•  1111
    This paper clarifies Searle's account of we-intentions and then argues that it is subject to counterexamples, some of which are derived from examples Searle uses against other accounts. It then offers an alternative reductive account that is not subject to the counterexamples.
  •  559
    Social externalism is the view that the contents of a person's propositional attitudes are logically determined at least in part by her linguistic community's standards for the use of her words. If social externalism is correct, its importance can hardly be overemphasized. The traditional Cartesian view of psychological states as essentially first personal and non-relational in character, which has shaped much theorizing about the nature of psychological explanation, would be shown to be deeply …Read more
  •  1204
    Do corporations have minds of their own?
    Philosophical Psychology 30 (3): 265-297. 2017.
    Corporations have often been taken to be the paradigm of an organization whose agency is autonomous from that of the successive waves of people who occupy the pattern of roles that define its structure, which licenses saying that the corporation has attitudes, interests, goals, and beliefs which are not those of the role occupants. In this essay, I sketch a deflationary account of agency-discourse about corporations. I identify institutional roles with a special type of status function, a status…Read more
  •  674
    Radical skepticism about the external world is founded on two assumptions: one is that the mind and the external world are logically independent; the other is that all our evidence for the nature of that world consists of facts about our minds. In this paper, I explore the option of denying the epistemic, rather than the logical assumption. I argue that one can do so only by embracing externalism about justification, or, after all, by rejecting the logical independence assumption. Since (I ar…Read more
  •  1936
    Brains in a Vat, Subjectivity, and the Causal Theory of Reference
    Journal of Philosophical Research 17 313-345. 1992.
    This paper evaluates Putnam’s argument in the first chapter of Reason, Truth and History, for the claim that we can know that we are not brains in a vat (of a certain sort). A widespread response to Putnam’s argument has been that if it were successful not only the world but the meanings of our words (and consequently our thoughts) would be beyond the pale of knowledge, because a causal theory of reference is not compatible with our having knowledge of the meanings of our words. I argue that thi…Read more
  •  981
    Propositions and higher-order attitude attributions
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 43 (5): 741-765. 2013.
    An important objection to sententialist theories of attitude reports is that they cannot accommodate the principle that one cannot know that someone believes that p without knowing what it is that he believes. This paper argues that a parallel problem arises for propositionalist accounts that has gone largely unnoticed, and that, furthermore, the usual resources for the propositionalist do not afford an adequate solution. While non-standard solutions are available for the propositionalist, it tu…Read more
  •  149
    A Companion to Donald Davidson (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy) (edited book)
    with Ernest Lepore
    Wiley-Blackwell. 2013.
    A Companion to Donald Davidson presents newly commissioned essays by leading figures within contemporary philosophy. Taken together, they provide a comprehensive overview of Davidson’s work across its full range, and an assessment of his many contributions to philosophy. Highlights the breadth of Davidson's work across philosophy Demonstrates the continuing influence his work has on the philosophical community Includes newly commissioned contributions from leading figures in contemporary philoso…Read more
  •  689
    First-person knowledge and authority
    In Gerhard Preyer, Frank Siebelt & Alexander Ulfig (eds.), Language, Mind and Epistemology: On Donald Davidson’s Philosophy, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1994.
    Let us call a thought or belief whose content would be expressed by a sentence of subject-predicate form (by the thinker or someone attributing the thought to the thinker) an ‘ascription’. Thus, the thought that Madonna is middle-aged is an ascription of the property of being middle-aged to Madonna. To call a thought of this form an ascription is to emphasize the predicate in the sentence that gives its content. Let us call an ‘x-ascription’ an ascription whose subject is x, that is, an ascripti…Read more
  •  1710
    The Ontology of Collective Action
    In Gerhard Preyer, Frank Hindriks & Sara Rachel Chant (eds.), From Individual to Collective Intentionality: New Essays, Oxford University Press. 2014.
    What is the ontology of collective action? I have in mind three connected questions. 1. Do the truth conditions of action sentences about groups require there to be group agents over and above individual agents? 2. Is there a difference, in this connection, between action sentences about informal groups that use plural noun phrases, such as ‘We pushed the car’ and ‘The women left the party early’, and action sentences about formal or institutional groups that use singular noun phrases, such as ‘…Read more
  •  551
    Duplicating thoughts
    Mind and Language 11 (1): 92-102. 1996.
    Suppose that a physical duplicate of me, right down to the arrangements of subatomic particles, comes into existence at the time at which I finish this sentence. Suppose that it comes into existence by chance, or at least by a causal process entirely unconnected with me. It might be so situated that it, too, is seated in front of a computer, and finishes this paragraph and paper, or a corresponding one, just as I do. (i) Would it have the same thoughts I do? (ii) Would it speak my language? (iii…Read more
  •  757
    The Truth about Moods
    ProtoSociology 10 19-66. 1997.
    Assertoric sentences are sentences which admit of truth or falsity. Non-assertoric sentences, imperatives and interrogatives, have long been a source of difficulty for the view that a theory of truth for a natural language can serve as the core of a theory of meaning. The trouble for truth-theoretic semantics posed by non-assertoric sentences is that, prima facie, it does not make sense to say that imperatives, such as 'Cut your hair', or interrogatives such as 'What time is it?', are truth o…Read more
  •  999
    The Argument for Subject‐Body Dualism from Transtemporal Identity
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86 (3): 684-701. 2012.
    Martine Nida-Rümelin has argued recently for subject-body dualism on the basis of reflections on the possibility of survival in fission cases from the literature on personal identity. The argument focuses on the claim that there is a factual difference between the claims that one or the other of two equally good continuers of a person in a fission case is identical with her. I consider three interpretations of the notion of a factual difference that the argument employs, and I argue that on each…Read more
  •  527
    Critical Notice: Ron McClamrock, Existential Cognition
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (2). 1999.
    Review of Ron McClamrock's book Existential Cognition.
  •  1038
    Skepticism and interpretation
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (2): 317-339. 1992.
    Donald Davidson has argued that attention to the necessarily public character of language shows that we cannot be massively mistaken about the world around us, and that consequently skeptical doubts about empirical knowledge are misplaced. The arguments Davidson advances rely on taking as the fundamental methodological standpoint for investigating meaning and related concepts the standpoint of the interpreter of another speaker, on the grounds that it is from the interpreter’s standpoint that we…Read more
  •  690
    Ontology in the theory of meaning
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 14 (3). 2006.
    This paper advances a general argument, inspired by some remarks of Davidson, to show that appeal to meanings as entities in the theory of meaning is neither necessary nor sufficient for carrying out the tasks of the theory of meaning. The crucial point is that appeal to meaning as entities fails to provide us with an understanding of any expression of a language except insofar as we pick it out with an expression we understand which we tacitly recognize to be a translation of the term whose mea…Read more
  •  1026
    Is the aim of perception to provide accurate representations?
    In Robert J. Stainton (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Cognitive Science, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 259-274. 2006.
    The paper rejects the claim that phenomena such as change and inattentional blindness show that perceptual representations are inaccurate or that a radical overhaul of our traditional picture of perception is required. The paper rejects in particular the sensorimotor theory of perception, which denies that there are any perceptual representations. It further argues that the degree of resolution of perceptual experience relevant to assessing its accuracy is determined by our use of it in standa…Read more
  •  1254
    The Reality of Language: on the Davidson-Dummett Debate
    In R. E. Auxier & L. E. Hahn (eds.), The Philosophy of Michael Dummett, Open Court. pp. 185-214. 2007.
    This chapter identifies the central issue between Michael Dummett and Donald Davidson on the role of convention in language and argues they are not as far apart in the end as they take themselves to be.
  •  115
    Functionalism, causation and causal relevance
    PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 4. 1998.
    causal relevance, a three-place relation between event types, and circumstances, and argue for a logical independence condition on properties standing in the causal relevance relation relative to circumstances. In section 3, I apply these results to show that functionally defined states are not causally relevant to the output or state transitions in terms of which they are defined. In section 4, I extend this result to what that output in turn causes and to intervening mechanisms. In section 5, …Read more
  •  1000
    Is Distributed Cognition Group level Cognition?
    Journal of Social Ontology 1 (2): 189-224. 2015.
    This paper shows that recent arguments from group problem solving and task performance to emergent group level cognition that rest on the social parity and related principles are invalid or question begging. The paper shows that standard attributions of problem solving or task performance to groups require only multiple agents of the outcome, not a group agent over and above its members, whether or not any individual member of the group could have accomplished the task independently.
  •  707
    Dretske on explaining behavior
    Acta Analytica 11 111-124. 1996.
    Fred Dretske has recently argued, in a highly original book and a series of articles, that action explanations are a very special species of historical explanation, in opposition to the traditional view that action explanations cite causes of actions, which are identical with bodily movements. His account aims to explain how it is possible for there to be a genuine explanatory role for reasons in a world of causes, and, in particular, in a world in which we have available in principle an explan…Read more
  •  2415
    The mind-body problem: An overview
    In Stephen P. Stich & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell. pp. 1-46. 2002.
    My primary aim in this chapter is to explain in what the traditional mind–body problem consists, what its possible solutions are, and what obstacles lie in the way of a resolution. The discussion will develop in two phases. The first phase, sections 1.2–1.4, will be concerned to get clearer about the import of our initial question as a precondition of developing an account of possible responses to it. The second phase, sections 1.5–1.6, explains how a problem arises in our attempts to answer the…Read more
  •  1018
    Shape Properties and Perception
    Philosophical Issues 7 325-350. 1996.
    We can perceive shapes visually and tactilely, and the information we gain about shapes through both sensory modalities is integrated smoothly into and functions in the same way in our behavior independently of whether we gain it by sight or touch. There seems to be no reason in principle we couldn't perceive shapes through other sensory modalities as well, although as a matter of fact we do not. While we can identify shapes through other sensory modalities—e.g., I may know by smell (the scent o…Read more
  •  507
    Causing actions (review)
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81 (2). 2003.
    Critical Notice of Causing Actions by Paul Pietroski,
  •  2005
    Proxy Agency in Collective Action
    Noûs 48 (1): 75-105. 2013.
    This paper gives an account of proxy agency in the context of collective action. It takes the case of a group announcing something by way of a spokesperson as an illustration. In proxy agency, it seems that one person or subgroup's doing something counts as or constitutes or is recognized as (tantamount to) another person or group's doing something. Proxy agency is pervasive in institutional action. It has been taken to be a straightforward counterexample to an appealing deflationary view of col…Read more
  •  1447
    Intuitions and relativity
    Philosophical Psychology 23 (4): 427-445. 2010.
    I address a criticism of the use of thought experiments in conceptual analysis advanced on the basis of the survey method of so-called experimental philosophy. The criticism holds that surveys show that intuitions are relative to cultures in a way that undermines the claim that intuition-based investigation yields any objective answer to philosophical questions. The crucial question is what intuitions are as philosophers have been interested in them. To answer this question we look at the role o…Read more
  •  533
    Reply to Ferrero
    Methode: Analytic Perspectives 4 (6): 75-87. 2015.
    I respond to Ferrero’s comments on “What are Conditional Intentions?” in three parts. In the first, I address three arguments Ferrero gives for his account and against mine, the argument from requirement of a formal distinction, the argument from continuity, and the argument from the rational pressures of intention. In the second, I raise some problems for Ferrero’s views on the basis drawing out its consequences and testing those against cases. In the third, I consider in a more theoretical vei…Read more
  •  527
    Critical Notice: Existential Cognition: Computational Minds in the World (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (2): 537-540. 1999.
    Existential Cognition, divided into four parts of three chapters each, argues that the mind “is an essentially embedded entity; one such that analyzing it in isolation from the environmental context in which it functions will be fundamentally misleading”. Disputing internalists who accept, and who reject, information processing accounts of the mind, as well as anti-cognitivists who reject internalism, McClamrock argues for an externalist information processing account of mental states and proces…Read more
  •  1367
    Trying the Impossible: Reply to Adams
    Journal of Philosophical Research 20 563-570. 1995.
    This paper defends the autonomy thesis, which holds that one can intend to do something even though one believes it to be impossible, against attacks by Fred Adams. Adams denies the autonomy thesis on the grounds that it cannot, but must, explain what makes a particular trying, a trying for the aim it has in view. If the autonomy thesis were true, it seems that I could try to fly across the Atlantic ocean merely by typing out this abstract, a palpable absurdity. If we deny the autonomy thesis, w…Read more