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7Philosophy of Science and the OccultSUNY Press. 1982.Philosophy of science is a paradigm of contemporary intellectual rigor. It offers a challenge of clarification, a promise of systematic understanding, and an invitation to innovative conceptual exploration. Such is its appeal. The occult traditions are steeped in antiquity. They reach us with an atmosphere of mystery, a whisper of wisdom, and a hint of beckoning unknown. Such is their appeal. This is an attempted to bring the two together.
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11happy face, in my view, is this. It starts with two simple claims about our language that I think just have to be right. On the basis of essentially those two claims alone it offers what I think is a very plausible account of both (1) what really is wrong with the argument and (2) why there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the argument.
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31Location, location, location: The importance of spatialization in modeling cooperation and communicationInteraction Studiesinteraction Studies Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems 7 (1): 43-78. 2006.Most current modeling for evolution of communication still underplays or ignores the role of local action in spatialized environments: the fact that it is immediate neighbors with which one tends to communicate, and from whom one learns strategies or conventions of communication. Only now are the lessons of spatialization being learned in a related field: game-theoretic models for cooperation. In work on altruism, on the other hand, the role of spatial organization has long been recognized under…Read more
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111Worlds by supervenience: Some further problemsAnalysis 57 (2): 146-51. 1997.Allen s has proposed a new approach to possible worlds, designed explicitly to overcome Cantorian difficulties for possible worlds construed as maximal consistent set of propositions. I emphasize some of the distinctive features of Hazenworlds, some of their weaknesses, and some further Cantorian problems for worlds against which they seem powerless.
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98How simulations failSynthese 190 (12): 2367-2390. 2011.‘The problem with simulations is that they are doomed to succeed.’ So runs a common criticism of simulations—that they can be used to ‘prove’ anything and are thus of little or no scientific value. While this particular objection represents a minority view, especially among those who work with simulations in a scientific context, it raises a difficult question: what standards should we use to differentiate a simulation that fails from one that succeeds? In this paper we build on a structural ana…Read more
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13The Incomplete Universe: Totality, Knowledge, and TruthMass.: Mit Press. 1991.This is an exploration of a cluster of related logical results. Taken together these seem to have something philosophically important to teach us: something about knowledge and truth and something about the logical impossibility of totalities of knowledge and truth. The book includes explorations of new forms of the ancient and venerable paradox of the :Liar, applications and extensions of Kaplan and Montague's paradox of the Knower, generalizations of Godel's work on incompleteness, and new u…Read more
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304Computational Modeling as a Philosophical MethodologyIn Luciano Floridi (ed.), The Blackwell guide to the philosophy of computing and information, Blackwell. 2003.Since the sixties, computational modeling has become increasingly important in both the physical and the social sciences, particularly in physics, theoretical biology, sociology, and economics. Sine the eighties, philosophers too have begun to apply computational modeling to questions in logic, epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of biology, ethics, and social and political philosophy. This chapter analyzes a selection of interesting exam…Read more
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2Plantinga, hartshorne, and the ontological argumentSophia 20 (2): 12-16. 1981.R l purtill has claimed that the ontological argument that plantinga presents in "the nature of necessity" is basically the same as that offered in hartshorne's "the logic of perfection" and that it falls victim to the same criticisms. i argue that plantinga's ontological argument is different enough "not" to fall victim to purtill's criticisms. what makes plantinga's argument different, however, also makes it vulnerable to a different criticism: the god of plantinga's conclusion is not a being …Read more
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89Operators in the paradox of the knowerSynthese 94 (3). 1993.Predicates are term-to-sentence devices, and operators are sentence-to-sentence devices. What Kaplan and Montague's Paradox of the Knower demonstrates is that necessity and other modalities cannot be treated as predicates, consistent with arithmetic; they must be treated as operators instead. Such is the current wisdom.A number of previous pieces have challenged such a view by showing that a predicative treatment of modalities neednot raise the Paradox of the Knower. This paper attempts to chall…Read more
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174In behalf of 'in behalf of the fool'International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 13 (1). 1982.Gaunilo updated.
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14The Incomplete Universe: Totality, Knowledge, and TruthPhilosophical Quarterly 44 (176): 409. 1994.
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8The undecidability of the spatialized prisoner's dilemmaTheory and Decision 42 (1): 53-80. 1997.In the spatialized Prisoner's Dilemma, players compete against their immediate neighbors and adopt a neighbor's strategy should it prove locally superior. Fields of strategies evolve in the manner of cellular automata (Nowak and May, 1993; Mar and St. Denis, 1993a,b; Grim 1995, 1996). Often a question arises as to what the eventual outcome of an initial spatial configuration of strategies will be: Will a single strategy prove triumphant in the sense of progressively conquering more and more terr…Read more
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113Some Neglected Problems of OmniscienceAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 20 (3): 265-277. 1983.One set of neglected problems consists of paradoxes of omniscience clearly recognizable as forms of the Liar, and these I have never seen raised at all. Other neglected problems are difficulties for omniscience posed by recent work on belief de se and essential indexicals. These have not yet been given the attention they deserve.
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3Philosophy for computers: Some explorations in philosophical modelingIn James Moor & Terrell Ward Bynum (eds.), Cyberphilosophy: the intersection of philosophy and computing, Blackwell. pp. 181-209. 2002.
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