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86How to be realistic about folk psychologyPhilosophical Psychology 1 (1): 69-81. 1988.Folk psychological realism is the view that folk psychology is true and that people really do have propositional attitudes, whereas anti-realism is the view that folk psychology is false and people really do not have propositional attitudes. We argue that anti-realism is not worthy of acceptance and that realism is eminently worthy of acceptance. However, it is plainly epistemically possible to favor either of two forms of folk realism: scientific or non-scientific. We argue that non-scientific …Read more
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67Supervenient bridge lawsPhilosophy of Science 45 (2): 227-249. 1978.I invoke the conceptual machinery of contemporary possible-world semantics to provide an account of the metaphysical status of "bridge laws" in intertheoretic reductions. I argue that although bridge laws are not definitions, and although they do not necessarily reflect attribute-identities, they are supervenient. I.e., they are true in all possible worlds in which the reducing theory is true
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28Modelling the noncomputational mind: Reply to LitchPhilosophical Psychology 10 (3): 365-371. 1997.I explain why, within the nonclassical framework for cognitive science we describe in the book, cognitive-state transitions can fail to be tractably computable even if they are subserved by a discrete dynamical system whose mathematical-state transitions are tractably computable. I distinguish two ways that cognitive processing might conform to programmable rules in which all operations that apply to representation-level structure are primitive, and two corresponding constraints on models of cog…Read more
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127The Transvaluationist Conception of VaguenessThe Monist 81 (2): 313-330. 1998.Transvaluationism makes two fundamental claims concerning vagueness. First, vagueness is logically incoherent in a certain way: vague discourse is governed by semantic standards that are mutually unsatisfiable. But second, vagueness is viable and legitimate nonetheless; its logical incoherence is benign.
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Nonreductive materialismIn Richard Warner & Tadeusz Szubka (eds.), The Mind-Body Problem: A Guide to the Current Debate, Blackwell. 1994.
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116Recognitional concepts and the compositionality of concept possessionPhilosophical Issues 9 27-33. 1998.
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155Robust vagueness and the forced-March sorites paradoxPhilosophical Perspectives 8 159-188. 1994.I distinguish two broad approaches to vagueness that I call "robust" and "wimpy". Wimpy construals explain vagueness as robust (i.e., does not manifest arbitrary precision); that standard approaches to vagueness, like supervaluationism or appeals to degrees of truth, wrongly treat vagueness as wimpy; that vagueness harbors an underlying logical incoherence; that vagueness in the world is therefore impossible; and that the kind of logical incoherence nascent in vague terms and concepts is benign …Read more
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1752The Intentionality of Phenomenology and the Phenomenology of IntentionalityIn David John Chalmers (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 520--533. 2002.
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133Token physicalism, supervenience, and the generality of physicsSynthese 49 (December): 395-413. 1981.
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15Josep Corbi raises several worries about the metaethical position that Mark Timmons and I have articulated and defended, which we call “nondescriptivist cognitivism.â€â€¦ His remarks prompt some points of clarification…. Timmons and I characterize descriptive content as “way-the-world-might-be†content. We maintain that “base case†beliefs—roughly, those non-evaluative and evaluative beliefs whose contents have the simplest kinds of logical form—are of two types: a non-evaluative b…Read more
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44Science nominalizedPhilosophy of Science 51 (4): 529-549. 1984.I propose a way of formulating scientific laws and magnitude attributions which eliminates ontological commitment to mathematical entities. I argue that science only requires quantitative sentences as thus formulated, and hence that we ought to deny the existence of sets and numbers. I argue that my approach cannot plausibly be extended to the concrete "theoretical" entities of science
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9Nonreductive materialism and the explanatory autonomy of psychologyIn Steven J. Wagner & Richard Wagner (eds.), Naturalism: A Critical Appraisal, University of Notre Dame Press. 1993.
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145Materialism: Matters of definition, defense, and deconstructionPhilosophical Studies 131 (1): 157-83. 2006.How should the metaphysical hypothesis of materialism be formulated? What strategies look promising for defending this hypothesis? How good are the prospects for its successful defense, especially in light of the infamous “hard problem” of phenomenal consciousness? I will say something about each of these questions.
Tucson, Arizona, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |