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209There’s Something Funny About Comedy: A Case Study in Faultless DisagreementErkenntnis 79 (S1): 73-100. 2014.Very often, different people, with different constitutions and comic sensibilities, will make divergent, conflicting judgments about the comic properties of a given person, object, or event, on account of those differences in their constitutions and comic sensibilities. And in many such cases, while we are inclined to say that their comic judgments are in conflict, we are not inclined to say that anybody is in error. The comic looks like a poster domain for the phenomenon of faultless disagreeme…Read more
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179Projectivism without errorIn Bence Nanay (ed.), Perceiving the world, Oxford University Press. pp. 68. 2010.I argue that a theory according to which some of the content of perception is self-locating gives us the resources to cash out the central thought behind projectivism, without having to go in for an error theory about the projected qualities. I first survey some of the phenomena that might motivate what I take to be the central projectivist thought, and then look at some ways of cashing out just what it would amount to for the thought to be correct. I make some objections to some of the standa…Read more
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333Comments on Gendler’s, “the epistemic costs of implicit bias”Philosophical Studies 156 (1): 65-79. 2011.
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633Some counterexamples to causal decision theoryPhilosophical Review 116 (1): 93-114. 2007.Many philosophers (myself included) have been converted to causal decision theory by something like the following line of argument: Evidential decision theory endorses irrational courses of action in a range of examples, and endorses “an irrational policy of managing the news”. These are fatal problems for evidential decision theory. Causal decision theory delivers the right results in the troublesome examples, and does not endorse this kind of irrational news-managing. So we should give up evid…Read more
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497I Can’t Believe I’m StupidPhilosophical Perspectives 19 (1). 2005.It is bad news to find out that one's cognitive or perceptual faculties are defective. Furthermore, it’s not always transparent how one ought to revise one's beliefs in light of such news. Two sorts of news should be distinguished. On the one hand, there is news that a faculty is unreliable -- that it doesn't track the truth particularly well. On the other hand, there is news that a faculty is anti-reliable -- that it tends to go positively wrong. These two sorts of news call for extremely diffe…Read more
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835Wanting things you don't want: The case for an imaginative analogue of desirePhilosophers' Imprint 7 1-17. 2007.You’re imagining, in the course of a different game of make-believe, that you’re a bank robber. You don’t believe that you’re a bank robber. You are moved to point your finger, gun-wise, at the person pretending to be the bank teller and say, “Stick ‘em up! This is a robbery!”
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124Second-Order Predication and the Metaphysics of PropertiesAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (1): 48-66. 2004.Problems about the accidental properties of properties motivate us--force us, I think--not to identify properties with the sets of their instances. If we identify them instead with functions from worlds to extensions, we get a theory of properties that is neutral with respect to disputes over counterpart theory, and we avoid a problem for Lewis's theory of events. Similar problems about the temporary properties of properties motivate us--though this time they probably don't force us--to give up …Read more
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410Quasi-realism and fundamental moral errorAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 85 (2). 2007.A common first reaction to expressivist and quasi-realist theories is the thought that, if these theories are right, there's some objectionable sense in which we can't be wrong about morality. This worry turns out to be surprisingly difficult to make stick - an account of moral error as instability under improving changes provides the quasi-realist with the resources to explain many of our concerns about moral error. The story breaks down, though, in the case of fundamental moral error. This is …Read more
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284Secondary Qualities and Self-LocationPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (1): 97-119. 2006.There is a strong pull to the idea that there is some metaphysically interesting distinction between the fully real, objective, observer-independent qualities of things as they are in themselves, and the less-than-fully-real, subjective, observer-dependent qualities of things as they are for us. Call this (putative) distinction the primary/secondary quality distinction. The distinction between primary and secondary qualities is philosophically interesting because it is (a) often quite attractive…Read more
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447Imagination, delusion, and self-deceptionIn Tim Bayne & Jordi Fernández (eds.), Delusion and Self-Deception: Affective and Motivational Influences on Belief Formation (Macquarie Monographs in Cognitive Science), Psychology Press. 2008.Subjects with delusions profess to believe some extremely peculiar things. Patients with Capgras delusion sincerely assert that, for example, their spouses have been replaced by impostors. Patients with Cotard’s delusion sincerely assert that they are dead. Many philosophers and psychologists are hesitant to say that delusional subjects genuinely believe the contents of their delusions.2 One way to reinterpret delusional subjects is to say that we’ve misidentified the content of the problematic …Read more
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317Appearance properties?Noûs 40 (3): 495-521. 2006.Intentionalism is the view that the phenomenal character of an experience is wholly determined by its representational content is very attractive. Unfortunately, it is in conflict with some quite robust intuitions about the possibility of phenomenal spectrum inversion without misrepresentation. Faced with such a problem, there are the usual three options: reject intentionalism, discount the intuitions and deny that spectrum inversion without misrepresentation is possible, or find a way to reconc…Read more
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1062Epistemic Modals and Epistemic ModalityIn Andy Egan & Brian Weatherson (eds.), Epistemic Modality, Oxford University Press. pp. 1-18. 2011.There is a lot that we don’t know. That means that there are a lot of possibilities that are, epistemically speaking, open. For instance, we don’t know whether it rained in Seattle yesterday. So, for us at least, there is an epistemic possibility where it rained in Seattle yesterday, and one where it did not. It’s tempting to give a very simple analysis of epistemic possibility: • A possibility is an epistemic possibility if we do not know that it does not obtain. But this is problematic for a f…Read more
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202Relativist Dispositional Theories of Value: Relativist Dispositional Theories of ValueSouthern Journal of Philosophy 50 (4): 557-582. 2012.Adopting a dispositional theory of value promises to deliver a lot of theoretical goodies. One recurring problem for dispositional theories of value, though, is a problem about nonconvergence. If being a value is being disposed to elicit response R in us, what should we say if it turns out that not everybody is disposed to have R to the same things? One horn of the problem here is a danger of the view collapsing into an error theory—of it turning out, on account of the diversity of agents' relev…Read more
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Metaphysics |
Meta-Ethics |
Epistemology |
Decision Theory |