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125Savoir FaireJournal of Philosophy 100 (3): 158-166. 2003.This paper challenges the linguistic arguments Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson gave in support of their thesis that knowing how is a species of knowing that.
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109Old Adams BuriedAnalytic Philosophy 54 (2): 157-188. 2013.I present some counterexamples to Adams's Thesis and explain how they undermine arguments that indicative conditionals cannot be truth-evaluable propositions
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47Donald Davidson and the Mirror of MeaningPhilosophical Quarterly 45 (178): 136. 1995.Review of J.E. Malpas, *Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning* (CUP)
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18The vagaries of paraphrase: a reply to Holton on the counting problemAnalysis 56 (4): 246-250. 1996.Peer Reviewed.
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48Truth and the determination of content: Variations on themes from frege’sGrazer Philosophische Studien 82 (1): 1-48. 2011.
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640Tempered pragmatismIn Cheryl Misak & Huw Price (eds.), The Practical Turn: Pragmatism in Britain in the Long Twentieth Century, Oup/ba. 2016.This paper assesses the prospects of a pragmatist theory of content. I begin by criticising the theory presented in D.H. Mellor’s essay ‘Successful Semantics’. I then identify problems and lacunae in the pragmatist theory of meaning sketched in Chapter 13 of Dummett’s The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. The prospects are brighter, I contend, for a tempered pragmatism, in which the theory of content is permitted to draw upon irreducible notions of truth and falsity. I sketch the shape of such a…Read more
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199Ricky ponting and the judgesAnalysis 70 (2): 205-210. 2010.This article proposes revisions to the Laws of Cricket and to the criminal law of England. The Laws of Cricket should be revised so that an umpire may give a batsman out without having to specify precisely how he got out. The criminal law should be revised so that (e.g.) aiding and abetting a murderer is not subsumed under the crime of murder.
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5Meaning and understandingIn Frank Jackson & Michael Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy, Oxford University Press Uk. 2005.
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136On A Neglected Path to IntuitionismTopoi 31 (1): 101-109. 2012.According to Quine, in any disagreement over basic logical laws the contesting parties must mean different things by the connectives or quantifiers implicated in those laws; when a deviant logician ‘tries to deny the doctrine he only changes the subject’. The standard semantics for intuitionism offers some confirmation for this thesis, for it represents an intuitionist as attaching quite different senses to the connectives than does a classical logician. All the same, I think Quine was wrong, ev…Read more
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244Knowledge by deductionGrazer Philosophische Studien 77 (1): 61-84. 2008.It seems beyond doubt that a thinker can come to know a conclusion by deducing it from premisses that he knows already, but philosophers have found it puzzling how a thinker could acquire knowledge in this way. Assuming a broadly externalist conception of knowledge, I explain why judgements competently deduced from known premisses are themselves knowledgeable. Assuming an exclusionary conception of judgeable content, I further explain how such judgements can be informative. (According to the exc…Read more
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174Frege's theory of predication: An elaboration and defense, with some new applicationsPhilosophical Review 103 (4): 599-637. 1994.
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38The Boundary Stones of Thought: An Essay in the Philosophy of LogicOxford University Press. 2015.Classical logic has been attacked by adherents of rival, anti-realist logical systems: Ian Rumfitt comes to its defence. He considers the nature of logic, and how to arbitrate between different logics. He argues that classical logic may dispense with the principle of bivalence, and may thus be liberated from the dead hand of classical semantics.
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714Vagueness and Intuitionistic LogicIn Alexander Miller (ed.), Language, Logic,and Mathematics: Themes from the Philosophy of Crispin Wright, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.In his essay ‘“Wang’s Paradox”’, Crispin Wright proposes a solution to the Sorites Paradox (in particular, the form of it he calls the ‘Paradox of Sharp Boundaries’) that involves adopting intuitionistic logic when reasoning with vague predicates. He does not give a semantic theory which accounts for the validity of intuitionistic logic (and the invalidity of stronger logics) in that area. The present essay tentatively makes good the deficiency. By applying a theorem of Tarski, it shows that …Read more
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31Structures and Categories for the Representation of MeaningPhilosophical Review 105 (2): 264. 1996.Review of Timothy Potts, *Structures and Categories for the Representation of Meaning* (CUP).
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65Making It Explicit (review)Philosophical Review 106 (3): 437-441. 1997.In developing his alternative, Brandom starts from a version of inferential-role semantics according to which an assertion's content is constituted by its place in a field of inferential relations. It is because we have "an independent theoretical grip on the notion of an inference", and of its goodness or badness, that we are able to attain a notion of content that is prior to any of the representational concepts. He stresses that the relevant assessment of inferences is not whether they are lo…Read more
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98Inference, Deduction, LogicIn John Bengson & Marc A. Moffett (eds.), Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind, and Action, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 334. 2011.
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207Contingent existentsPhilosophy 78 (4): 461-481. 2003.Timothy Williamson has recently put forward a proof that every object exists necessarily. I show where the proof fails. My diagnosis also exposes the fallacy in A. N. Prior's argument in favour of his modal logic, Q.
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757Against HarmonyIn B. Hale & Crispin Wright (eds.), Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Blackwell. 1995.Many prominent writers on the philosophy of logic, including Michael Dummett, Dag Prawitz, Neil Tennant, have held that the introduction and elimination rules of a logical connective must be ‘in harmony ’ if the connective is to possess a sense. This Harmony Thesis has been used to justify the choice of logic: in particular, supposed violations of it by the classical rules for negation have been the basis for arguments for switching from classical to intuitionistic logic. The Thesis has also had…Read more
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197Plural terms : Another variety of reference?In José Luis Bermúdez (ed.), Thought, reference, and experience: themes from the philosophy of Gareth Evans, Clarendon Press. pp. 84--123. 2005.
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78Logic and existenceAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 73 (1). 1999.[Ian Rumfitt] Frege's logicism in the philosophy of arithmetic consisted, au fond, in the claim that in justifying basic arithmetical axioms a thinker need appeal only to methods and principles which he already needs to appeal in order to justify paradigmatically logical truths and paradigmatically logical forms of inference. Using ideas of Gentzen to spell out what these methods and principles might include, I sketch a strategy for vindicating this logicist claim for the special case of the ari…Read more
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201Yes and noMind 109 (436): 781-823. 2000.In what does the sense of a sentential connective consist? Like many others, I hold that its sense lies in rules that govern deductions. In the present paper, however, I argue that a classical logician should take the relevant deductions to be arguments involving affirmative or negative answers to yes-or-no questions that contain the connective. An intuitionistic logician will differ in concentrating exclusively upon affirmative answers. I conclude by arguing that a well known intuitionistic cri…Read more
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