s SchematismPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 55 (4): 777-797. 1995.In this paper I advance an account of Kant’s Schematism according to which a schema in general is a pattern of imaginative synthesis that explains how intuitions have the content required for them to fall under a concept corresponding to the schema. An empirical schema is a pattern of imaginative synthesis that is responsive to the qualities of the sensations involved in the intuition which it synthesizes. A transcendental schema, in contrast, is not responsive to the particular qualities of the…Read more
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26Hetherington on Possible ObjectsAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 63 (4). 1985.This Article does not have an abstract
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55Against the Power of Force: Reflections on the Meaning of MoodMind 95 (379): 361-372. 1986.According to a common account, grammatical mood is merely a conventional indicator of force with no semantic significance. Focusing on indicatives, interrogatives and imperatives, I advance two reasons to reject this “force treatment” of mood. First, it can be shown that the mood of a subordinate clause can have semantic significance that affects the sense of a sentence in which it is embedded—which the force treatment cannot accommodate. Second, the speech acts of asserting, asking and ordering…Read more
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64Stalnaker on InquiryJournal of Philosophical Logic 16 (3): 229-272. 1987.This article is an extended critical study of Robert C. Stalnaker, 'Inquiry' (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984).
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133On the Semantics of Simple and Complex Demonstratives in EnglishSouthern Journal of Philosophy 39 (4): 487-505. 2001.According to a straightforward, conservative account of English demonstratives, simple and complex demonstratives are referring expressions belonging to the same semantic category (but they could be understood as either terms or quantifiers); the denotation of a complex demonstrative “dF” (if it has one) must satisfy the nominal “F” in “dF”; and both simple and complex demonstratives function as rigid designators. According to a recent alternative advanced by Lepore and Ludgwig, simple and compl…Read more
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276Intentionality and NormativitySouth African Journal of Philosophy 17 (2): 142-151. 1998.The intentionality of virtually all thought that is distinctive of human beings is linguistically based and constitutively normative. As Robert Brandom claims in Making It Explicit, this normativity is best understood as having roots in social practice. But Brandom is wrong to insist that all intentionality is normative (thus denying intentionality to nonhuman, nonlinguistic animals). For even the simple social practices that ground the most primate norms presuppose robust nonnormative intention…Read more
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1990The Role of Imagination in PerceptionSouth African Journal of Philosophy 15 (4): 133-138. 1996.This article is an explication and defense of Kant’s view that ‘imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself’ (Critique of Pure Reason, A120, fn.). Imagination comes into perception at a far more basic level than Strawson allows, and it is required for the constitution of intuitions (= sense experiences) out of sense impressions. It also plays an important part in explaining how it is possible for intuitions to have intentional contents. These functions do not involve the applicati…Read more
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28Heidelberger on the First and Second PersonPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 46 (2): 323-331. 1985.
Indiana University
PhD, 1980
Raleigh, North Carolina, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
History of Western Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
History of Western Philosophy |