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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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86Sensations and grain processesIn Gregory R. Mulhauser (ed.), Evolving Consciousness, John Benjamins. 1998.
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121Consciousness and intentionalityIn Max Velmans & Susan Schneider (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 468--484. 2007.
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103Themes in my philosophical workIn Johannes L. Brandl (ed.), Essays on the Philosophy of Terence Horgan, Atlanta: Rodopi. pp. 1-26. 2002.I invoked the notion of supervenience in my doctoral disseration, Microreduction and the Mind-Body Problem, completed at the University of Michigan in 1974 under the direction of Jaegwon Kim. I had been struck by the appeal to supervenience in Hare (1952), a classic work in twentieth century metaethics that I studied at Michigan in a course on metaethics taught by William Frankena; and I also had been struck by the brief appeal to supervenience in Davidson (1970). Kim was already, in effect, con…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.
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27Qualia 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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116Deconstructing new wave materialismIn Carl Gillett & Barry Loewer (eds.), Physicalism and its Discontents, Cambridge University Press. pp. 307--318. 2001.In the first post World War II identity theories (e.g., Place 1956, Smart 1962), mind brain identities were held to be contingent. However, in work beginning in the late 1960's, Saul Kripke (1971, 1980) convinced the philosophical community that true identity statements involving names and natural kind terms are necessarily true and furthermore, that many such necessary identities can only be known a posteriori. Kripke also offered an explanation of the a posteriori nature of ordinary theoretica…Read more
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554Troubles on moral twin earth: Moral queerness revivedSynthese 92 (2). 1992.J. L. Mackie argued that if there were objective moral properties or facts, then the supervenience relation linking the nonmoral to the moral would be metaphysically queer. Moral realists reply that objective supervenience relations are ubiquitous according to contemporary versions of metaphysical naturalism and, hence, that there is nothing especially queer about moral supervenience. In this paper we revive Mackie's challenge to moral realism. We argue: (i) that objective supervenience relation…Read more
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218Naturalism and intentionalityPhilosophical Studies 76 (2-3): 301-26. 1994.I argue for three principle claims. First, philosophers who seek to integrate the semantic and the intentional into a naturalistic metaphysical worldview need to address a task that they have thus far largely failed even to notice: explaining into- level connections between the physical and the intentional in a naturalistically acceptable way. Second, there are serious reasons to think that this task cannot be carried out in a way that would vindicate realism about intentionality. Third, there i…Read more
Tucson, Arizona, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |