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38The Editor and the Associate Editors thank the Consulting Editors, the Members of the Editorial Board and the following philosophers for their help with refereeing papers during the period July 1994 to June 1995. Adeney, Douglas Kennett, Jeanette Agar, Nicholas Lamarque, Peter (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73 (4). 1995.
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60Hume on Self-Identity and MemoryReview of Metaphysics 30 (1). 1976.Ashley and Stack couple their claim that Hume holds a logical-construction theory with the remarkable suggestion that, so understood, his views yield "... at least a recognizable facsimile of the identity most of us believe in." The highly implausible suggestion that the non-philosopher regards his self as a logical construct should be enough to provide a motive for re-examining the arguments Ashley and Stack offer for their interpretation. These arguments make use of the distinction Hume develo…Read more
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36Hume's Difficulties with the SelfHume Studies 5 (1): 45-54. 1979.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:45. HUME'S DIFFICULTIES WITH THE SELF One of the more baffling and apparently inconclusive parts of the Treatise is the section on personal identity. Hume himself, when he takes a backward glance at it in those notorious passages in the Appendix, singles it out as representing an unresolved problem in his philosophy. It is a matter of fairly general agreement among recent writers on the subject that one of Hume's chief difficulties -…Read more
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70What is Evidence of Evidence Evidence of?Logos and Episteme 8 (2): 195-206. 2017.Richard Feldman’s well-known principle about disagreement and evidence – usually encapsulated in the slogan, ‘evidence of evidence is evidence’, (EEE) – invites the question, what should a rational believer do when faced by such evidence, especially when the disagreement is with an epistemic peer? The question has been the subject of much controversy. However, it has been recently suggested both that the principle is subject to counterexamples and that it is trivial. If either is the case, the q…Read more
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39Knowability, believability and begging the question: A reply to SanfordMetaphilosophy 15 (3-4): 239-247. 1984.
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9Book reviews (review)Humana Mente 5 (1): 111-137. 1997.The Morality of Happiness By Julia Annas, Oxford University Press, 1993. Pp. x + 502. ISBN 0–19–507999‐X. £45.00, £13.99. Dimensions of Creativity By Margaret A. Boden MIT Press, 1994. Pp. 242. ISBN 0–262–02368–7. £24.95. Thomas Hobbes and the Science of Moral Virtue By David Boonin‐Vail, Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. 219. ISBN 0–521–46209–6. £37.50. Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes By Quentin Skinner, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. 477. ISBN 0–521–55436–5. £35.00. …Read more
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75Intentionalism in the Theory of MeaningThe Monist 62 (2): 238-258. 1979.The object of this paper is to argue that the relationship between intentions and meaning has been misconstrued by some influential recent theories of meaning. The theories I have in mind derive from earlier work by H. P. Grice, but have undergone extensive development and modification in the hands of Grice himself,, Stephen Schiffer, Jonathan Bennett and others. There have been, during much the same period, developments of Austin’s work on speech acts in which the same Gricean influence is unmi…Read more
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110Are there more than minimal a priori limits on irrationality?Australasian Journal of Philosophy 72 (1): 89-102. 1994.Our concern in this paper is with the question of how irrational an intentional agent can be, and, in particular, with an argument Stephen Stich has given for the claim that there are only very minimal a priori requirements on the rationality of intentional agents. The argument appears in chapter 2 of The Fragmentation of Reason.1 Stich is concerned there with the prospects for the ‘reform-minded epistemologist’. If there are a priori limits on how irrational we can be, there are limits to how m…Read more
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14Ben L. Mijuskovic, "The Achilles of Rationalist Arguments" (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 16 (4): 477. 1978.
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205Intention, demonstration, and referencePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 43 (1): 35-41. 1982.
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6Mind, Brain, and Function: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind (edited book)Oklahoma University Press. 1982.With the discovery in 1995 of the first planet orbiting another star, we know that planets are not unique to our own Solar System. For centuries, humanity has wondered whether we are alone in the Universe. We are now finally one step closer to knowing the answer. The quest for exoplanets is an exciting one, because it holds the possibility that one day we might find life elsewhere in the Universe, born in the light of another sun. Written from the perspective of one of the pioneers of this scien…Read more
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15Two Notes on CompositionMetaphysica 23 (2): 445-454. 2022.If, as some philosophers maintain, there are no composites, we do not have to ask whether, as others hold, composition is identity. Here I argue that both groups are wrong: there are composites, and composition is not identity. I examine one argument for excluding composites from our ontology, based on their alleged causal redundancy. I give reason to think that composites are ineliminable in causal explanations of macroscopic effects. I go on to argue that the relation between composites and th…Read more
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25“Dogmatism” and DogmatismEpisteme 1-5. forthcoming.The so-called paradox of dogmatism has it that it seems that one is both entitled and not entitled to ignore evidence against what one knows. By knowing something, one knows it to be true, and one also knows that there can be no non-misleading evidence against what is true. But to ignore evidence against what one believes – and, surely, one believes what one knows – is to be dogmatic, something one should not be. I argue that there is no genuine paradox here. One's attitude to evidence is govern…Read more
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25Leading a Double Life: Statues and Pieces of ClayMetaphysica 21 (2): 273-277. 2020.Some philosophers think that two distinct things can occupy exactly the same region of space, as with a statue and a piece of clay. Others think that the statue and the piece of clay are identical, but not necessarily so. I argue that Alan Gibbard’s well-known story of Goliath and Lumpl does not support either of these claims. Not the first, as there is independent reason to think that it cannot be true. Not the second, because there is no need to invoke the dubiously intelligible notion of cont…Read more
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19Reply to Forrai: No Reprieve for Gettier “Beliefs”Logos and Episteme 10 (3): 327-331. 2019.In a recent paper in this journal, Gabor Forrai offers ways to resist my argument that in so-called Gettier cases the belief condition is not, as is commonly assumed, satisfied. He argues that I am mistaken in taking someone's reluctance to assert a proposition he knows follows from a justified belief on finding the latter false as evidence that he does not believe it, as such reluctance may be explained in other ways. While this may be true, I show that it does not affect my central claim which…Read more
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25Rearranging the FurniturePhilosophia 48 (1): 77-81. 2020.According to Peter van Inwagen, there are, from the point of view of serious metaphysics, no composites, only simples. Saying that we have built a ship is a misleading way of saying that we have rearranged some simples ship- wise. However, the notion of rearranging simples is problematic, and van Inwagen’s resort to “honorary simples” does not make it less so. Simples can be rearranged only by way of rearranging these, making talk of them not merely a convenient facon de parler, as van Inwagen c…Read more
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55Persistence Conditions and IdentityMetaphysica 20 (1): 73-82. 2019.Pluralists believe that there are cases of distinct but spatio-temporally coinciding things. The statue goes, the piece of clay remains: differing persistence conditions, different things. Yet while both are with us, they are obviously in the same place. The argument rests on two assumptions: that statues have their shape essentially and that pieces of clay do not. Only if we make both does the conclusion follow. Here I suggest that while both assumptions are plausible on their face, each may be…Read more
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568‘Peer Disagreement’ and Evidence of EvidenceLogos and Episteme 9 (4): 379-402. 2018.What the rational thing to do in the face of disagreement by an epistemic peer is has been much discussed recently. Those who think that a peer’s disagreement is itself evidence against one’s belief, as many do, are committed to a special form of epistemic dependence. If such disagreement is really evidence, it seems reasonable to take it into account and to adjust one’s belief accordingly. But then it seems that the belief one ends up with depends, in part, on what someone else believes, even i…Read more
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78Saving the ShipEuropean Journal of Analytic Philosophy 13 (2): 43-54. 2017.In defending the startling claim that that there are no artifacts, indeed, no inanimate material objects of the familiar sort, Peter van Inwagen has argued that truths about such putative objects can be paraphrased as truths that do not make essential reference to them and that we should endorse only the ontological commitments of the paraphrase. In this note I argue that the paraphrases van Inwagen recommends cannot meet his c…Read more
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149Epistemic Normativity, Argumentation, and FallaciesArgumentation 11 (3): 277-292. 1997.In Biro and Siegel we argued that a theory of argumentation mustfully engage the normativity of judgments about arguments, and we developedsuch a theory. In this paper we further develop and defend our theory.
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15Argumentation, Arguing, and Arguments: Comments on Giving ReasonsTheoria 26 (3): 279-287. 2011.While we applaud several aspects of Lilian Bermejo-Luque's novel theory of argumentation and especially welcome its epistemological dimensions, in this discussion we raise doubts about her conception of argumentation, her account of argumentative goodness, and her treatments of the notion of “giving reasons” and of justification.
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58Rationality, Reasonableness, and Critical Rationalism: Problems with the Pragma-dialectical View (review)Argumentation 22 (2): 191-203. 2008.A major virtue of the Pragma-Dialectical theory of argumentation is its commitment to reasonableness and rationality as central criteria of argumentative quality. However, the account of these key notions offered by the originators of this theory, Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst, seems to us problematic in several respects. In what follows we criticize that account and suggest an alternative, offered elsewhere, that seems to us to be both independently preferable and more in keeping with …Read more
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55The pragma-dialectician’s dilemma: Reply to Garssen and van LaarInformal Logic 30 (4): 457-480. 2010.Garssen and van Laar in effect concede our main criticism of the pragma-dialectical approach. The criticism is that the conclusions of arguments can be ‘P-D reasonable’ yet patently unreasonable, epistemically speaking. The concession consists in the claim that the theory “remains restricted to the investigation of standpoints in the light of particular sets of starting points” which are “up to individual disputants to create” and the admission that all the relevant terms of normative appraisal …Read more
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