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32Scientific scotism - the emperor's new trousers or has Armstrong made some real strides?Australasian Journal of Philosophy 61 (1). 1983.(1983). Scientific scotism — The emperor's new trousers or has armstrong made some real strides? Australasian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 61, No. 1, pp. 40-57
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2Wittgenstein as soilIn Max Kölbel & Bernhard Weiss (eds.), Wittgenstein's Lasting Significance, Routledge. 2004.Wittgenstein likened himself to a soil distinctive only in that once implanted with the seeds of great thinkers, interesting flora grew. This chapter examines the influence on him of authors he regarded as truly original, such as Bolzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege and Russell.
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106The Sorites is nonsense disguised by a fallacyAnalysis 72 (1): 61-65. 2012.It is uncontroversial that, on any run through a Sorites series, a subject, at some point, switches from an ‘F’ verdict on one exhibit to a non-‘F’ verdict on the next. (Where this ‘cut-off’ point occurs tend to differ from trial to trial.) It is a fallacy to infer that there must be a cut-off point simpliciter between F items and non-F items. The transition is from firm ground to swamp. In the Sorites reasoning, some conditionals of the form ‘If Item n is F, then Item n + 1 is F’ are not false …Read more
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1A Problem For The DialetheistBulletin of the Section of Logic 15 (1): 10-13. 1986.There has recently been revived logical interest, particularly in the context of attempts to solve the logico-semantical paradoxes, of the idea that there are true contracistions, and of semantics accomodating the glut value both true and false. By considering some generally accepted claims about assertion. I attempt to show that this dialetheist idea is untenable
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103Pierre and circumspection in belief-formationAnalysis 69 (4): 653-655. 2009.In a well-known story constructed by Saul Kripke , Pierre, a rational but monolingual Frenchman who has never visited England, acquires, on the evidence of many magazine pictures of London, the belief that London is beautiful. He is happy to declare ‘Londres est jolie’. Pierre eventually moves to England and settles in one of the seedier areas of London, travelling only to comparably shabby neighbourhoods. He learns English by immersion, though he does not realize that ‘London’ and ‘Londres’ are…Read more
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40
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121How original a work is the tractatus logico-philosophicus?Philosophy 77 (3): 421-446. 2002.Wittgenstein's Tractatus is widely regarded as a masterpiece, a brilliant, if flawed attempt to achieve an ‘unassailable and definitive … final solution’ to a wide range of philosophical problems. Yet, in a 1931 notebook, Wittgenstein confesses: ‘I think there is some truth in my idea that I am really only reproductive in my thinking. I think I have never invented a line of thinking but that it was always provided for me by someone else’. This disarming self-assessment is, I believe accurate. Th…Read more
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32Fallacious ReasoningTeaching Philosophy 18 (2): 139-146. 1995.The author recommends an involved study of logical fallacies in order to provide a database of testable hypotheses for error reasoning. The purpose of the study is to make the study of logical fallacies accessible to a wider audience. Following a recent study conducted by Ludwig Schlecht, the author presents a diagnostic method to illustrate how an argument can be fallacious from the breach of particular rational principles. The diagnosis method also serves as investigation into other forms of a…Read more
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72Stephen Clark, the laws of logic and the soritesPhilosophy 84 (1): 135-143. 2009.A standard method for refuting a set of claims is to show that it implies a contradiction. Stephen Clark questions this method on the grounds that the Law of Non-Contradiction, together with the other fundamental laws of logic do not accord with everyday reality. He accounts for vagueness by suggesting that, for any vague predicate 'F', an ordinary object is typically to some extent both F and not-F, and that objects do not change abruptly from being F to being not-F. I challenge Clark's 'decons…Read more
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Clear and Queer Thinking: Wittgenstein's Development and His Relevance to Modern ThoughtMind 110 (437): 207-211. 2001.
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128Paradoxical partners: semantical brides and set-theoretical groomsAnalysis 73 (1): 33-37. 2013.Is there a key for ‘translating' some set-theoretical paradoxes into counterpart semantical paradoxes and vice-versa? There is, and this encourages the hope of a unified solution. The solution turns not on inventing new axioms that do not entail contradiction, but on imposing a completely intuitive restriction on the comprehension axiom of naive set theory in order to avoid illegitimate (circular) stipulation
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26A Buridanian discussion of desire, murder and democracyAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 70 (4). 1992.This Article does not have an abstract
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106The Indefinability of âOneâJournal of Philosophical Logic 31 (1): 29-42. 2002.Logicism is one of the great reductionist projects. Numbers and the relationships in which they stand may seem to possess suspect ontological credentials â to be entia non grata â and, further, to be beyond the reach of knowledge. In seeking to reduce mathematics to a small set of principles that form the logical basis of all reasoning, logicism holds out the prospect of ontological economy and epistemological security. This paper attempts to show that a fundamental logicist project, that of…Read more
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69Wittgenstein's Late Views on Belief, Paradox and ContradictionPhilosophical Investigations 11 (1): 49-73. 1988.
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93Fibonacci, Yablo, and the cassationist approach to paradoxMind 115 (460): 867-890. 2006.A syntactically correct number-specification may fail to specify any number due to underspecification. For similar reasons, although each sentence in the Yablo sequence is syntactically perfect, none yields a statement with any truth-value. As is true of all members of the Liar family, the sentences in the Yablo sequence are so constructed that the specification of their truth-conditions is vacuous; the Yablo sentences fail to yield statements. The ‘revenge’ problem is easily defused. The soluti…Read more
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67The adverbial theory of conceptual thoughtThe Monist 65 (July): 379-392. 1982.Romane Clark has complained of the dissimilarity between Sellars’s treatment of conceptual thought and his treatment of sense impressions. For sense impressions are intrinsic to perceptions and, on Sellars’s view, both conceptual thought and perception are species of judgment. In the first section of this paper I want to raise a converse sort of complaint: Sellars offers an ‘adverbial’ theory of sense impressions and a similar account of conceptual thought. But this similarity of treatment is no…Read more
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96Wittgenstein and situation comedyPhilosophia 37 (4): 605-627. 2009.Wittgenstein discusses speakers exploiting context to inject meaning into the sentences that they use. One facet of situation comedy is context-injected ambiguity, where scriptwriters artfully construct situations such that, because of conflicting contextual clues, a character, though uttering a sentence that contains neither ambiguous words nor amphibolous contruction may plausibly be interpreted in at least two distinct ways. This highlights an important distinction between the (concise) sente…Read more
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Russell, Edward Lear, Plato, Zeno, Grelling, EubulidesThe Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication 1. 2005.
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University of KentRegular Faculty
University of St. Andrews
PhD, 1977