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455Is sex socially constructed?Arc Digital (nov 30). 2018.Three arguments for the thesis that sex is socially constructed are examined and rejected. No such argument could succeed, because sex is not socially constructed.
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38On DenotingMind 14 (56): 479-493. 1905.Richard Heck, in "The Sense of Communication" (Mind, 104, pp. 79-106, 1995), argues against the "Hybrid View"--the claim, roughly, that names are Millian while beliefs are Fregean. We argue that Heck's argument fails
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789Perception and ordinary objectsIn Javier Cumpa & Bill Brewer (eds.), The Nature of Ordinary Objects, Cambridge University Press. 2018.The paper argues -- against the standard view in metaphysics -- that the existence of ordinary objects like tomatoes is (near-enough) established by the fact that such things are apparently encountered in perception.
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595Is sex binary?Arc Digital (nov 1). 2018.Response to Anne Fausto-Sterling's New York Times Op-Ed, in which she purports to explain why sex isn't binary.
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197Readings on Color, Volume 1: The Philosophy of ColorMIT Press. 1997."This admirable volume of readings is the first of a pair: the editors are to be applauded for placing the philosophy of color exactly where it should go, in ...
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67Transparency and Self-KnowledgeOxford University Press. 2018.You know what someone else is thinking and feeling by observing them. But how do you know what you are thinking and feeling? This is the problem of self-knowledge: Alex Byrne tries to solve it. The idea is that you know this not by taking a special kind of look at your own mind, but by an inference from a premise about your environment.
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23Review: Soames on Quine and Davidson (review)Philosophical Studies 135 (3): 439-449. 2007.A discussion of Quine and Davidson, as interpreted and criticized in Scott Soames' "Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume II"
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504Do Colours Look Like Dispositions? Reply to Langsam and OthersPhilosophical Quarterly 51 (203): 238-245. 2001.Dispositional theories of colour have been attacked by McGinn and others on the ground that ‘Colours do not look like dispositions’. Langsam has argued that on the contrary they do, in ‘Why Colours Do Look Like Dispositions’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 50 , pp. 68–75. I make three claims. First, neither side has made its case. Secondly, it is true, at least on one interpretation, that colours do not look like dispositions. Thirdly, this does not show that dispositionalism about colours is fals…Read more
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306Color and the Mind‐Body ProblemDialectica 60 (2): 223-44. 2006.b>: there is no “mind-body problem”, or “hard problem of consciousness”; if there is a hard problem of something, it is the problem of reconciling the manifest and scientific images
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237Color and similarityPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 (3): 641-65. 2003.Anything is similar to anything, provided the respects of similarity are allowed to be gerrymandered or gruesome, as Goodman observed.2 But similarity in non-gruesome or—as I shall say—genuine respects is much less ecumenical. Colors, it seems, provide a compelling illustration of the distinction as applied to similarities among properties.3 For instance, in innumerable gruesome respects, blue is more similar to yellow than to purple. But in a genuine respect, blue is more similar to purple than…Read more
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804Some like it HOT: Consciousness and higher-order thoughtsPhilosophical Studies 86 (2): 103-29. 1997.Consciousness is the subject of many metaphors, and one of the most hardy perennials compares consciousness to a spotlight, illuminating certain mental goings-on, while leaving others to do their work in the dark. One way of elaborating the spotlight metaphor is this: mental events are loaded on to one end of a conveyer belt by the senses, and move with the belt
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87On Misinterpreting Kripke’s WittgensteinPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 56 (2): 339-343. 1996.Saul Kripke’s much discussed Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language has, I believe, been widely misinterpreted. The purpose of this note is to offer a correction. As it happens, on my reading of Kripke’s text Kripke’s Wittgenstein begins to look recognisably like Wittgenstein himself. But I shall not be concerned here with the question of whether Kripke’s Wittgenstein is Wittgenstein. My only aim is to correct the misinterpretation.
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229Truth in fiction: The story continuedAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 71 (1). 1993.This Article does not have an abstract
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305Chalmers on consciousness and quantum mechanicsPhilosophy of Science 66 (3): 370-90. 1999.The textbook presentation of quantum mechanics, in a nutshell, is this. The physical state of any isolated system evolves deterministically in accordance with Schrödinger's equation until a "measurement" of some physical magnitude M (e.g. position, energy, spin) is made. Restricting attention to the case where the values of M are discrete, the system's pre-measurement state-vector f is a linear combination, or "superposition", of vectors f1, f2,... that individually represent states that..
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38Knowing our mindsBoston Review. 2005.ancient Greek temple at Delphi and is quoted approvingly by Socrates in the _First_
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152Soames on Quine and Davidson (review)Philosophical Studies 135 (3). 2007.A discussion of Quine and Davidson, as interpreted and criticized in Scott Soames’ Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume II.
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8There’s also plenty of controversy about moral law. Should we give much more to charity than we actually do? Is torture permissible under extreme circumstances? Is eating meat wrong? Could it ever be permissible to kill one innocent person in order to save five? But, again we know a lot. Throwing good taste out with the bathwater for the sake of a clear example, everyone knows that boiling babies for fun is wrong. Boiling lobsters is a matter that reasonable people may disagree about, but as far…Read more
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338IntentionalityIn Sahotra Sarkar & Jessica Pfeifer (eds.), The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia, Routledge. 2005.Some things are _about_, or are _directed on_ , or _represent_, other things. For example, the sentence 'Cats are animals' is about cats (and about animals), this article is about intentionality, Emanuel Leutze's most famous painting is about Washington's crossing of the Delaware, lanterns hung in Boston's North Church were about the British, and a map of Boston is about Boston. In contrast, '#a$b', a blank slate, and the city of Boston are not about anything. Many mental states and events also …Read more
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976Skepticism about the internal worldIn Gideon A. Rosen, Alex Byrne, Joshua Cohen & Seana Valentine Shiffrin (eds.), The Norton Introduction to Philosophy, W. W. Norton. 2015.Skepticism about the internal world is actually more troubling than skepticism about the external world.
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84In Defence of the Hybrid ViewMind 105 (417). 1996.argument fails, and the purpose of this note is to bring out that failure. The view in question which Heck calls the Hybrid Vie~istinguishes between the meanings of names and the contents of beliefs which are expressible using names. According to the Hybrid View the meaning of a name is its referent: names do not have senses. Thus (a) "George Orwell wrote 1984" means the same as (b) "Eric Blair wrote 1984". However, the Hybrid View tells a different story about the beliefs one expresses when one…Read more
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346Review Essay of Dorit Bar‐On’s Speaking My Mind (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 83 705-17. 2011.“Avowals” are utterances that “ascribe [current] states of mind”; for instance utterances of ‘I have a terrible headache’ and ‘I’m finding this painting utterly puzzling’ (Bar-On 2004: 1). And avowals, “when compared to ordinary empirical reports…appear to enjoy distinctive security” (1), which Bar-On elaborates as follows: A subject who avows being tired, or scared of something, or thinking that p, is normally presumed to have the last word on the relevant matters; we would not presume to criti…Read more
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44Fact and Value: Essays on Ethics and Metaphysics for Judith Jarvis Thomson (edited book)Bradford. 2001.The diversity of topics discussed in this book reflects the breadth of Judith Jarvis Thomson's philosophical work. Throughout her long career at MIT, Thomson's straightforward approach and emphasis on problem-solving have shaped philosophy in significant ways. Some of the book's contributions discuss specific moral and political issues such as abortion, self-defense, the rights and obligations of prospective fathers, and political campaign finance. Other contributions concern the foundations of …Read more
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40Do colours look like dispositions?Philosophical Quarterly 51 (203): 238--45. 2001.Dispositional theories of colour have been attacked by McGinn and others on the ground that ‘Colours do not look like dispositions’. Langsam has argued that on the contrary they do, in ‘Why Colours Do Look Like Dispositions’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 50 , pp. 68–75. I make three claims. First, neither side has made its case. Secondly, it is true, at least on one interpretation, that colours do not look like dispositions. Thirdly, this does not show that dispositionalism about colours is fals…Read more
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423Knowing what I seeIn Declan Smithies & Daniel Stoljar (eds.), Introspection and Consciousness, Oxford University Press. 2012.How do I know that I see a cat? A curiously under-asked question. The paper tries to answer it.
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773Transparency, belief, intentionAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 85 201-21. 2011.This paper elaborates and defends a familiar ‘transparent’ account of knowledge of one's own beliefs, inspired by some remarks of Gareth Evans, and makes a case that the account can be extended to mental states in general, in particular to knowledge of one's intentions.
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40Consciousness, Color, and Content (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (1): 245-247. 2004.Somewhat at random, I shall pick chapter 7 for a closer look. Tye distinguishes three versions of the view that colors are “mind-independent, illumination-independent properties”, which we frequently see physical objects as possessing. The first is emergentism, according to which colors are “simple qualities” that nomologically supervene on the physical facts: there is a possible world exactly like the actual world physically, but in which nothing is colored. Brute nonreductive physicalism is th…Read more