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177The development of wittgenstein's views on contradictionHistory and Philosophy of Logic 7 (1): 43-56. 1986.The views on contradiction and consistency that Wittgenstein expressed in his later writings have met with misunderstanding and almost uniform hositility. In this paper, I trace the roots of these views by attempting to show that, in his early writings, Wittgenstein accorded a ?unique status? to tautologies and contradictions, marking them off logically from genuine propositions. This is integral both to his Tractatus project of furnishing a theory of inference, and to the enterprise of explaini…Read more
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16Wittgenstein 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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312A consistent way with paradoxPhilosophical Studies 144 (3). 2009.Consideration of a paradox originally discovered by John Buridan provides a springboard for a general solution to paradoxes within the Liar family. The solution rests on a philosophical defence of truth-value-gaps and is consistent (non-dialetheist), avoids ‘revenge’ problems, imports no ad hoc assumptions, is not applicable to only a proper subset of the semantic paradoxes and implies no restriction of the expressive capacities of language.
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67Mind, Machine, and Metaphor: An Essay on Artificial Intelligence and Legal ReasoningPhilosophical Books 36 (2): 134-136. 1995.
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232The 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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154The adverbial theory of conceptual thoughtThe Monist 65 (3): 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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66Fallacious 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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Russell, Edward Lear, Plato, Zeno, Grelling, EubulidesThe Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication 1. 2005.
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32Brevity (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2013.Brevity in conversation is a window to the workings of the mind. It is both a multifaceted topic of deep philosophical importance and a phenomenon that serves as a testing ground for theories in linguistics, psycholinguistics and computer modeling. Speakers use elliptical constructions and exploit salient features of the conversational environment, a process of pragmatic enrichment, so as to pack a great deal into a few words. They also tailor their words to theirparticular conversational partne…Read more
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286Pierre 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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10Humor and HarmSorites 3 27-42. 1995.For familiar reasons, stereotyping is believed to be irresponsible and offensive. Yet the use of stereotypes in humor is widespread. Particularly offensive are thought to be sexual and racial stereotypes, yet it is just these that figure particularly prominently in jokes. In certain circumstances it is unquestionably wrong to make jokes that employ such stereotypes. Some writers have made the much stronger claim that in all circumstances it is wrong to find such jokes funny; in other words that …Read more
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174IntroductionThe Monist 88 (1): 3-10. 2005.According to some commentators, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is all one big joke: we plough through the text trying to extract the sense out of each spare and heroic proposition, only to be told at the end, that anyone who understands the author will realize that all of his propositions are nonsensical and so are not even propositions. The whole work is a kind of hoax; the readers are ridiculed, but, with luck, will eventually have to laugh when they come to recognize that what they had taken for de…Read more
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116Wittgenstein's Late Views on Belief, Paradox and ContradictionPhilosophical Investigations 11 (1): 49-73. 1988.
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276Paradoxical 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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165Wittgenstein 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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208A non-theistic cosmology and natural historyAnalysis 66 (3): 256-260. 2006.The plausibility of the theory of evolution depends on abandoning the assumption of a unique 'big bang' ex nihilo marking the beginning of the universe.
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University of KentRegular Faculty
University of St. Andrews
PhD, 1977