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157Understanding and beliefPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (3): 559-580. 1998.A natural view is that linguistic understanding is a source of justification or evidence: that beliefs about the meaning of a text or speech act are prima facie justified when based on states of understanding. Neglect of this view is largely due to the widely held assumption that understanding a text or speech act consists in knowledge or belief. It is argued that this assumption rests, in part, on confusing occurrent states of understanding and dispositions to understand. It is then argued that…Read more
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127Knowledge and understandingMind and Language 16 (5). 2001.Some philosophical proposals seem to die hard. In a recent paper, Jason Stanley has worked to resurrect the description theory of reference, at least as it might apply to natural kind terms like ‘elm’ (Stanley, 1999). The theory’s founding idea is that to understand ‘elm’ one must know a uniquely identifying truth about elms. Famously, Hilary Putnam showed that ordinary users of ‘elm’ may understand it while lacking such knowledge, and may even be unable to distinguish elms from beeches (Putnam,…Read more
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147Common ground and modal disagreementIn H. V. Hanson (ed.), Dissensus and the Search for Common Ground, . pp. 134-143. 2007.The common ground in an inquiry consists of what the participants agree on, at least for the sake of the inquiry. The relations between the factual and linguistic components of common ground are notoriously difficult to trace. I clarify them by exploring how modal disagreements – disagreements about how things might be – interact with the linguistic and the factual common ground. I argue that modal agreement is essential to common ground of any kind.
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58Rule-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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56Gabriel 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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120Mind-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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156Soames 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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80IntroductionCanadian 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
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Areas of Specialization
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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 |