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198Ricky 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. 2005.
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133On 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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685Vagueness 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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54Structures 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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64Making 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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97Inference, 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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205Contingent 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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744Against HarmonyIn Bob Hale, Crispin Wright & Alexander Miller (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Blackwell. forthcoming.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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195Plural 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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235Yes 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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336Truth conditions and communicationMind 104 (416): 827-862. 1995.The paper addresses itself to the "Homeric struggle" in the theory of meaning between those (e.g., Grice) who try to analyze declarative meaning in terms of an intention to induce a belief and those (e.g., Davidson) for who declarative meaning consists in truth conditions. (The point of departure is Strawson's celebrated discussion of this issue, in his Inaugural Lecture.) I argue that neither style of analysis is satisfactory, and develop a "hybrid" that may be-although what I take from the Gri…Read more
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141Sense and EvidenceThe Monist 96 (2): 177-204. 2013.There are many theories which say how the truth-value (the Fregean reference) of a complete sentence depends on the references of its parts. The present paper proposes a theory of how the Fregean sense of a sentences depends on the senses of its parts. A sentence's sense is related to the evidence that would justify its assertion. The theory characterizes the senses of 'and', 'or', 'not', and 'if...then'.
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44Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (review)Philosophical Review 106 (3): 437. 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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136Co-ordination principles: A replyMind 117 (468): 1059-1063. 2008.I explain why Fernando Ferreira's interesting formal result does not threaten the bilateralist account of the sense of the connectives.
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112The vagaries of paraphrase: A reply to Holton on the counting problemAnalysis 56 (4). 1996.In his 'paratactic' analysis of indirect speech reports, Davidson took the occurrence of 'that' in 'Galileo said that the Earth moves' to be a demonstrative expression which refers to the reporter's subsequent utterance of 'the Earth moves'. Ian McFetridge used his 'counting problem' to argue that we get a better version of the paratactic theory if we take the demonstrative 'that' to refer to the proposition expressed by the reporter's utterance, rather than to the utterance itself. In this note…Read more
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