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42Beliefs and Concepts: Comments on Brian Loar, "Must Beliefs Be Sentences?"PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1982. 1982.Concepts, not the beliefs employing them, have uses or roles in thought. Most conceptual roles cannot be specified solipsistically, and do not have inner aspects that can be specified solipsistically. (To think otherwise is to confuse function with misfunction.) A theory of truth conditions plays no useful part in any adequate account of conceptual role. Ordinary views about beliefs assign them conceptual structures which figure in explanations of functional relations. Which conceptual structure…Read more
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53Explaining ValueSocial Philosophy and Policy 11 (1): 229-248. 1994.I am concerned with values in the descriptive rather than in the normative sense. I am interested in theories that seek to explain one or another aspect of people's moral psychology. Why do people value what they value? Why do they have other moral reactions? What accounts for their feelings, their motivations to act morally, and their opinions about obligation, duty, rights, justice, and what people ought to do? A moral theory like utilitarianism may be put forward as offering the correct norma…Read more
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7623What is moral relativism?In A. I. Goldman & I. Kim (eds.), Values and Morals, D. Reidel. pp. 143--161. 1978.
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97Moral Philosophy and LinguisticsThe Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 1 107-115. 1999.Any acceptable account of moral epistemology must accord with the following points. (1) Different people acquire seemingly very different moralities. (2) All normal people acquire a moral sense, whether or not they are given explicit moral instruction. Language resembles morality in these ways. There is considerable evidence from linguistics for linguistic universals. This suggests that (3) despite the first point, there are moral universals. If so, it might be possible to develop a moral episte…Read more
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62Davidson's contribution to the philosophy of languageIn Gerhard Preyer (ed.), Donald Davidson on truth, meaning, and the mental, Oxford University Press. 2012.The most basic theme in Davidson’s writings in philosophy of language in the 1960s is that we are finite beings whose mastery of the indefinitely many expressions of our language must somehow arise out of our mastery of finite resources. Otherwise, there would be an unbounded number of distinct things to learn in learning a language, which would make language learning..
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164Self-reflexive thoughtsPhilosophical Issues 16 (1): 334-345. 2006.Alice has insomnia. She has trouble falling asleep and part of the problem is that she worries about it and realizes that her worrying about it tends to keep from falling asleep. It occurs to her that thinking that she will not be able to fall asleep may be a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps she even has a thought that might be expressed like this: I am not going to fall asleep because of my having this very thought. This thought attributes to itself the property of keeping her awake
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Lx8i^^ g? Jn view~In Steven Luper (ed.), Essential Knowledge: Readings in Epistemology, Longman. pp. 167. 2003.
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37Phenomenal fallacies and conflationsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (2): 256-257. 1995.A “fallacy” is something like the sense-datum fallacy, involving a logically invalid argument. A “conflation” is something like Block's conflation of the (alleged) raw feel of an experience with what it is like to have the experience. Trivially, a self is conscious of something only if it accesses it. Substantive issues concern the nature of the conscious self and the nature of access.
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20Response to Shaffer, Thagard, Strevens and HansonAbstracta 5 (S3): 47-56. 2009.Like Glenn Shafer, we are nostalgic for the time when “philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists interested in probability, induction, and scientific methodology talked with each other more than they do now”, [p.10]. 1 Shafer goes on to mention other relevant contemporary communities. He himself has been at the interface of many of these communities while at the same time making major contributions to them and this very symposium represents something of that desired discussion. We begin with …Read more
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92Justice and Moral BargainingSocial Philosophy and Policy 1 (1): 114. 1983.INTRODUCTION In my view, justice is entirely conventional; indeed, all of morality consists in conventions that are the result of continual tacit bargaining and adjustment. This is not to say social arrangements are just whenever they are in accordance with the principles of justice accepted in that society. We can use our own principles of justice in judging the institutions of another society, and we can appeal to some principles we accept in order to criticize other principles we accept. To u…Read more
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116In these notes, I will use the word “reasoning” to refer to something people do. The general category includes both internal reasoning, reasoning things out by oneself—inference and deliberation—and external reasoning with others—arguing, discussing and negotiating.
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Immanent and transcendent approaches to the theory of meaningIn Roger Gibson & Robert B. Barrett (eds.), Perspectives on Quine, Blackwell. 1990.
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144Reasoning, meaning, and mindOxford University Press. 1999.In this important new collection, Gilbert Harman presents a selection of fifteen interconnected essays on fundamental issues at the center of analytic philosophy. The book opens with a group of four essays discussing basic principles of reasoning and rationality. The next three essays argue against the once popular idea that certain claims are true and knowable by virtue of meaning. In the third group of essays Harman presents his own view of meaning and the possibility of thinking in language T…Read more
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24General Foundations versus Rational InsightPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 63 (3): 657-663. 2001.BonJour offers two main reasons for supposing that there is such a thing as rational insight into necessity. First, he says there are many examples in which it clearly seems that one has such insight. Second, he argues that any epistemology denying the existence of rational insight into necessity is committed to a narrow skepticism. After commenting about possible frameworks for epistemological justification, I argue against these two claims in reverse order.
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329The Problem of InductionPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (3): 559-575. 2006.The problem of induction is sometimes motivated via a comparison between rules of induction and rules of deduction. Valid deductive rules are necessarily truth preserving, while inductive rules are not.
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1CharacterIn John M. Doris (ed.), Moral Psychology Handbook, Oxford University Press. pp. 355--401. 2010.
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866Moral relativism defendedPhilosophical Review 84 (1): 3-22. 1975.My thesis is that morality arises when a group of people reach an implicit agreement or come to a tacit understanding about their relations with one another. Part of what I mean by this is that moral judgments - or, rather, an important class of them - make sense only in relation to and with reference to one or another such agreement or understanding. This is vague, and I shall try to make it more precise in what follows. But it should be clear that I intend to argue for a version of what has be…Read more
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3RationalityIn E. E. Smith & D. N. Osherson (eds.), Invitation to Cognitive Science, Mit Press. 1995.
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14Epistemology and the Diet RevolutionIn John O'Leary-Hawthorne & Michaelis Michael (eds.), Philosophy in Mind, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 203--214. 1994.
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