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737Epistemology and InformationIn Adriaans Pieter & Van Benthem Johan (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, Volume 8. Philosophy of Information., Elsevier-north Holland. pp. 29-47. 2008.
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69First person warrant: Comments on Siewert's The Significance of ConsciousnessPSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 7. 2001.I agree with Siewert's claims about the special character and importance of phenomenal consciousness and the impossibility of providing a satisfactory functionalist reduction of it. I question, however, his dismissal of a representational theory of conscious experience. I also question his account of how conscious agents are supposed to know, or enjoy first person warrant, for their belief that they are conscious
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9Arthur Campbell Garnett 1894-1970Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 44. 1970.
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3Does meaning matter?In Enrique Villanueva (ed.), Information, Semantics and Epistemology, Blackwell. 1990.
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72" 1 A Misrepresentation"In Alvin I. Goldman (ed.), Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, Mit Press. pp. 297. 1993.
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21The Case Against ClosureIn Matthias Steup & John Turri (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, Blackwell. pp. 13--25. 2013.
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1Knowledge: Sanford and CohenIn Brian P. McLaughlin (ed.), Dretske and his critics, Blackwell. pp. 185--96. 1991.
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249Particular reidentificationPhilosophy of Science 31 (2): 133-142. 1964.A certain dilemma is inherent in relational accounts of space and time. If any objects endure through change, then temporal elements other than relations are required to describe them. If, on the other hand, no objects endure through change, no permanent reference system is available in terms of which to define the "same place" at different times. An argument which, by exploiting this latter difficulty, attempts to show that "objects with some endurance through time" must be accepted as fundamen…Read more
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106Challenging Closure: Is It A Way To Answer The Skeptic?The Harvard Review of Philosophy 19 61-68. 2013.
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23Is Knowledge Closed Under Known Entailment? The Case Against ClosureIn Matthias Steup & John Turri (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, Blackwell. pp. 13-26. 2013.
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25What Good is Consciousness?Canadian Journal of Philosophy 27 (1): 1-15. 1997.If consciousness is good for something, conscious things must differ in some causally relevant way from unconscious things. If they do not, then, as Davies and Humphreys conclude, too bad for consciousness: ‘psychological theory need not be concerned with this topic.’Davies and Humphreys are applying a respectable metaphysical idea — the idea, namely, that if an object's having a property does not make a difference to what that object does, if the object's causal powers are in no way enhanced by…Read more
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40Reply to NiiniluotoPhilosophy of Science 45 (3): 440-444. 1978.In “Laws of Nature” [1] I argued that natural laws are not universal truths. Laws have properties that enable them to function in a special way. Since universal truths do not have these properties, they cannot be promoted to the status of laws by assigning them this function, by using them in the way laws are typically used. To suppose that we could effect this transformation by the way we used a generalization is like supposing that we could make thumb tacks into garden hoses by using them to w…Read more
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580Naturalizing the MindMIT Press. 1995.In this provocative book, Fred Dretske argues that to achieve an understanding of the mind it is not enough to understand the biological machinery by means of...
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2About self-knowledgeIn Sven Bernecker Duncan Pritchard (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Epistemology, Routledge. pp. 425. 2010.
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99Review of Mohan Matthen, Seeing, Doing, and Knowing: A Philosophical Theory of Sense Perception (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2005 (9). 2005.
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58Externalism and Modest ContextualismErkenntnis 61 (2-3): 173-186. 2004.Externalism about knowledge commits one to a modest form of contextualism: whether one knows depends (or may depend) on circumstances (context) of which one has no knowledge. Such modest contextualism requires the rejection of the KK Principle (If S knows that P, then S knows that S knows that P) - something most people would want to reject anyway - but it does not require (though it is compatible with) a rejection of closure. Radical contextualism, on the other hand, goes a step farther and rel…Read more
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31The Likelihood of Knowledge (review)Review of Metaphysics 42 (3): 632-633. 1989.This is a competent review and critique of contemporary theories of knowledge and justification. With the exception of memory, truth and the a priori, most of the standard subjects are discussed: certainty, incorrigibility, perception, the given, rationality, and scepticism. There are a few new technical wrinkles, but no real surprises. The book's strength lies, instead, in its solid, sensible treatment of most topics.
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107Mental events as structuring causes of behaviorIn Pascal Engel (ed.), Mental causation, Oxford University Press. 1995.1. Causal explanations depend on our interests, our purposes, and our prior knowledge. ⇒ No uniquely real causal explanation