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152Things: papers on objects, events, and propertiesOxford University Press. 2010.Identity, Essence, and Indiscernibility - Intrinsicness - Cause and Essence - Advertisement for a Sketch of an Outline of a Prototheory of Causation - Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake? - Apriority and Existence - Go Figure: A Path through Fictionalism - Abstract Objects: A Case Study - The Myth of the Seven - Carving Content at the Joints - Non-Catastrophic Presupposition Failure - Must Existence-Questions Have Answers?
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86Hop, Skip and jump: The agonistic conception of truthPhilosophical Perspectives 7 371-396. 1993.
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206Permission and (So-Called Epistemic) PossibilityIn Bob Hale & Aviv Hoffmann (eds.), Modality: Metaphysics, Logic, and Epistemology, Oxford University Press. 2010.
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1015Ifs, Ands, and Buts: An Incremental Truthmaker Semantics for Indicative ConditionalsAnalytic Philosophy 57 (1): 175-213. 2016.
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84The Seven Habits of Highly Effective ThinkersThe Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 9 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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149Necessity, Essence, and Individuation: A Defense of ConventionalismPhilosophical Review 101 (4): 878. 1992.
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281Cause 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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2Illusions of possibilityIn Manuel Garcia-Carpintero & Josep Macià (eds.), Two-Dimensional Semantics, Clarendon Press. 2006.
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507The myth of the sevenIn Mark Eli Kalderon (ed.), Fictionalism in Metaphysics, Clarendon Press. pp. 88--115. 2005.
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360A problem about permission and possibilityIn Andy Egan & Brian Weatherson (eds.), Epistemic Modality, Oxford University Press. 2009.
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249AboutnessPrinceton 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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3370The real distinction between mind and bodyCanadian Journal of Philosophy 16 (sup1): 149--201. 1990.Descartes's "conceivability argument" for substance-dualism is defended against Arnauld's criticism that, for all he knows, Descartes can conceive himself without a body only because he underestimates his true essence; one could suggest with equal plausibility that it is only for ignorance of his essential hairiness that Descartes can conceive himself as bald. Conceivability intuitions are defeasible but special reasons are required; a model for such defeat is offered, and various potential defe…Read more
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424. A Semantic Conception of TruthmakingIn Aboutness, Princeton University Press. pp. 54-76. 2014.
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