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12Epistemology meets cognitive psychologyInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 31 (4). 1988.
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12Truth, Love and Immortality: An Introduction to McTaggart's PhilosophyPhilosophical Review 91 (3): 445. 1982.
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11Varieties of Things: Foundations of Contemporary Metaphysics ‐ By Cynthia Macdonald (review)Philosophical Books 48 (1): 81-82. 2007.
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10Analysis and Metaphysics: An Introduction to PhilosophyPhilosophical Books 34 (3): 162-163. 1993.
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6Causal Asymmetries (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (1): 243-246. 2001.Time and cause present apparent asymmetries. What happens later depends on what happens earlier, and not the other way around. Effects depend on their causes, and not the other way around.
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5How Plausible is the Principle of Plenitude?Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 59 (2): 149. 1978.The cardinality of incompatible possibilities whose actuality requires at least N seconds exceeds the cardinality of disjoint intervals at least N seconds long. Therefore, not all logical possibilities can be actual in the long run, even if the long run is infinite.
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4Pre‐Phenomenal Adjustments and the Müller‐Lyer IllusionPacific Philosophical Quarterly 65 (2): 199-201. 2017.
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4Chisholm on Brentano's thesisIn Lewis Edwin Hahn (ed.), The Philosophy of Roderick M. Chisholm, Open Court. pp. 25--201. 1997.Roderick Chisholm provides, in different places, two formulations of Brentano's thesis about the relation between the psychological and the intentional: (1) all and only psychological sentences are intentional; (2) no psychological intentional sentence is equivalent to a nonintentional sentence. Chisholm also presents several definitions of intentionality. Some of these allow that a sentence is intentional while its negation is nonintentional, which ruins the prospects of defending the more plau…Read more
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36. Self-Deception as RationalizationIn Brian P. McLaughlin & Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (eds.), Perspectives on Self-Deception, University of California Press. pp. 157-169. 1988.
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3Temporal Parts. Temporal Portions, and Temporal Slices: An Exercise in Naive MereologyActa Analytica 15 21-33. 2000.Naive mereology studies ordinary conceptions of part and whole. Parts, unlike portions, have objective boundaries and many things, such as dances and sermons have temporal parts. In order to deal with Mark Heller's claim that temporal parts "are ontologically no more or less basic than the wholes that they compose," we retell the story of Laplace's Genius, here named "Swifty." Although Swifty processes lots of information very quickly, his conceptual repertoire need not extend beyond fundamental…Read more
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3Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting By Daniel C. Dennett Clarendon Press, 1985, x + 200 pp., £17.50, £7.95 paper (review)Philosophy 61 (238): 547-550. 1986.
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2The perception of shapeIn Carl Ginet & Sydney Shoemaker (eds.), Knowledge And Mind: Phil Essays, Oxford University Press. 1983.The central text of this article is Thomas Reid’s response to Berkeley’s argument for distinguishing tangible from visual shape. Reid is right to hold that shape words do not have different visual and tangible meanings. We might also perceive shape, moreover, with senses other than touch and sight. As Reid also suggests, the visual perception of shape does not require perception of hue or brightness. Contrary to treatments of the Molyneux problem by H. P. Grice and Judith Jarvis Thomson, I …Read more
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1Where was I?In D. R. Hofstadter & D. C. Dennett (eds.), The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, Basic Books. pp. 232-40. 1981.This piece continues the story line of “Where Am I?” by Dan Dennett. I am inclined to locate myself at the location of my point of view. In my fantasy stories, points of view can be far away from a brain inside a flesh-and-blood body. Points of view can also move discontinuously from one location to another.
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1Infinite regress argumentsIn James H. Fetzer (ed.), Principles of philosophical reasoning, Rowman & Allanheld. pp. 93--117. 1984.
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Uses and abuses of fuzziness in philosophyInternational Journal of General Systems 23 (1): 271. 1995.
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Topological Trees: G H von Wright's Theory of Possible WorldsIn TImothy Childers (ed.), The Logica Yearbook, Acadamy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. 1998.In several works on modality, G. H. von Wright presents tree structures to explain possible worlds. Worlds that might have developed from an earlier world are possible relative to it. Actually possible worlds are possible relative to the world as it actually was at some point. Many logically consistent worlds are not actually possible. Transitions from node to node in a tree structure are probabilistic. Probabilities are often more useful than similarities between worlds in treating counterfactu…Read more
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What is a Truth Functional Component?Logique Et Analyse 52 4483-486. 1970.Although the truth value (falsity) of "Henry knows that (dogs live in trees and beavers chew wood)" remains unchanged no matter what sentence is substituted in it for "beavers chew wood", we want not to regard the second as a truth functional component (tfc) of the first. Many definitions of "tfc" (e.g., Quine's) fail to insure satisfaction of the following principle: if p is a component of r which is in turn a component of q, then p is a tfc of q if and only if 1) p is also a tfc of r, and 2) r…Read more
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