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74Imagination constrained, imagination constructedInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (1): 485-512. 2024.A number of authors have asked what it takes for a course of mental imagery to be epistemically or practically useful. This paper addresses a prior question, namely, the difference between courses of imagination that are realistic and those that are fantastic. One approach, suggested by recent literature concerning the utility of imagery, holds that a course of imagination represents realistically if and only if the course of events represented conforms to certain accepted constraints. Against t…Read more
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73Open Texture and Schematicity as Arguments for Non-referential SemanticsIn Klaus Petrus Sarah-Jane Conrad (ed.), Meaning, Context, and Methodology, Mouton De Gruyter. pp. 13-30. 2017.Many of the terms of our language, such as “jar”, are open-textured in the sense that their applicability to novel objects is not entirely determined by their past usage. Many others, such as the verbs “use” and “have”, are schematic in the sense that they have only a very general meaning although on any particular occasion of use they denote some more particular relation. The phenomena of open texture and schematicity constitute a sharp challenge to referential semantics, which assumes that e…Read more
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70An extraterrestrial perspective on conceptual developmentMind and Language 8 (1): 105-30. 1993.The network theory of conceptual development is the theory that conceptual developmentmay be represented as a process of constructing a network of linked nodes. The nodes of such a network represent concepts and the links between nodes represent relations between concepts. The structure of such a network is not determined by experience alone but must evolve in accordance with abstraction heuristics, which constrain the varieties of network between which experience must decide. This paper critici…Read more
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70Belief Attribution as Indirect CommunicationIn Ladislav Koreň, Hans Bernhard Schmid, Preston Stovall & Leo Townsend (eds.), Groups, Norms and Practices: Essays on Inferentialism and Collective Intentionality, Springer. pp. 173-187. 2021.This paper disputes the widespread assumption that beliefs and desires may be attributed as theoretical entities in the service of the explanation and predic- tion of human behavior. The literature contains no clear account of how beliefs and desires might generate actions, and there is good reason to deny that principles of rationality generate a choice on the basis of an agent’s beliefs and desires. An alter- native conception of beliefs and desires is here introduced, according to which an at…Read more
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66Language and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language (review)Teaching Philosophy 10 (3): 269-271. 1987.A review of Devitt and Sterelny, Language and Reality (1st edition)
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65Building Block dilemmasBehavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (1): 26-27. 1998.Feature-based theories of concept formation face two dilemmas. First, for many natural concepts, it is hard to see how the concepts of the features could be developmentally more basic. Second, concept formation must be guided by “abstraction heuristics,” but these can be neither universal principles of rational thought nor natural conventions.
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57Scientific Realism as an Issue in SemanticsIn Patrick Greenough & Michael P. Lynch (eds.), Truth and Realism: New Debates, Oxford University Press. pp. 125. 2006.
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49Mind and ChanceCanadian Journal of Philosophy 17 (3): 533-552. 1987.Much discussed but still unresolved is whether a subject's internal physical structure is a sufficient condition for his beliefs and desires. The question has sometimes been expressed as a question about microstructurally identical Doppelgänger. Imagine two subjects who are identical right down to the ions traversing the synapses. Their senses are stimulated in all the same ways, their bodies execute the same motions, and identical physical events mediate between the sensory inputs and the behav…Read more
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46A strictly stronger relative mustThought: A Journal of Philosophy 10 (2): 82-89. 2021.It is widely accepted that when ‘might’ expresses certain kinds of relative modality, the sentence ‘p and it might not be the case that p’ is in some sense inconsistent. It has proven difficult to define a formal semantics that explicates this inconsistency while meeting certain other desiderata, in particular, that p does not imply ‘Must p’. This paper presents such a semantics. The key idea is that background contexts have to have multiple levels, including an inner set consisting of worlds…Read more
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45Indicative Conditionals in Objective ContextsTheoria 86 (5): 651-687. 2020.A conversation can be conceived as aiming to circumscribe a set of possibilities that are relevant to the goals of the conversation. This set of possibilities may be conceived as determined by the goals and objective circumstances of the interlocutors and not by their propositional attitudes. An indicative conditional can be conceived as circumscribing a set of possibilities that have a certain property: If the set of relevant possibilities is subsequently restricted to one in which the antecede…Read more
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38Are there wordlike concepts too?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (1): 70-71. 1998.Millikan proposes that there are mapping functions through which spoken sentences represent reality. Such mappings seem to depend on thoughts that words express and on concepts as components of such thoughts, but such concepts would conflict with Millikan's other claims about concepts and language.
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37If children thought like adults: A critical review of Markman'sCategorization and Naming in Childrenand Keil'sConcepts, Kinds and Cognitive Development (review)Philosophical Psychology 4 (1): 139-146. 1991.
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37The Problem of Context-relativity in SemanticsGrazer Philosophische Studien 93 (3): 329-333. 2016.This is an introduction to a special issue of Grazer Philosophische Studien on context-relativity in semantics.
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33Review of Millikan, White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice (review)Philosophical Psychology 8 305-309. 1995.
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31Paradoxes of truth-in-context-XPhilosophical Studies 180 (5-6): 1467-1489. 2021.We may suppose that the truth predicate that we utilize in our semantic metalanguage is a two-place predicate relating sentences to contexts, the truth-in-context-X predicate. Seeming paradoxes pertaining to the truth-in-context-X predicate can be blocked by placing restrictions on the structure of contexts. While contexts must specify a domain of contexts, and what a context constant denotes relative to a context must be a context in the context domain of that context, no context may belong to …Read more
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31Belief, Introspection, and Constituted Kinds. Selected Papers from the Fifth Philosophy of Language and Mind ConferenceReview of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (1): 1-5. 2022.
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23Attitudes without psychologyFacta Philosophica 5 (2): 239-56. 2003.Many philosophers hold that beliefs and desires are theoretical entities postulated for the sake of predicting and explaining people's behaviors. This paper offers a very different perspective on the nature of beliefs and desires. According to this, the first step is to understand the nature of assertion and command. Then, to understand the nature of belief and desire, what one must do is extend one's understanding of assertion and commandto assertions and commands on behalf of others; for to at…Read more
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21Truth, Propositions and ContextIn A. Rojszczak, J. Cachro & G. Kurczewski (eds.), Philosophical Dimensions of Logic and Science, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 277--287. 2003.
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13On the Evidence for Prelinguistic ConceptsTheoria 20 (3): 287-297. 2010.Language acquisition is often said to be a process of mapping words into pre-existing concepts. If that is right, then we ought to be able to obtain experimental evidence for the existence of concepts in prelinguistic children, as intended in the work of Paul Quinn. This paper argues that Quinn's results have an alternative explanation.
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10Deflationism and LogicFacta Philosophica (1): 167-199. 1999.Inference rule deflationism is the thesis that the nature of truth can be explained in terms of the inference rules governing the word "true". This paper argues, first, that, in light of the semantic paradoxes, the inference rule deflationist must reject some of the classical rules of inference. It is argued, secondly, that inference rule deflationism is incompatible with model theoretic approaches to the definition of logical validity. Here the argument focuses on the question whether the numbe…Read more
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1Grounding Assertion and Acceptance in Mental ImageryIn Ondřej Beran, Vojtěch Kolman & Ladislav Koreň (eds.), From rules to meanings. New essays on inferentialism, Routledge. pp. 49-62. 2018.How can thinking be effective in enabling us to meet our goals? If we answer this in terms of representation relations between thoughts and the world, then we are challenged to explain what representation is, which no one has been able to do. If we drop the appeal to representation, then it is hard to explain why certain inferences are good and others are not. This paper outlines a strategy for a nonrepresentationalist account of the way in which the structure of reality may drive cognition. …Read more
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1Visual Imagery in the Thought of Monkeys and ApesIn Kristin Andrews & Jacob Beck (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Animal Minds, Routledge. pp. 25-33. 2017.Explanations of animal problem-solving often represent our choices as limited to two: first, we can explain the observed behavior as a product of trained responses to sensory stimuli, or second, we can explain it as due to the animal’s possession of general rules utilizing general concepts. My objective in this essay is to bring to life a third alternative, namely, an explanation in terms of imagistic cognition.The theory of imagistic cognition posits representations that locate objects in a mul…Read more
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Scientific Realism as an Issue in SemanticsIn Patrick Greenough & Michael P. Lynch (eds.), Truth and realism, Clarendon Press. 2006.
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Do perceptions justify beliefs? : the argument from "looks" talkIn Johan Gersel, Rasmus Thybo Jensen, Morten S. Thaning & Søren Overgaard (eds.), In the light of experience: new essays on perception and reasons, Oxford University Press. 2018.
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Etienne Bonnot de CondillacIn Margaret Cameron, Benjamin Hill & Robert J. Stainton (eds.), Sourcebook in the History of Philosophy of Language, Springer. pp. 773-774. 2016.This is a brief summary of Condillac's philosophy of language in his Origins of Human Knowledge.
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The Refutation of Internalism: An Essay on IntentionalityDissertation, University of Pittsburgh. 1984."Internalism" is the thesis that a subject's internal physical structure determines which beliefs and desires are properly attributable to him. Internalist theories of intentionality purport to solve several philosophical problems, most notably, how explanation in terms of belief and desire is compatible with subsumption of the subject under physical law. This dissertation argues that internalism is false. First it is argued that an internalistic construal of belief would make it impossible to u…Read more
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The Mind-Independence of Contexts for Knowledge-AttributionsIn Jonathan Ichikawa (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Contextualism, Routledge. pp. 455-464. 2017.If we say that the truth of a statement of the form “S knows that p” depends on the pertinent context, that raises the question, what determines the pertinent context? One answer would be: the speaker. Another would be: the speaker and the hearer jointly somehow. Yet a third answer would be: no one gets to decide; it is a matter of what the conversation is supposed to achieve and how the world really is, and it can happen that all of the interlocutors are mistaken about the pertinent context. In…Read more