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340No Fool's Cold: Notes on Illusions of PossibilityIn Oup (ed.), Thoughts, Oxford University Press. 2009.
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16Superproportionality and Mind-Body RelationsTheoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 16 (1): 65-75. 2001.Mental causes are threatened from two directions: from below, since they would appear to be screened off by lower-order, e.g., neural states; and from within, since they would also appear to be screened off by intrinsic, e.g., syntactical states. A principle needed to parry the first threat -causes should be proportional to their effects- appears to leave us open to the second; for why should unneeded extrinsic detail be any less offensive to proportionality than excess microstructure? I say tha…Read more
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1310A Priority and ExistenceIn Paul Artin Boghossian & Christopher Peacocke (eds.), New Essays on the A Priori, Oxford University Press. pp. 197. 2000.
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271Precis of aboutnessPhilosophical Studies 174 (3): 771-777. 2017.A lightning fast summary of Yablo, Aboutness, cutting many corners in the interests of brevity. The emphasis is on “ways.” Substituting “ways for S to be true” in for “worlds in which S is true” improves a number of philosophical explanations. The subject matter of S is identified with S’s ways of holding in a world, or failing, as the case may be. S contains T iff T is implied by S, and T’s ways of being true are implied by ways for S to be true ; this kind of way-implication is the same as sub…Read more
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653Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake?Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 72 (1). 1998.[Stephen Yablo] The usual charge against Carnap's internal/external distinction is one of 'guilt by association with analytic/synthetic'. But it can be freed of this association, to become the distinction between statements made within make-believe games and those made outside them-or, rather, a special case of it with some claim to be called the metaphorical/literal distinction. Not even Quine considers figurative speech committal, so this turns the tables somewhat. To determine our ontological…Read more
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134Open knowledge and changing the subjectPhilosophical Studies 174 (4): 1047-1071. 2017.Knowledge is closed under implication, according to standard theories. Orthodoxy can allow, though, that apparent counterexamples to closure exist, much as Kripkeans recognize the existence of illusions of possibility which they seek to explain away. Should not everyone, orthodox or not, want to make sense of “intimations of openness”? This paper compares two styles of explanation: evidence that boosts P’s probability need not boost that of its consequence Q; evidence bearing on P’s subject matt…Read more
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149Things: 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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79Hop, Skip and jump: The agonistic conception of truthPhilosophical Perspectives 7 371-396. 1993.
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195Permission and (So-Called Epistemic) PossibilityIn Bob Hale & Aviv Hoffmann (eds.), Modality: Metaphysics, Logic, and Epistemology, Oxford University Press. 2010.
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