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178Truth and reflectionJournal of Philosophical Logic 14 (3). 1985.Many topics have not been covered, in most cases because I don't know quite what to say about them. Would it be possible to add a decidability predicate to the language? What about stronger connectives, like exclusion negation or Lukasiewicz implication? Would an expanded language do better at expressing its own semantics? Would it contain new and more terrible paradoxes? Can the account be supplemented with a workable notion of inherent truth (see note 36)? In what sense does stage semantics li…Read more
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88Hop, Skip and jump: The agonistic conception of truthPhilosophical Perspectives 7 371-396. 1993.
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60Replies to commentatorsPhilosophical Studies 174 (3): 809-820. 2017.I reply to three commentators—Friederike Moltmann, Daniel Rothschild, and Zoltán Szabó—on six topics—sense and reference, the unity of subject matter, questions, presupposition, partial truth, and content mereology.
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144Prime causation (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 70 (2). 2005.No one doubts that mental states can be wide. Why should this seem to prevent them from causing behavior? Tim points to an "internalist line of thought"
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1087Ifs, Ands, and Buts: An Incremental Truthmaker Semantics for Indicative ConditionalsAnalytic Philosophy 57 (1): 175-213. 2016.
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198New Grounds for Naive Truth TheoryIn J. C. Beall (ed.), Liars and Heaps: New Essays on Paradox, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 312-330. 2003.
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75The Metaphysics of Modality by Graeme Forbes (review)Journal of Philosophy 85 (6): 329-337. 1988.
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285Cause and essenceSynthese 93 (3). 1992.Essence and causation are fundamental in metaphysics, but little is said about their relations. Some essential properties are of course causal, as it is essential to footprints to have been caused by feet. But I am interested less in causation's role in essence than the reverse: the bearing a thing's essence has on its causal powers. That essencemight make a causal contribution is hinted already by the counterfactual element in causation; and the hint is confirmed by the explanation essence offe…Read more
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407A problem about permission and possibilityIn Andy Egan & Brian Weatherson (eds.), Epistemic Modality, Oxford University Press. 2009.
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194Seven habits of highly effective thinkersIn Bernard Elevitch (ed.), The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Philosophy Documentation Center. pp. 35-45. 2000.By effective thinkers I mean not people who think effectively, but people who understand “how it’s done,” i.e., people not paralyzed by the philosophical problem of epiphenomenalism. I argue that mental causes are not preempted by either neural or narrow content states, and that extrinsically individuated mental states are not out of proportion with their putative effects. I give three examples/models of how an extrinsic cause might be more proportional to an effect than the competition
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260AboutnessPrinceton University Press. 2014.Aboutness has been studied from any number of angles. Brentano made it the defining feature of the mental. Phenomenologists try to pin down the aboutness-features of particular mental states. Materialists sometimes claim to have grounded aboutness in natural regularities. Attempts have even been made, in library science and information theory, to operationalize the notion. But it has played no real role in philosophical semantics. This is surprising; sentences have aboutness-properties if anythi…Read more
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80Red, Bitter, Best (review)Philosophical Books 41 (1). 2002.Book reviewed in this article: Jackson, F., From Metaphysics to Ethics
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25The Real Distinction Between Mind and BodyCanadian Journal of Philosophy 20 (sup1): 149-201. 1990.….it [is] wholly irrational to regard as doubtful matters that are perceived clearly and distinctly by the understanding in its purity, on account of mere prejudices of the senses and hypotheses in which there is an element of the unknown.Descartes, Geometrical Exposition of the MeditationsSubstance dualism, once a main preoccupation of Western metaphysics, has fallen strangely out of view; today’s mental/physical dualisms are dualisms of fact, property, or event. So if someone claims to find a …Read more
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861Must existence-questions have answers?In David Chalmers, David Manley & Ryan Wasserman (eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, Oxford University Press. pp. 507-525. 2009.
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424. A Semantic Conception of TruthmakingIn Aboutness, Princeton University Press. pp. 54-76. 2014.
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