• Modality, Morality and Belief: Essays in Honour of Ruth Barcan Marcus (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 48 (191): 253-255. 1998.
  •  165
    Reflexive fictionalisms
    Analysis 56 (1): 23-32. 1996.
    There is a class of fictionalist strategies (the reflexive fictionalisms) which appear to suffer from a common problem: the problem that the entities which are supposedly fictional turn out, by the lights of the fictionalist theory itself, to exist. The appropriate solution is to reject so-called strong fictionalism in each case: that is, to reject the variety of fictionalism which takes appeal to the domain of fictional entities to provide an explanation or analysis of the operators or predi…Read more
  •  2532
    Possible Worlds Semantics
    In Gillian Russell & Delia Fara (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language, Routledge Press. pp. 242-252. 2012.
    This chapter provides an introduction to possible worlds semantics in both logic and the philosophy of language, including a discussion of some of the advantages and challenges for possible worlds semantics.
  •  269
    Recombination unbound
    Philosophical Studies 84 (2-3): 239-262. 1996.
    This paper discusses the principle of recombination for possible worlds. It argues that arguments against unrestricted recombination offered by Forrest and Armstrong and by David Lewis fail, but a related argument is a challenge, and recommends that we accept an unrestricted principle of recombination and the conclusion that possible worlds form a proper class
  •  157
    Canberra Plan
    A Companion to Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand. 2010.
    This encylopedia entry describes the "Canberra Plan" approach to conceptual analysis, a method closely related to the Ramsey-Carnap-Lewis approach to analysing the meaning of theoretical terms.
  •  735
    Lewis's Philosophical Method
    In B. Loewer & J. Schaffer (eds.), A Companion to Lewis, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 25-39. 2015.
    Lewis is famous as a contemporary philosophical system-builder. The most obvious way his philosophy exhibited a system was in its content: Lewis’s metaphysics, for example, provided answers to many metaphysical puzzles in an integrated way, and there are illuminating connections to be drawn between his general metaphysical views and, for example, his various views about the mind and its place in nature
  •  255
    Impossible Worlds
    Philosophy Compass 8 (4): 360-372. 2013.
    Philosophers have found postulating possible worlds to be very useful in a number of areas, including philosophy of language and mind, logic, and metaphysics. Impossible worlds are a natural extension to this use of possible worlds, and can help resolve a number of difficulties thrown up by possible‐worlds frameworks.
  •  758
    Methodological Naturalism in Metaethics
    In Tristram McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, Routledge. pp. 659-673. 2017.
    Methodological naturalism arises as a topic in metaethics in two ways. One is the issue of whether we should be methodological naturalists when doing our moral theorising, and another is whether we should take a naturalistic approach to metaethics itself. Interestingly, these can come apart, and some naturalist programs in metaethics justify a non-scientific approach to our moral theorising. This paper discusses the range of approaches that fall under the general umbrella of methodological natur…Read more
  •  323
    Selfless Desires
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (3): 665-679. 2007.
    Unified theories of de se attitudes and de dicto attitudes, along the lines of David Lewis’s proposal, face a problem. Whether or not they are adequate for representing beliefs, they can misrepresent the content of many of our desires, which rank possible outcomes in which the agent with the desire does not exist. These desires are shown to play a role in the rational explanation of action, and recognising them is important in our understanding of ourselves. Lewis’s account of attitudes de di…Read more
  •  865
    Platitudes and metaphysics
    In David Braddon-Mitchell & Robert Nola (eds.), Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism, Mit Press. 2009.
    One increasingly popular technique in philosophy might be called the "platitudes analysis": a set of widely accepted claims about a given subject matter are collected, adjustments are made to the body of claims, and this is taken to specify a “role” for the phenomenon in question. (Perhaps the best-known example is analytic functionalism about mental states, where platitudes about belief, desire, intention etc. are together taken to give us a "role" for states to fill if they are to count as men…Read more
  •  533
    Impossible Worlds: A Modest Approach
    Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 38 (4): 535-572. 1997.
    Reasoning about situations we take to be impossible is useful for a variety of theoretical purposes. Furthermore, using a device of impossible worlds when reasoning about the impossible is useful in the same sorts of ways that the device of possible worlds is useful when reasoning about the possible. This paper discusses some of the uses of impossible worlds and argues that commitment to them can and should be had without great metaphysical or logical cost. The paper then provides an account of …Read more
  •  257
    Modality
    In John Shand (ed.), Central Issues of Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 95--106. 2009.
    This is an introduction to the topic of modality in philosophy. Theories of modality seek to explain possibility and necessity in the various ways they come up in our ordinary understanding of the world and in our systematic theorising. Topics covered include distinguishing types of necessity and possibility; possible worlds and their use; de re possibility and necessity; and how we discover modal truths.
  •  35
    Non-Factivity About Knowledge: A Defensive Move
    The Reasoner 2 (11): 6-7. 2008.
    Those defending non-factivity of knowledge should explain why it is so intuitive that knowledge entails truth. One option they have is to concede a great deal to this intuition: they can maintain that we know that knowledge is factive, even though it is not.
  •  450
    Fearing Spouses in Aristotle's Ta Oikonomika
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 18 (1): 1-8. 2010.
    The work which the Loeb Classical Library classifies as book 3 of the Oikonomika attributed to Aristotle is a curious piece. It has come down to us only via medieval translations into Latin. (I will be quoting the Loeb text and translation except where noted.) It is not certain that it is by Aristotle: and it is not certain whether it is even a part of the work attributed to Aristotle in ancient times. For want of a better name, let me refer to its author, whoever that was, as “Aristotle”, and l…Read more
  •  1955
    Utility Monsters for the Fission Age
    with Ray Briggs
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 96 (2): 392-407. 2015.
    One of the standard approaches to the metaphysics of personal identity has some counter-intuitive ethical consequences when combined with maximising consequentialism and a plausible doctrine about aggregation of consequences. This metaphysical doctrine is the so-called ‘multiple occupancy’ approach to puzzles about fission and fusion. It gives rise to a new version of the ‘utility monster’ problem, particularly difficult problems about infinite utility, and a new version of a Parfit-style ‘repug…Read more
  •  782
    Contemporary Metaphysicians and Their Traditions
    Philosophical Topics 35 (1-2): 1-18. 2007.
    When invited to consider the methodology of contemporary metaphysics, quite a number of procedures spring to mind as part of the metaphysician's toolkit. These include: eliciting and relying on intuitions; solving location problems and using “conceptual analysis”; inference to the best theory, both on internal metaphysical grounds and drawing from the theoretical reaches of the sciences; working on topics clearly close to, or even overlapping, those of other areas of inquiry using techniques of …Read more
  •  130
    This book discusses a range of important issues in current philosophical work on the nature of possible worlds. Areas investigated include the theories of the nature of possible worlds, general questions about metaphysical analysis and questions about the direction of dependence between what is necessary or possible and what could be.
  •  184
    Stoic Gunk
    Phronesis 51 (2): 162-183. 2006.
    The surviving sources on the Stoic theory of division reveal that the Stoics, particularly Chrysippus, believed that bodies, places and times were such that all of their parts themselves had proper parts. That is, bodies, places and times were composed of gunk. This realisation helps solve some long-standing puzzles about the Stoic theory of mixture and the Stoic attitude to the present
  •  154
    Backwards explanation
    Philosophical Studies 140 (1). 2008.
    We discuss explanation of an earlier event by a later event, and argue that prima facie cases of backwards event explanation are ubiquitous. Some examples: (1) I am tidying my flat because my brother is coming to visit tomorrow. (2) The scarlet pimpernels are closing because it is about to rain. (3) The volcano is smoking because it is going to erupt soon. We then look at various ways people might attempt to explain away these prima facie cases by arguing that in each case the 'real' explanation…Read more
  •  71
  •  649
    The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Abstract Metaphysics
    Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 9 61-88. 2015.
    In Metaphysics A, Aristotle offers some objections to Plato’s theory of Forms to the effect that Plato’s Forms would not be explanatory in the right way, and seems to suggest that they might even make the explanatory project worse. One interesting historical puzzle is whether Aristotle can avoid these same objections to his own theory of universals. The concerns Aristotle raises are, I think, cousins of contemporary concerns about the usefulness and explanatoriness of abstract objects, some of…Read more
  •  330
    Is fertility virtuous in its own right?
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 50 (2): 265-282. 1999.
    the virtues which are desirable for scientific theories to possess. In this paper I discuss the several species of theoretical virtues called 'fertility', and argue in each case that the desirability of 'fertility' can be explicated in terms of other, more fundamental theoretical virtues.
  •  519
    Chance and Necessity
    Philosophical Perspectives 30 (1): 294-308. 2016.
    A principle endorsed by many theories of objective chance, and practically forced on us by the standard interpretation of the Kolmogorov semantics for chance, is the principle that when a proposition P has a chance, any proposition Q that is necessarily equivalent to P will have the same chance as P. Call this principle SUB (for the substitution of necessary equivalents into chance ascriptions). I will present some problems for a theory of chance, and will argue that the best way to resolve th…Read more
  •  187
    Defending a possible-worlds account of indicative conditionals
    Philosophical Studies 116 (3): 215-269. 2003.
    One very popular kind of semantics for subjunctive conditionals is aclosest-worlds account along the lines of theories given by David Lewisand Robert Stalnaker. If we could give the same sort of semantics forindicative conditionals, we would have a more unified account of themeaning of ``if ... then ...'' statements, one with manyadvantages for explaining the behaviour of conditional sentences. Such atreatment of indicative conditionals, however, has faced a battery ofobjections. This paper outl…Read more
  •  584
    Vagueness, multiplicity and parts
    Noûs 40 (4). 2006.
    There’s an argument around from so-called “linguistic theories of vagueness”, plus some relatively uncontroversial considerations, to powerful metaphysical conclusions. David Lewis employs this argument to support the mereological principle of unrestricted composition, and Theodore Sider employs a similar argument not just for unrestricted composition but also for the doctrine of temporal parts. This sort of argument could be generalised, to produce a lot of other less palatable metaphysical con…Read more
  •  953
    The extent of metaphysical necessity
    Philosophical Perspectives 25 (1): 313-339. 2011.
    A lot of philosophers engage in debates about what claims are “metaphysically necessary”, and a lot more assume with little argument that some classes of claims have the status of “metaphysical necessity”. I think we can usefully replace questions about metaphysical necessity with five other questions which each capture some of what people may have had in mind when talking about metaphysical necessity. This paper explains these five other questions, and then discusses the question “how much of m…Read more
  •  1307
    Creationism and cardinality
    Analysis 74 (4): 615-622. 2014.
    Creationism about fictional entities requires a principle connecting what fictions say exist with which fictional entities really exist. The most natural way of spelling out such a principle yields inconsistent verdicts about how many fictional entities are generated by certain inconsistent fictions. Avoiding inconsistency without compromising the attractions of creationism will not be easy
  •  266
    Properties and Paradox in Graham Priest’s Towards Non-Being
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (1). 2008.
    Part of a book symposium on Graham Priest's Towards Non-Being.
  •  195
    What’s Wrong With Infinite Regresses?
    Metaphilosophy 32 (5): 523-538. 2001.
    It is almost universally believed that some infinite regresses are vicious, and also almost universally believed that some are benign. In this paper I argue that regresses can be vicious for several different sorts of reasons. Furthermore, I claim that some intuitively vicious regresses do not suffer from any of the particular aetiologies that guarantee viciousness to regresses, but are nevertheless so on the basis of considerations of parsimony. The difference between some apparently benign and…Read more