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61Rule-Following and Realism (review)Philosophical Review 108 (3): 425. 1999.Ebbs’s aim is to “come to terms with and move beyond currently entrenched ways of looking at central topics in the philosophy of language and mind”. The entrenched perspectives are Metaphysical Realism, the view that “we can make ‘objective’ assertions only if we can ‘grasp’ metaphysically independent ‘truth conditions”’, and Scientific Naturalism, “Quine’s view that ‘it is within science itself that reality is to be identified and described”’. Ebbs intends to replace these with what he calls th…Read more
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59Gabriel Segal, a slim book about narrow content(mit press, 2000), 177 pp (review)Noûs 37 (4): 724-745. 2003.The Mind-Body problem is the problem of saying how a person’s mental states and events relate to his bodily ones. How does Oscar’s believing that water is cold relate to the states of his body? Is it itself a bodily state, perhaps a state of his brain or nervous system? If not, does it nonetheless depend on such states? Or is his believing that water is cold independent of his bodily states? And, crucially, what are the notions of dependence and independence at issue here?
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16Belief and Agency (edited book)University of Calgary Press. 2011."Most of the papers in this volume (all except for those by Steinberg, Haase, and Street) were presented at a conference...at Ryerson University in October of 2010."--p. xvii.
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110Understanding, justification and the a prioriPhilosophical Studies 87 (2): 119-141. 1997.What I wish to consider here is how understanding something is related to the justification of beliefs about what it means. Suppose, for instance, that S understands the name “Clinton” and has a justified belief that it names Clinton. How is S’s understanding related to that belief’s justification? Or suppose that S understands the sentence “Clinton is President”, or Jones’ assertive utterance of it, and has a justified belief that that sentence expresses the proposition that Clinton is President, o…Read more
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123Mind-brain identity and the nature of statesAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 79 (3). 2001.This Article does not have an abstract
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18Review of *Context* Robert Stalnaker new York: Oxford university press, 2014; 248 pp.; $52.50 (review)Dialogue 55 (2). 2016.
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159Soames and widescopismPhilosophical Studies 123 (3). 2005.Widescopism, as I call it, holds that names are synonymous with descriptions that are required to take wide scope over modal adverbs. Scott Soames has recently argued that Widescopism is false. He identifies an argument that is valid but which, he claims, a defender of Widescopism must say has true premises and a false conclusion. I argue, first, that a defender of Widescopism need not in fact say that the target arguments conclusion is false. Soames argument that she must confuses, I claim, mod…Read more
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84IntroductionCanadian Journal of Philosophy 43 (5-6): 515-517. 2013.(2013). Introduction. Canadian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 43, Essays on the Nature of Propositions, pp. 515-517
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58Beliefs and DispositionsJournal of Philosophical Research 34 243-262. 2009.This paper is about the dispositional difference that demonstrative and indexical beliefs make. More specifically, it is about the dispositional difference between my believing that NN is P (where I am NN) and my believing that I, myself, am P. Identifying a dispositional difference in this kind of case is especially challenging because those beliefs have the very same truth conditions. My question is this: how can a difference in belief that makes no difference to one’s conception of the world …Read more
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29New Essays on the Nature of Propositions (edited book)Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Special Issue.. 2015.These are exciting times for philosophical theorizing about propositions, with the last 15 years seeing the development of new approaches and the emergence of new theorists. Propositions have been invoked to explain thought and cognition, the nature and attribution of mental states, language and communication, and in philosophical treatments of truth, necessity and possibility. According to Frege and Russell, and their followers, propositions are structured mind- and language-independent abstrac…Read more
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83Guidance and BeliefCanadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (S1): 63-90. 2009.There is a difference between those things one does that manifest agency and those things that merely happen to one or that are the effects of one's agency. My typing these words manifests my agency – is an action of mine – whereas growing older is merely happening to me and making sounds as I type is but an effect of my action. Actions are sometimes but not always done for reasons and are characteristically but perhaps not invariably known by the agent without observation or inference. I'm typi…Read more
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149Alienated BeliefDialectica 65 (2): 221-240. 2011.This paper argues that it is possible to knowingly believe something while judging that one ought not to believe it and (so) viewing the belief as manifesting a sort of failure. I offer examples showing that such ‘alienated belief’ has several potential sources. I contrast alienated belief with self-deception, incontinent (or akratic) belief and half-belief. I argue that the possibility of alienated belief is compatible with the so-called ‘transparency’ of first-person reflection on belief, and …Read more
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Areas of Specialization
3 more
Belief |
Desire |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Action |
Metaphysics of Mind |
Moral Realism |
History of Meta-Ethics, Misc |
Philosophy of Language |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Meta-Ethics |