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14‘Could’, Possible Worlds, and Moral ResponsibilitySouthern Journal of Philosophy 17 (3): 345-358. 1979.
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33Analytic functionalism without representational functionalismBehavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (1): 51-51. 1993.
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31Levels of Description in Nonclassical Cognitive ScienceRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 34 159-188. 1993.David Marr provided an influential account of levels of description in classical cognitive science. In this paper we contrast Marr'ent with some alternatives that are suggested by the recent emergence of connectionism. Marr's account is interesting and important both because of the levels of description it distinguishes, and because of the way his presentation reflects some of the most basic, foundational, assumptions of classical AI-style cognitive science. Thus, by focusing on levels of descri…Read more
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69From Moral Realism to Moral Relativism in One Easy StepCritica 28 (83): 3-39. 1996.In recent years, defenses of moral realism have embraced what we call new wave moral semantics', which construes the semantic workings of moral terms like good' and right' as akin to the semantic workings of natural-kind terms in science and also takes inspiration from functionalist themes in the philosophy of mind. This sort of semantic view which we find in the metaethical views of David Brink, Richard Boyd, Peter Railton, is the crucial semantical underpinning of a naturalistic brand of moral…Read more
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722New Wave Moral Realism Meets Moral Twin EarthJournal of Philosophical Research 16 447-465. 1991.There have been times in the history of ethical theory, especially in this century, when moral realism was down, but it was never out. The appeal of this doctrine for many moral philosophers is apparently so strong that there are always supporters in its corner who seek to resuscitate the view. The attraction is obvious: moral realism purports to provide a precious philosophical good, viz., objectivity and all that this involves, including right answers to (most) moral questions, and the possibi…Read more
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75The Epistemological Spectrum: At the Interface of Cognitive Science and Conceptual AnalysisOxford University Press. 2011.Henderson and Horgan set out a broad new approach to epistemology. They defend the roles of the a priori and conceptual analysis, but with an essential empirical dimension. 'Transglobal reliability' is the key to epistemic justification. The question of which cognitive processes are reliable depends on contingent facts about human capacities.
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61Humean Causation and Kim’s Theory of EventsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 10 (4). 1980.In recent years Jaegwon Kim has propounded and elaborated an influential theory of events. He takes an event to be the exemplification of an empirical property by a concrete object at a time. He also has proposed and endorsed a version of the “Humean” tradition concerning causation: the view that causal relations between concrete events depend upon general "covering laws." But although his explication of the covering-law conception of causation seems quite natural within the framework of his the…Read more
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25Call for Papers for'SORITES'SORITES is a new refereed all-English electronic international quarterly of analytical philosophyAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 73 (2). 1995.
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148Truth as Mediated CorrespondenceThe Monist 89 (1): 28-49. 2006.We will here describe a conception of truth that is robust rather than deflationist, and that differs in important ways from the most familiar robust conceptions.' We will argue that this approach to truth is intrinsically and intuitively plausible, and fares very well relative to other conceptions of truth in terms of comparative theoretical benefits and costs.
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37The synthetic unity of truthIn Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen & Cory Wright (eds.), Truth and Pluralism: Current Debates, Oxford University Press. pp. 180. 2012.
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18Retreat from Non-Being: Graham Priest, Towards Non-Being: The Logic and Metaphysics of Intentionality, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005, pp. xv + 190, £30 (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 84 (4): 615-627. 2006.
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The Exchange Continued: Response to Pust's Response to my ReplyIn Essays on Paradoxes, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 226-224. 2017.
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79Core and Ancillary Epistemic VirtuesActa Analytica 33 (3): 295-309. 2018.We argue, primarily by appeal to phenomenological considerations related to the experiential aspects of agency, that belief fixation is broadly agentive; although it is rarely voluntary, nonetheless, it is phenomenologically agentive because of its significant phenomenological similarities to voluntary-agency experience. An important consequence is that epistemic rationality, as a central feature of belief fixation, is an agentive notion. This enables us to introduce and develop a distinction be…Read more
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100Gripped by authorityCanadian Journal of Philosophy 48 (3-4): 313-336. 2018.Moral judgments are typically experienced as being categorically authoritative – i.e. as having a prescriptive force that is motivationally gripping independently of both conventional norms and one's pre-existing desires, and justificationally trumps both conventional norms and one's pre-existing desires. We argue that this key feature is best accommodated by the meta-ethical position we call ‘cognitivist expressivism’, which construes moral judgments as sui generis psychological states whose di…Read more
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56Epistemic Friction: An Essay on Knowledge, Truth, and Logic, by Gila SherMind 127 (507): 881-890. 2018.© Mind Association 2018Gila Sher’s Epistemic Friction is a bold and ambitious book, with many interesting things to say not only about knowledge, truth, and logic but also about matters ontological. It often requires the reader to construe it hermeneutically, but repays the effort of doing so.She coins the expression ‘epistemic friction’ to refer to constraints on a system of knowledge, coming from both the world and the mind. She says, ‘The world as the object or target of our theories restrict…Read more
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34The Soritical CentipedeNoûs 53 (2): 491-510. 2017.Two philosophical questions arise about rationality in centipede games that are logically prior to attempts to apply the formal tools of game theory to this topic. First, given that the players have common knowledge of mutual rationality and common knowledge that they are each motivated solely to maximize their own profits, is there a backwards-induction argument that employs only familiar non-technical concepts about rationality, leads to the conclusion that the first player is rationally oblig…Read more
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192Troubles for Bayesian Formal EpistemologyRes Philosophica 94 (2): 1-23. 2017.I raise skeptical doubts about the prospects of Bayesian formal epistemology for providing an adequate general normative model of epistemic rationality. The notion of credence, I argue, embodies a very dubious psychological myth, viz., that for virtually any proposition p that one can entertain and understand, one has some quantitatively precise, 0-to-1 ratio-scale, doxastic attitude toward p. The concept of credence faces further serious problems as well—different ones depending on whether cred…Read more
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2The Phenomenology of Agency and Freedom: Lessons from Introspection and Lessons from Its LimitsHumana Mente 4 (15). 2011.
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30Epistemic Virtues and Cognitive DispositionsIn Horgan Terry & Henderson David (eds.), Debating Dispositions: Issues in Metaphysics, Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 296-319. 2009.
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Debating Dispositions: Issues in Metaphysics, Epistemology and Philosophy of MindWalter de Gruyter. 2009.
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95Attention, Morphological Content and Epistemic JustificationCroatian Journal of Philosophy 11 (1): 73-86. 2011.In the formation of epistemically justified beliefs, what is the role of attention, and what is the role (if any) of non-attentional aspects of cognition? We will here argue that there is an essential role for certain nonattentional aspects. These involve epistemically relevant background information that is implicit in the standing structure of an epistemic agent’s cognitive architecture and that does not get explicitly represented during belief-forming cognitive processing. Since such “morphol…Read more
Tucson, Arizona, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |