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20Synchronic Bayesian updating and the generalized Sleeping Beauty problemAnalysis 67 (1): 50-59. 2007.
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161Facing Up to the Sorites ParadoxThe Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 6 99-111. 2000.The ancient sorites paradox has important implications for metaphysics, for logic, and for semantics. Metaphysically, the paradox can be harnessed to produce a powerful argument for the claim that there cannot be vague objects or vague properties. With respect to logic, the paradox forces a choice between the highly counterintuitive ‘epistemic’ account of vagueness and the rejection of classical two-valued logic. Regarding semantics, nonclassical approaches to the logic of vagueness lead natural…Read more
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34Replies to papersGrazer 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
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31Phenomenal Intentionality and Content DeterminacyIn Richard Schantz (ed.), Prospects for Meaning, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 321-344. 2012.
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32Multiple reference, multiple realization, and the reduction of mindIn Gerhard Preyer & Frank Siebelt (eds.), Reality and Humean Supervenience: Essays on the Philosophy of David Lewis, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 205--221. 2001.
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83Materialism: Matters Of Definition, Defense, and DeconstructionPhilosophical Studies 131 (1): 157-183. 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
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4The phenomenology of intentionality and the intentionality of phenomenologyIn David J. Chalmers (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, Oxford University Press. pp. 520--533. 2002.
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120Abundant truth in an austere worldIn Patrick Greenough & Michael P. Lynch (eds.), Truth and realism, Oxford University Press. pp. 137--167. 2006.What is real? Less than you might think. We advocate austere metaphysical realism---a form of metaphysical realism claiming that a correct ontological theory will repudiate numerous putative entities and properties that are posited in everyday thought and discourse, and also will even repudiate numerous putative objects and properties that are posited by well confirmed scientific theories. We have lately defended a specific version of austere metaphysical realism which asserts that there is real…Read more
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81Introspection about phenomenal consciousness: Running the gamut from infallibility to impotenceIn Declan Smithies & Daniel Stoljar (eds.), Introspection and Consciousness, Oxford University Press. 2012.
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163Synchronic Bayesian updating and the Sleeping Beauty problem: reply to PustSynthese 160 (2): 155-159. 2008.I maintain, in defending “thirdism,” that Sleeping Beauty should do Bayesian updating after assigning the “preliminary probability” 1/4 to the statement S: “Today is Tuesday and the coin flip is heads.” (This preliminary probability obtains relative to a specific proper subset I of her available information.) Pust objects that her preliminary probability for S is really zero, because she could not be in an epistemic situation in which S is true. I reply that the impossibility of being in such an…Read more
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195Transglobal evidentialism-reliabilismActa Analytica 22 (4): 281-300. 2007.We propose an approach to epistemic justification that incorporates elements of both reliabilism and evidentialism, while also transforming these elements in significant ways. After briefly describing and motivating the non-standard version of reliabilism that Henderson and Horgan call “transglobal” reliabilism, we harness some of Henderson and Horgan’s conceptual machinery to provide a non-reliabilist account of propositional justification (i.e., evidential support). We then invoke this account…Read more
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48Recognitional Concepts and the Compositionality of Concept PossessionPhilosophical Issues 9. 1998.
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32Abductive Inference, Explicable and Anomalous Disagreement, and Epistemic ResourcesRes Philosophica 93 (3): 567-584. 2016.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
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107Troubles for Michael Smith's metaethical rationalismPhilosophical Papers 25 (3): 203-231. 1996.
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3Mandelbaum on moral phenomenology and moral realismIn Ian Verstegen (ed.), Maurice Mandelbaum and American Critical Realism, Routledge. pp. 105. 2010.
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115You are given a choice between two envelopes. You are told, reliably, that each envelope has some money in it—some whole number of dollars, say—and that one envelope contains twice as much money as the other. You don’t know which has the higher amount and which has the lower. You choose one, but are given the opportunity to switch to the other. Here is an argument that it is rationally preferable to switch: Let x be the quantity of money in your chosen envelope. Then the quantity in the other is…Read more
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639Cognitivist expressivismIn Terry Horgan & Mark Timmons (eds.), Metaethics After Moore, Oxford University Press. pp. 255--298. 2006.
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170Metaethics After Moore (edited book)Oxford University Press UK. 2006.Metaethics, understood as a distinct branch of ethics, is often traced to G. E. Moore's 1903 classic, Principia Ethica. Whereas normative ethics is concerned to answer first order moral questions about what is good and bad, right and wrong, metaethics is concerned to answer second order non-moral questions about the semantics, metaphysics, and epistemology of moral thought and discourse. Moore has continued to exert a powerful influence, and the sixteen essays here represent the most up-to-date …Read more
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112The epistemic relevance of morphological contentActa Analytica 25 (2): 155-173. 2010.Morphological content is information that is implicitly embodied in the standing structure of a cognitive system and is automatically accommodated during cognitive processing without first becoming explicit in consciousness. We maintain that much belief-formation in human cognition is essentially morphological : i.e., it draws heavily on large amounts of morphological content, and must do so in order to tractably accommodate the holistic evidential relevance of background information possessed b…Read more
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42Agentive Phenomenal Intentionality and the Limits of IntrospectionPSYCHE: 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
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242Generalized Conditionalization and the Sleeping Beauty ProblemErkenntnis 78 (2): 333-351. 2013.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
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12Review: 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
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