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674Expressivism Worth the Name -- A reply to Teemu ToppinenJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 1-7. 2015.I respond to an interesting objection to my 2014 argument against hermeneutic expressivism. I argue that even though Toppinen has identified an intriguing route for the expressivist to tread, the plausible developments of it would not fall to my argument anyways---as they do not make direct use of the parity thesis which claims that expression works the same way in the case of conative and cognitive attitudes. I close by sketching a few other problems plaguing such views.
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630The Normative Force of PromisingOxford Studies in Normative Ethics 6 77-101. 2016.Why do promises give rise to reasons? I consider a quadruple of possibilities which I think will not work, then sketch the explanation of the normativity of promising I find more plausible—that it is constitutive of the practice of promising that promise-breaking implies liability for blame and that we take liability for blame to be a bad thing. This effects a reduction of the normativity of promising to conventionalism about liability together with instrumental normativity and desire-based reas…Read more
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566Mathematics, Morality, and Self‐EffacementNoûs 52 (1): 47-68. 2016.I argue that certain species of belief, such as mathematical, logical, and normative beliefs, are insulated from a form of Harman-style debunking argument whereas moral beliefs, the primary target of such arguments, are not. Harman-style arguments have been misunderstood as attempts to directly undermine our moral beliefs. They are rather best given as burden-shifting arguments, concluding that we need additional reasons to maintain our moral beliefs. If we understand them this way, then we can …Read more
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843Failures of Categoricity and Compositionality for Intuitionistic DisjunctionThought: A Journal of Philosophy 1 (4): 281-291. 2012.I show that the model-theoretic meaning that can be read off the natural deduction rules for disjunction fails to have certain desirable properties. I use this result to argue against a modest form of inferentialism which uses natural deduction rules to fix model-theoretic truth-conditions for logical connectives.
Leeds, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Meta-Ethics |
Philosophy of Language |