-
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.
-
120Abundant truth in an austere worldIn Patrick Greenough & Michael Patrick 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
-
74Materialism: 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
-
4The phenomenology of intentionality and the intentionality of phenomenologyIn David John Chalmers (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 520--533. 2002.
-
196Transglobal 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
-
81Introspection about phenomenal consciousness: Running the gamut from infallibility to impotenceIn Declan Smithies & Daniel Stoljar (eds.), Introspection and Consciousness, Oxford University Press. 2012.
-
97Synchronic 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
-
48Recognitional Concepts and the Compositionality of Concept PossessionPhilosophical Issues 9. 1998.
-
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
-
107Troubles for Michael Smith's metaethical rationalismPhilosophical Papers 25 (3): 203-231. 1996.
-
639Cognitivist expressivismIn Terry Horgan & Mark Timmons (eds.), Metaethics After Moore, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 255--298. 2006.
-
3Mandelbaum on moral phenomenology and moral realismIn Ian Verstegen (ed.), Maurice Mandelbaum and American critical realism, Routledge. pp. 105. 2010.
-
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
-
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
-
106Metaethics 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
-
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
-
244Generalized 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
-
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
-
426Risk sensitive animal knowledgePhilosophical 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.
-
108Exploring Intuitions on Moral Twin Earth: A Reply to SonderholmTheoria 81 (4): 355-375. 2015.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
-
108Particularist semantic normativityActa Analytica 21 (1): 45-61. 2006.We sketch the view we call contextual semantics. It asserts that truth is semantically correct affirmability under contextually variable semantic standards, that truth is frequently an indirect form of correspondence between thought/language and the world, and that many Quinean commitments are not genuine ontological commitments. We argue that contextualist semantics fits very naturally with the view that the pertinent semantic standards are particularist rather than being systematizable as exce…Read more
-
264What does moral phenomenology tell us about moral objectivity?Social Philosophy and Policy 25 (1): 267-300. 2008.Moral phenomenology is concerned with the elements of one's moral experiences that are generally available to introspection. Some philosophers argue that one's moral experiences, such as experiencing oneself as being morally obligated to perform some action on some occasion, contain elements that (1) are available to introspection and (2) carry ontological objectivist purportargument from phenomenological introspection.neutrality thesisthe phenomenological data regarding one's moral experiences …Read more
-
81Deep ignorance, brute supervenience, and the problem of the manyPhilosophical Issues 8 229-236. 1997.
-
11Morphological Rationalism and the Psychology of Moral JudgmentEthical Theory and Moral Practice 10 (3): 279-295. 2007.According to rationalism regarding the psychology of moral judgment, people’s moral judgments are generally the result of a process of reasoning that relies on moral principles or rules. By contrast, intuitionist models of moral judgment hold that people generally come to have moral judgments about particular cases on the basis of gut-level, emotion-driven intuition, and do so without reliance on reasoning and hence without reliance on moral principles. In recent years the intuitionist model has…Read more
Tucson, Arizona, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |