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276Secondary 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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441Imagination, delusion, and self-deceptionIn Tim Bayne & Jordi Fernandez (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 Patients with Capgras delusion sincerely assert that, for example, their spouses have been replaced by impostors.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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326Appearance 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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1079Epistemic Modals and Epistemic ModalityIn Andy Egan & Brian Weatherson (eds.), Epistemic Modality, Oxford University Press. pp. 1-18. 2009.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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195Relativist 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
APA Eastern Division
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
Meta-Ethics |
Epistemology |
Decision Theory |