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449If-ThenismAustralasian Philosophical Review 1 (2): 115-132. 2017.ABSTRACT An undemanding claim ϕ sometimes implies, or seems to, a more demanding one ψ. Some have posited, to explain this, a confusion between ϕ and ϕ*, an analogue of ϕ that does not imply ψ. If-thenists take ϕ* to be If ψ then ϕ. Incrementalism is the form of if-thenism that construes If ψ then ϕ as the surplus content of ϕ over ψ. The paper argues that it is the only form of if-thenism that stands a chance of being correct.
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95Replies to Comments on If-ThenismAustralasian Philosophical Review 1 (2): 212-227. 2017.I am hugely grateful for these provocative and illuminating comments. My thanks to all N commentators (N ≈ 13). I will have something to say about each contribution, but the overall organization wi...
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137Kment on counterfactualsAnalysis 77 (1): 148-155. 2017.Review of Kment, "*Modality and Explanatory Reasoning*, with an emphasis on counterfactuals.
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296Reply to Fine on AboutnessPhilosophical Studies 175 (6): 1495-1512. 2018.A reply to Fine’s critique of Aboutness. Fine contrasts two notions of truthmaker, and more generally two notions of “state.” One is algebraic; states are sui generis entities grasped primarily through the conditions they satisfy. The other uses set theory; states are sets of worlds, or, perhaps, collections of such sets. I try to defend the second notion and question some seeming advantages of the first.
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2ThingsDissertation, University of California, Berkeley. 1986.Essentialists hold that certain of a thing's properties are specially fundamental, antiessentialists that all of a thing's properties are on a par. As a result, essentialists can explain how, e.g., a statue and its clay are different, but not how they are the same, whereas antiessentialists can explain how they're the same but not how they're different. Ordinarily, though, we reckon them in one sense the same and in another different. ;To accomodate the ordinary view, essentialism and antiessent…Read more
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2046Textbook kripkeanism and the open texture of conceptsPacific Philosophical Quarterly 81 (1). 2000.Kripke, argued like this: it seems possible that E; the appearance can't be explained away as really pertaining to a "presentation" of E; so, pending a different explanation, it is possible that E. Textbook Kripkeans see in the contrast between E and its presentation intimations of a quite general distinction between two sorts of meaning. E's secondary or a posteriori meaning is the set of all worlds w which E, as employed here, truly describes. Its primary or a priori meaning is the set of all …Read more
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2177Is conceivability a guide to possibility?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (1): 1-42. 1993.
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273Truth 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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1494How in the world?In Christopher Hill (ed.), Metaphysics, University of Arkansas Press. pp. 255--86. 1996.
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101Replies 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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713Permission and (So-Called Epistemic) PossibilityIn Bob Hale & Aviv Hoffmann (eds.), Modality: metaphysics, logic, and epistemology, Oxford University Press. pp. 229-256. 2010.David Lewis in ‘A Problem About Permission’ asks about the effect on context of permitting the previously forbidden. The set of permissible worlds expands, but how? One can ask in a similar vein about the effects of calling a circumstance possible which had previously been ruled out. This chapter proposes a unified rule. Permission to take the day off adds in world _W_ if the reasons _W_ was initially ruled out all imply taking the day off. _W_ remains impermissible if the reasons it was initial…Read more
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177Circularity and ParadoxIn Thomas Bolander (ed.), Self-reference, Center For the Study of Language and Inf. pp. 139--157. 2008.
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263Necessity, Essence, and Individuation: A Defense of ConventionalismPhilosophical Review 101 (4): 878. 1992.
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808A problem about permission and possibilityIn Andy Egan & Brian Weatherson (eds.), Epistemic Modality, Oxford University Press. pp. 270-294. 2011.This chapter explores the prospects for a unified theory of deontic and (so-called) epistemic modality. A theory of deontic modality needs to solve the puzzles raised by David Lewis in ‘A Puzzle About Permission’. In particular, it needs to say what the effect is of making something permissible, and what consequences a permission has in terms of what else is thereby permitted. It is argued that when _p_ is made permissible, then a world _w_ is still impermissible if, antecedently, _w_ was imperm…Read more
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2Illusions of possibilityIn Manuel Garcia-Carpintero & Josep Macià (eds.), Two-Dimensional Semantics, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2006.
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217The Metaphysics of Modality by Graeme Forbes (review)Journal of Philosophy 85 (6): 329-337. 1988.
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235Seven habits of highly effective thinkersIn Bernard Elevitch (ed.), The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Volume 9: Philosophy of Mind, Charlottesville: Philosophy Doc Ctr. 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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325Explanation, Extrapolation, and ExistenceMind 121 (484): 1007-1029. 2012.Mark Colyvan (2010) raises two problems for ‘easy road’ nominalism about mathematical objects. The first is that a theory’s mathematical commitments may run too deep to permit the extraction of nominalistic content. Taking the math out is, or could be, like taking the hobbits out of Lord of the Rings. I agree with the ‘could be’, but not (or not yet) the ‘is’. A notion of logical subtraction is developed that supports the possibility, questioned by Colyvan, of bracketing a theory’s mathematical …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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121Corrections to "Hop, Skip, and jump: The agonistic conception of truth:Philosophical Perspectives 9 503-506. 1995.
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1759The Real Distinction Between Mind and BodyCanadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 16 (n/a): 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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