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115Intuitions and illusions: From explanation and experiment to assessmentIn Eugen Fischer & John Collins (eds.), Experimental Philosophy, Rationalism, and Naturalism. Rethinking Philosophical Method, Routledge. pp. 259-292. 2015.This paper pioneers the use of methods and findings from psycholinguistics in experimental philosophy’s ‘sources project’. On this basis, it clarifies the epistemological relevance of empirical findings about intuitions – a key methodological challenge to experimental philosophy. The sources project (aka ‘cognitive epistemology of intuitions’) seeks to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions, which help us assess their evidentiary value. One approach seeks expla…Read more
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100Bogus Mystery about Linguistic CompetenceSynthese 135 (1): 49-75. 2003.The paper considers a version of the problem of linguistic creativity obtained by interpreting attributions of ordinary semantic knowledge as attributions of practical competencies with expressions. The paper explains how to cope with this version of the problem without invoking either compositional theories of meaning or the notion of `tacit knowledge' (of such theories) that has led to unnecessary puzzlement. The central idea is to show that the core assumption used to raise the problem is fal…Read more
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96On the very idea of a theory of meaning for a natural languageSynthese 111 (1): 1-8. 1997.A certain orthodoxy has it that understanding is essentially computational: that information about what a sentence means is something that may be generated by means of a derivational process from information about the significance of the sentences constituent parts and of the ways in which they are put together. And that it is therefore fruitful to study formal theories acceptable as compositional theories of meaning for natural languages: theories that deliver for each sentence of their object-…Read more
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78Inappropriate stereotypical inferences? An adversarial collaboration in experimental ordinary language philosophySynthese 198 (11): 10127-10168. 2020.This paper trials new experimental methods for the analysis of natural language reasoning and the development of critical ordinary language philosophy in the wake of J.L. Austin. Philosophical arguments and thought experiments are strongly shaped by default pragmatic inferences, including stereotypical inferences. Austin suggested that contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences are at the root of some philosophical paradoxes and problems, and that these can be resolved by exposing those…Read more
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74What is it like to be colour‐blind? A case study in experimental philosophy of experienceMind and Language 37 (5): 814-839. 2021.What is the experience of someone who is “colour‐blind” like? This paper presents the results of a study that uses qualitative research methods to better understand the lived experience of colour blindness. Participants were asked to describe their experiences of a variety of coloured stimuli, both with and without EnChroma glasses—glasses which, the manufacturers claim, enhance the experience of people with common forms of colour blindness. More generally, the paper provides a case study in the…Read more
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64Paradox-Psychologie: Kognitive Epistemologie und philosophische ProblemaufloesungIn Thomas Grundmann, Joachim Horvath & Jens Kipper (eds.), Die Experimentelle Philosophie in der Diskussion, Suhrkamp. pp. 322-349. 2014.Der Aufsatz stellt einen Strang der experimentellen Philosophie vor, der sich nicht mit empirischen Umfragen begnügt, sondern bemüht, psychologische Experimente und Erklärungen für die philosophische Arbeit nutzbar zu machen: Das prominent propagierte, aber bislang nur vereinzelt praktizierte Forschungsprogramm der kognitiven Epistemologie (alias ‚sources project‘) verwendet bereits vorliegende experimentelle und theoretische Ergebnisse der Kognitions- und Sozialpsychologie, um ihrerseits experi…Read more
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57Derivation of a Floquet Formalism within a Natural FrameworkActa Biotheoretica 60 (3): 303-317. 2012.Many biological systems experience a periodic environment. Floquet theory is a mathematical tool to deal with such time periodic systems. It is not often applied in biology, because linkage between the mathematics and the biology is not available. To create this linkage, we derive the Floquet theory for natural systems. We construct a framework, where the rotation of the Earth is causing the periodicity. Within this framework the angular momentum operator is introduced to describe the Earth’s ro…Read more
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53Linguistic Legislation and Psycholinguistic Experiments: Redeveloping Waismann’s ApproachIn Dejan Makovec & Stewart Shapiro (eds.), Friedrich Waismann: The Open Texture of Analytic Philosophy, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 211-241. 2019.This paper presents a neglected philosophical approach, redevelops it on fresh empirical foundations, and seeks to bring out that it is of not merely historical interest. Building on ideas Ludwig Wittgenstein mooted in the early 1930s, Friedrich Waismann developed a distinctive metaphilosophy: Through case studies on particular philosophical problems, he identified a characteristic structure and genesis displayed by several philosophical problems and presented a distinctive dialogical method for…Read more
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53The Myth of the Intuitive: Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical MethodPhilosophical Review 127 (3): 413-418. 2018.
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50Discrimination: A Challenge to First‐Person Authority?Philosophical Investigations 24 (4): 330-346. 2001.It is no surprise that empirical psychology refutes, again and again, assumptions of uneducated common sense. But some puzzlement tends to arise when scientific results appear to call into question the very conceptual framework of the mental to which we have become accustomed. This paper shall examine a case in point: Experiments on colour-discrimination have recently been taken to refute an assumption of first-person authority that appears to be constitutive of our ordinary notion of perceptual…Read more
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50Messing Up the Mind? Analogical Reasoning with MetaphorsIn Henrique Jales Ribeiro (ed.), Systematic Approaches to Argument by Analogy, Springer. pp. 129-148. 2014.One major facilitator of analogical reasoning is conceptual metaphor: cross-domain mappings that preserve relations and thereby motivate the extension of linguistic terms from the source to the target domain. Their conscious and explicit use in analogical reasoning has been helpful and productive in disciplines ranging from physics to psychology, and philosophy. At the same time, students of metaphor have suggested that partially unwitting use of conceptual metaphors led to unsound but intuitive…Read more
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46Dissolving' the 'problem of linguistic creativityPhilosophical Investigations 20 (4). 1997.In this article, I develop the so‐called ‘problem of linguistic creativity’ for two object‐languages, one finite, the other infinite. I then employ an approach first outlined by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s collaborator Friedrich Waismann, to ‘dissolve’ that problem, in a sense made precise by working through the example. This is to unsettle the computational picture of linguistic understanding as turning on the generation of semantic information about sentences on the basis of semantic information abo…Read more
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32Linguistic Creativity: Exercises in 'Philosophical Therapy'Kluwer Academic Publishers. 2000.How is it that speakers can get to know the meaning of any of indefinitely many sentences they have never encountered before? - the 'problem of linguistic creativity' posed by this question is a core problem of both philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics, and has sparked off a considerable amount of work in the philosophy of mind. The book establishes the failure of the familiar - compositional - approach to this problem, and then takes a radically new start: It develops core elemen…Read more
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22How Understanding Shapes Reasoning: Experimental Argument Analysis with Methods from Psycholinguistics and Computational LinguisticsIn David Bordonaba-Plou (ed.), Experimental Philosophy of Language: Perspectives, Methods, and Prospects, Springer Verlag. pp. 241-262. 2023.Empirical insights into language processing have a philosophical relevance that extends well beyond philosophical questions about language. This chapter will discuss this wider relevance: We will consider how experimental philosophers can examine language processing in order to address questions in several different areas of philosophy. To do so, we will present the emerging research program of experimental argument analysis (EAA) that examines how automatic language processing shapes verbal rea…Read more
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19‘Experience’, ordinary and philosophical: a corpus studySynthese 201 (6): 1-30. 2023.Common arguments for realism about phenomenal consciousness contend that this is a folk concept, with proponents expecting it to be lexicalised in ordinary language. In English, the word ‘experience’ is typically regarded as the best candidate. This predicts that ‘experience’ will be used to refer to mental states and episodes, not only in philosophical but also in ordinary discourse. We conduct a corpus study in order to assess this claim and to understand the actual use of the word in non-acad…Read more
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12Causation attributions and corpus analysisIn Pascale Willemsen & Alex Wiegmann (eds.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Causation, Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 209-238. 2022.
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6Through Pictures to Problems: Cognitive Epistemology and Therapeutic PhilosophyIn Christoph Jäger & Winfried Löffler (eds.), Epistemology: Contexts, Values, Disagreement. Papers of the 34th International Ludwig Wittgenstein-Symposium in Kirchberg, 2011, The Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society. pp. 475-492. 2007.
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Austin on Sense-Data: Ordinary Language Analysis as `Therapy'Grazer Philosophische Studien 70 (1): 67. 2006.
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Platos Untersuchung der Formen der Tugend. Eine Fallstudie zur Frage: Was ist und was soll Metaphysik?Philosophisches Jahrbuch 107 (1): 95-115. 2000.
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Introduction : Aims and method in the investigationsIn Erich Ammereller & Eugen Fisher (eds.), Wittgenstein at Work: Method in the Philosophical Investigations, Routledge. 2004.
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University of East AngliaSchool of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication StudiesRegular Faculty
Areas of Specialization
1 more
Epistemology |
Metaphilosophy |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
20th Century Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |