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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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32Analytic functionalism without representational functionalismBehavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (1): 51-51. 1993.
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31Multiple 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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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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30Materialism, minimal emergentism, and the hard problem of consciousnessIn Robert C. Koons & George Bealer (eds.), The Waning of Materialism: New Essays, Oxford University Press. 2010.This chapter formulates and motivates the current favored articulation of the metaphysical doctrine of materialism. It describes an alternative metaphysical position called minimal emergentism, which has two versions; and then contrasts it with stronger kinds of emergentism. Minimal emergentism posits certain inter-level necessitation relations — either nomically necessary connections, or metaphysically necessary connections — that are metaphysically brute. The chapter sets forth what it takes t…Read more
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30Replies 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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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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29Relies to our criticsPhilosophical Studies 169 (3): 549-564. 2014.We respond to the central concerns raised by our commentators to our book, The Epistemological Spectrum. Casullo believes that our account of what we term “low-grade a priori” justification provides important clarification of a kind of philosophical reflection. However he objects to calling such reflection a priori. We explain what we think is at stake. Along the way, we comment on his idea of that there may be an epistemic payoff to making a distinction between assumptions and presumptions. In …Read more
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29Qualia and Mental Causation in a Physical World: Themes From the Philosophy of Jaegwon Kim (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2015.How does mind fit into nature? Philosophy has long been concerned with this question. No contemporary philosopher has done more to clarify it than Jaegwon Kim, a distinguished analytic philosopher specializing in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. With new contributions from an outstanding line-up of eminent scholars, this volume focuses on issues raised in Kim's work. The chapters cluster around two themes: first, exclusion, supervenience, and reduction, with attention to the causal exclusion …Read more
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28Phenomenal Intentionality and Content DeterminacyIn Richard Schantz (ed.), Prospects for Meaning, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 321-344. 2012.
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27Modelling 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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26Pr cis of connectionism and the philosophy of psychologyPhilosophical Psychology 10 (3). 1997.Connectionism was explicitly put forward as an alternative to classical cognitive science. The questions arise: how exactly does connectionism differ from classical cognitive science, and how is it potentially better? The classical “rules and representations” conception of cognition is that cognitive transitions are determined by exceptionless rules that apply to the syntactic structure of symbols. Many philosophers have seen connectionism as a basis for denying structured symbols. We, on the ot…Read more
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26Austere Realism: Contextual Semantics Meets Minimal OntologyMIT Press. 2008.A provocative ontological-cum-semantic position asserting that the right ontology is austere in its exclusion of numerous common-sense and scientific posits and that many statements employing such posits are nonetheless true. The authors of Austere Realism describe and defend a provocative ontological-cum-semantic position, asserting that the right ontology is minimal or austere, in that it excludes numerous common-sense posits, and that statements employing such posits are nonetheless true, whe…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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23Nonrigid event-designators and the modal individuation of eventsPhilosophical Studies 37 (4). 1980.
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23What does it take to be a true believer?In Christina E. Erneling & David Martel Johnson (eds.), Mind As a Scientific Object: Between Brain and Culture, Oxford University Press. pp. 211. 2004.Eliminative materialism, as William Lycan (this volume) tells us, is materialism plus the claim that no creature has ever had a belief, desire, intention, hope, wish, or other “folk-psychological” state. Some contemporary philosophers claim that eliminative materialism is very likely true. They sketch certain potential scenarios, for the way theory might develop in cognitive science and neuroscience, that they claim are fairly likely; and they maintain that if such.
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21From supervenience to superdupervenienceIn Jaegwon Kim (ed.), Supervenience, Ashgate. pp. 113--144. 2002.
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20Synchronic Bayesian updating and the generalized Sleeping Beauty problemAnalysis 67 (1): 50-59. 2007.
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20Kim on the Mind—Body Problem (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 (4). 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
Tucson, Arizona, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |