•  419
    In his 1958 seminal paper “Saints and Heroes”, J. O. Urmson argued that the then dominant tripartite deontic scheme of classifying actions as being exclusively either obligatory, or optional in the sense of being morally indifferent, or wrong, ought to be expanded to include the category of the supererogatory. Colloquially, this category includes actions that are “beyond the call of duty” (beyond what is obligatory) and hence actions that one has no duty or obligation to perform. But it is a con…Read more
  •  106
    Agentive Phenomenal Intentionality and the Limits of Introspection
    PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 13 (1). 2007.
    I explore the prospects for overcoming the prima facie tension in the following four claims, all of which I accept: the phenomenal character of experience is narrow; virtually all aspects of the phenomenal character of experience are intentional; the most fundamental kind of mental intentionality is fully constituted by phenomenal character; and yet introspection does not by itself reliably generate answers to certain philosophically important questions about the phenomenally constituted intenti…Read more
  •  78
    Themes in My Philosophical Work
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 63 (1): 1-26. 2002.
    This paper is an overview of my philosophical work. It follows closely the structure of the handout I used as the basis for a talk on this topic at the 2000 meeting of the Austro-Slovene Philosophical Association. The section-headings mention major themes, and various key concepts are indicated by boldface terms in the text
  •  861
    Risk sensitive animal knowledge
    Philosophical Studies 166 (3): 599-608. 2013.
    A discussion of Sosa's Knowing Full Well. The authors focus on the understood place and significance of animal and reflective knowledge.
  •  127
    Replies to papers
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 63 (1): 302-340. 2002.
    Jaegwon Kim argues that one should distinguish naturalism from materialism, and that both should be construed as ontological rather than epistemological. I agree, on both counts. Although I have sometimes tended to slur together materialism and naturalism in of my writings (as is done in much recent philosophy), I do think that it is important to distinguish them. It is a serious philosophical task to get clearer about how each position is best articulated, and about ways that one could embrace …Read more
  •  225
    Expressivism, Yes! Relativism, No!
    Oxford Studies in Metaethics 1 73-98. 2006.
  •  226
    Phenomenal intentionality and the evidential role of perceptual experience: comments on Jack Lyons, Perception and Basic Beliefs Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11098-010-9604-2 Authors Terry Horgan, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ USA Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116.
  •  42
    Deep Ignorance, Brute
    Philosophical Issues 8 16. 1997.
  •  405
    Moral phenomenology and moral theory
    Philosophical Issues 15 (1). 2005.
  •  358
    Nondescriptivist Cognitivism: Framework for a New Metaethic
    Philosophical Papers 29 (2): 121-153. 2000.
    Abstract We propose a metaethical view that combines the cognitivist idea that moral judgments are genuine beliefs and moral utterances express genuine assertions with the idea that such beliefs and utterances are nondescriptive in their overall content. This sort of view has not been recognized among the standard metaethical options because it is generally assumed that all genuine beliefs and assertions must have descriptive content. We challenge this assumption and thereby open up conceptual s…Read more
  •  255
    Mental causation and the agent-exclusion problem
    Erkenntnis 67 (2): 183-200. 2007.
    The hypothesis of the mental state-causation of behavior asserts that the behaviors we classify as actions are caused by certain mental states. A principal reason often given for trying to secure the truth of the MSC hypothesis is that doing so is allegedly required to vindicate our belief in our own agency. I argue that the project of vindicating agency needs to be seriously reconceived, as does the relation between this project and the MSC hypothesis. Vindication requires addressing what I cal…Read more
  •  232
    For the last 20 years or so, philosophers of mind have been using the term ‘qualia’, which is frequently glossed as standing for the “what-it-is-like” of experience. The examples of what-it-is-like that are typically given are feelings of pain or itches, and color and sound sensations. This suggests an identification of the experiential what-it-islike with such states. More recently, philosophers have begun speaking of the “phenomenology“ of experience, which they have also glossed as “what-it-i…Read more
  •  88
    Transglobal Reliabilism
    Croatian Journal of Philosophy 6 (2): 171-195. 2006.
    We here propose an account of what it is for an agent to be objectively justified in holding some belief. We present in outline this approach, which we call transglobal reliabilism, and we discuss how it is motivated by various thought experiments. While transglobal reliabilism is an externalist epistemology, we think that it accommodates traditional internalist concerns and objections in a uniquely natural and respectful way.
  •  386
    We present a new argument for the claim that in the Sleeping Beauty problem, the probability that the coin comes up heads is 1/3. Our argument depends on a principle for the updating of probabilities that we call ‘generalized conditionalization’, and on a species of generalized conditionalization we call ‘synchronic conditionalization on old information’. We set forth a rationale for the legitimacy of generalized conditionalization, and we explain why our new argument for thirdism is immune to t…Read more
  •  246
    Editor's Introduction
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 33 (S1). 1995.
    I advocate a two part view concerning vagueness. On one hand I claim that vagueness is logically incoherent; but on the other hand I claim that vagueness is also a benign, beneficial, and indeed essential feature of human language and thought. I will call this view transvaluationism, a name which seems to me appropriate for several reasons. First, the term suggests that we should move beyond the idea that the successive statements in a sorites sequence can be assigned differing truth values in s…Read more
  •  89
    Disagreement affords humans as members of epistemic communities important opportunities for refining or improving their epistemic situations with respect to many of their beliefs. To get such epistemic gains, one needs to explore and gauge one’s own epistemic situation and the epistemic situations of others. Accordingly, a fitting response to disagreement regarding some matter, p, typically will turn on the resolution of two strongly interrelated questions: (1) whether p, and (2) why one’s inter…Read more
  •  205
    Kim on the Mind—Body Problem (review)
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 (4): 579-607. 1996.
    For three decades the writings of Jaegwon Kim have had a major influence in philosophy of mind and in metaphysics. Sixteen of his philosophical papers, together with several new postscripts, are collected in Kim [1993]. The publication of this collection prompts the present essay. After some preliminary remarks in the opening section, in Section 2 I will briefly describe Kim's philosophical 'big picture' about the relation between the mental and the physical. In Section 3 I will situate Kim's ap…Read more
  •  171
    In his 2013 Theoria article, “Unreliable Intuitions: A New Reply to the Moral Twin-Earth Argument,” Jorn Sonderholm attempts to undermine our moral twin earth argument against Richard Boyd's moral semantics by debunking the semantic intuitions that are prompted by reflection on the thought experiment featured in the MTE argument. We divide our reply into three main sections. In section 1, we briefly review Boyd's moral semantics and our MTE argument against this view. In section 2, we set forth …Read more
  •  487
    Conceptual Relativity and Metaphysical Realism
    Noûs 36 (s1): 74-96. 2002.
    Is conceptual relativity a genuine phenomenon? If so, how is it properly understood? And if it does occur, does it undermine metaphysical realism? These are the questions we propose to address. We will argue that conceptual relativity is indeed a genuine phenomenon, albeit an extremely puzzling one. We will offer an account of it. And we will argue that it is entirely compatible with metaphysical realism. Metaphysical realism is the view that there is a world of objects and properties that is in…Read more
  •  557
    In Chapters 4 and 5 of his 1998 book From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis, Frank Jackson propounds and defends a form of moral realism that he calls both ‘moral functionalism’ and ‘analytical descriptivism’. Here we argue that this metaethical position, which we will henceforth call ‘analytical moral functionalism’, is untenable. We do so by applying a generic thought-experimental deconstructive recipe that we have used before against other views that posit moral properti…Read more
  •  85
    Addressing Questions for Blobjectivism
    Facta Philosophica 4 (2): 311-322. 2002.
  •  157
    Introspection and the phenomenology of free will: Problems and prospects
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 18 (1): 180-205. 2011.
    Inspired and informed by the work of Russ Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel in their 'Describing Inner Experience', we do two things in this commentary. First, we discuss the degree of reliability that introspective methods might be expected to deliver across a range of types of experience. Second, we explore the phenomenology of agency as it bears on the topic of free will. We pose a number of poten-tial problems for attempts to use introspective methods to answer var-ious questions about the phen…Read more
  •  244
    Review: The Salem Witch Project (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (1). 2002.
    The authors’ central claim, they tell us, is that meaning discourse is radically normative, rather than descriptive. In the Introduction they say
  •  139
    From agentive phenomenology to cognitive phenomenology: A guide for the perplexed
    In Tim Bayne and Michelle Montague (ed.), Cognitive Phenomenology, Oxford University Press. pp. 57. 2011.