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2934This is an essay written for students regarding how to write a philosophy paper.
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1060Worrisome Skepticism About PhilosophyEpisteme 13 (3): 289-303. 2016.A new kind of skepticism about philosophy is articulated and argued for. The key premise is the claim that many of us are well aware that in the past we failed to have good responses to substantive objections to our philosophical beliefs. The conclusion is disjunctive: either we are irrational in sticking with our philosophical beliefs, or we commit some other epistemic sin in having those beliefs.
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1051DisagreementIn Duncan Pritchard & Sven Bernecker (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Epistemology, Routledge. 2010.This is a short essay that presents what I take to be the main questions regarding the epistemology of disagreement.
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388This is an essay for undergraduates. I set out the statue/clay problem and Tibbles/Tib in rich detail. I also present, with less detail, some other puzzles about material composition.
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886The Dual Concepts Objection to Content ExternalismAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 53 (2): 123-138. 2016.Many philosophers have used premises about concepts and rationality to argue that the protagonists in the various Twin Earth thought experiments do not have the concepts that content externalists say they have. This essay argues that this popular internalist argument is flawed in many different ways, and more importantly it cannot be repaired in order to cast doubt on externalism.
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74Scepticism Comes AliveOxford University Press UK. 2005.In epistemology the nagging voice of the sceptic has always been present, whispering that 'You can't know that you have hands, or just about anything else, because for all you know your whole life is a dream.' Philosophers have recently devised ingenious ways to argue against and silence this voice, but Bryan Frances now presents a highly original argument template for generating new kinds of radical scepticism, ones that hold even if all the clever anti-sceptical fixes defeat the traditional sc…Read more
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876DisagreementPolity. 2014.Regardless of who you are or how you live your life, you disagree with millions of people on an enormous number of topics from politics, religion and morality to sport, culture and art. Unless you are delusional, you are aware that a great many of the people who disagree with you are just as smart and thoughtful as you are - in fact, you know that often they are smarter and more informed. But believing someone to be cleverer or more knowledgeable about a particular topic usually won’t change you…Read more
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407On the Explanatory Deficiencies of Linguistic ContentPhilosophical Studies 93 (1): 45-75. 1999.The Burge-Putnam thought experiments have generated the thesis that beliefs are not fixed by the constitution of the body. However, many philosophers have thought that if this is true then there must be another content-like property. Even if the contents of our attitudes such as the one in ‘believes that aluminum is a light metal’, do not supervene on our physical makeups, nevertheless people who are physical duplicates must be the same when it comes to evaluating their rationality and explain…Read more
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405Defending the DefenseMind 108 (431): 563-566. 1999.My hunch has always been that in the end, Fregeanism will defeat Millianism. So I suspect that my (1998) arguments on behalf of Millianism are flawed. Peter Graham (1999) is confident he has found the flaws, but he has not. I hope that some clarification will encourage others to reveal the errors.
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2868The Rationality of Religious BeliefsThink 14 (40): 109-117. 2015.Many highly educated people think religious belief is irrational and unscientific. If you ask a philosopher, however, you'll likely get two answers: most religious belief is rational in some respects and irrational in other respects. In this essay I explain why they think religious belief is rational. In a sequel essay I explain why they think the very same beliefs are irrational
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445I say that it’s philosophically inexpensive because I think it is more convincing than any other Twin-Earth thought experiment in that it sidesteps many of the standard objections to the usual thought experiments. I also discuss narrow contents and give an analysis of Putnam’s original argument.
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225A presentation and analysis of the twin-earth thought experiments.
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926Rationally held ‘P, but I fully believe ~P and I am not equivocating’Philosophical Studies 173 (2): 309-313. 2016.One of Moore’s paradoxical sentence types is ‘P, but I believe ~P’. Mooreans have assumed that all tokens of that sentence type are absurd in some way: epistemically, pragmatically, semantically, or assertively. And then they proceed to debate what the absurdity really is. I argue that if one has the appropriate philosophical views, then one can rationally assert tokens of that sentence type, and one can be epistemically reasonable in the corresponding compound belief as well
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4170Plato’s Response to the Third Man Argument in the Paradoxical Exercise of the ParmenidesAncient Philosophy 16 (1): 47-64. 1996.An analysis of the Third Man Argument, especially in light of Constance Meinwald's book Plato's Parmenides. I argue that her solution to the TMA fails. Then I present my own theory as to what Plato's solution was.
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668In this essay (for undergraduates) I introduce three of the famous semantic paradoxes: the Liar, Grelling’s, and the No-No. Collectively, they seem to show that the notion of truth is highly paradoxical, perhaps even contradictory. They seem to show that the concept of truth is a bit akin to the concept of a married bachelor—it just makes no sense at all. But in order to really understand those paradoxes one needs to be very comfortable thinking about how lots of interesting sentences talk ab…Read more
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611Disquotation and SubstitutivityMind 109 (435): 519-25. 2000.Millianism is reasonable; that is, it is reasonable to think that all there is to the semantic value of a proper name is its referent. But Millianism appears to be undermined by the falsehood of Substitutivity, the principle that interchanging coreferential proper names in an intentional context cannot change the truth value of the resulting belief report. Mary might be perfectly rational in assenting to ‘Twain was a great writer’ as well as ‘Clemens was not a great writer’. Her confusion does n…Read more
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582The New Leibniz's Law Arguments for PluralismMind 115 (460): 1007-1022. 2006.For years philosophers argued for the existence of distinct yet materially coincident things by appealing to modal and temporal properties. For instance, the statue was made on Monday and could not survive being flattened; the lump of clay was made months before and can survive flattening. Such arguments have been thoroughly examined. Kit Fine has proposed a new set of arguments using the same template. I offer a critical evaluation of what I take to be his central lines of reasoning.
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152The Ontology of Some AfterimagesIn Manuel Curado & Steven Gouvei (eds.), Philosophy of Mind: Contemporary Perspectives, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. pp. 118-144. 2017.A good portion of the work in the ontology of color focuses on color properties, trying to figure out how they are related to more straightforwardly physical properties. Another focus is realism: are ordinary material objects such as pumpkins really colored? A third emphasis is the nature of what is referred to by the terms ‘what it’s like’ or ‘phenomenal character’, as applied to color. In contrast, this essay is exclusively about select color tokens. I will be arguing that whether or not ordin…Read more
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526Spirituality, Expertise, and PhilosophersIn L. Kvanvig Jonathan (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, Oxford University Press. pp. 44-81. 2013.We all can identify many contemporary philosophy professors we know to be theists of some type or other. We also know that often enough their nontheistic beliefs are as epistemically upstanding as the non-theistic beliefs of philosophy professors who aren’t theists. In fact, the epistemic-andnon-theistic lives of philosophers who are theists are just as epistemically upstanding as the epistemic-and-non-theistic lives of philosophers who aren’t theists. Given these and other, similar, facts, ther…Read more
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945Justifying a Large Part of PhilosophyThink 18 (51): 93-99. 2019.I explain why research in non-applied, non-interdisciplinary, non-historical philosophy is worthwhile. The key move in the explanation is the realization that many philosophical problems can be put in the form of a set of highly plausible yet apparently jointly inconsistent claims regarding a fundamental notion.Export citation.
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221Preface & Chp 1 of 'Scepticism Comes Alive'Oxford University Press. 2005.The preface and chapter 1 of my book Scepticism Comes Alive, 2005 OUP.
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1091Extensive Philosophical Agreement and ProgressMetaphilosophy 48 (1-2): 47-57. 2017.This article argues, first, that there is plenty of agreement among philosophers on philosophically substantive claims, which fall into three categories: reasons for or against certain views, elementary truths regarding fundamental notions, and highly conditionalized claims. This agreement suggests that there is important philosophical progress. It then argues that although it's easy to list several potential kinds of philosophical progress, it is much harder to determine whether the potential i…Read more
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59Varieties of Things: Foundations of Contemporary Metaphysics—Cynthia Macdonald (review)International Philosophical Quarterly 47 (3): 380-382. 2007.Book review
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658A Test for Theories of Belief AscriptionAnalysis 62 (2): 116-125. 2002.These days the two most popular approaches to belief ascription are Millianism and Contextualism. The former approach is inconsistent with the existence of ordinary Frege cases, such as Lois believing that Superman flies while failing to believe that Clark Kent flies. The Millian holds that the only truth-conditionally relevant aspect of a proper name is its referent or extension. Contextualism, as I will define it for the purposes of this essay, includes all theories according to which ascripti…Read more
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467This is an essay for undergraduates. I present the basic problems of reference for descriptions and names.
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237Scepticism and DisagreementIn Diego Machuca & Baron Reed (eds.), Skepticism: From Antiquity to the Present, Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 581-591. 2016.There is a long history of using facts about disagreement to argue that many of our most precious beliefs are false in a way that can make a difference in our lives. In this essay I go over a series of such arguments, arguing that the best arguments target beliefs that meet two conditions: (i) they have been investigated and debated for a very long time by a great many very smart people who are your epistemic superiors on the matter and have worked very hard under optimal circumstances to figure…Read more
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1561Philosophical RenegadesIn Jennifer Lackey & David Christensen (eds.), The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays, Oxford University Press. pp. 121-166. 2013.If you retain your belief upon learning that a large number and percentage of your recognized epistemic superiors disagree with you, then what happens to the epistemic status of your belief? I investigate that theoretical question as well has the applied case of philosophical disagreement—especially disagreement regarding purely philosophical error theories, theories that do not have much empirical support and that reject large swaths of our most commonsensical beliefs. I argue that even if al…Read more
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576Live Skeptical HypothesesIn John Greco (ed.), The Oxford handbook of skepticism, Oxford University Press. pp. 225-245. 2008.Those of us who take skepticism seriously typically have two relevant beliefs: (a) it’s plausible (even if false) that in order to know that I have hands I have to be able to epistemically neutralize, to some significant degree, some skeptical hypotheses, such as the brain-in-a-vat (BIV) one; and (b) it’s also plausible (even if false) that I can’t so neutralize those hypotheses. There is no reason for us to also think (c) that the BIV hypothesis, for instance, is plausible or probably true. In …Read more
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1084Discovering Disagreeing Epistemic Peers and SuperiorsInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 20 (1): 1-21. 2012.Suppose you know that someone is your epistemic peer regarding some topic. You admit that you cannot think of any relevant epistemic advantage you have over her when it comes to that topic; you admit that she is just as likely as you to get P's truth-value right. Alternatively, you might know that she is your epistemic superior regarding the topic. And then after learning this about her you find out that she disagrees with you about P. In those situations it appears that the confidence with whic…Read more
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205This is one of those "fun" examples of a semantic paradox, written for undergraduates.
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