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336Reply to Lasersohn, MacFarlane, and Richard (review)Philosophical Studies 156 (3): 417-419. 2011.Reply to Lasersohn, MacFarlane, and Richard.
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379Locations and bindingAnalysis 67 (2): 95-105. 2007.It is natural to think that the relationship between ‘rain’ and the location of rain is different from the relationship between ‘dance’ and the location of dancing. Utterances of (1) are typically interpreted as, in some sense, being about a location in which it rains. (2) is, typically, not interpreted as being about a location in which the dancing takes place
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123Reply to Glanzberg, Soames and WeathersonAnalysis 71 (1): 143-156. 2011.One of Weatherson's main goals is to drive home a methodological point: We shouldn't be looking for deductive arguments for or against relativism – we should instead be evaluating inductive arguments designed to show that either relativism or some alternative offers the best explanation of some data. Our focus in Chapter Two on diagnostics for shared content allegedly encourages the search for deductive arguments and so does more harm than good. We have no methodological slogan of our own to off…Read more
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447The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2016.This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology. The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted …Read more
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4748Evil and EvidenceOxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 7 1-31. 2016.The problem of evil is the most prominent argument against the existence of God. Skeptical theists contend that it is not a good argument. Their reasons for this contention vary widely, involving such notions as CORNEA, epistemic appearances, 'gratuitous' evils, 'levering' evidence, and the representativeness of goods. We aim to dispel some confusions about these notions, in particular by clarifying their roles within a probabilistic epistemology. In addition, we develop new responses to the pro…Read more
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1623Higher-order free logic and the Prior-Kaplan paradoxCanadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (4-5): 493-541. 2016.The principle of universal instantiation plays a pivotal role both in the derivation of intensional paradoxes such as Prior’s paradox and Kaplan’s paradox and the debate between necessitism and contingentism. We outline a distinctively free logical approach to the intensional paradoxes and note how the free logical outlook allows one to distinguish two different, though allied themes in higher-order necessitism. We examine the costs of this solution and compare it with the more familiar ramifica…Read more
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111In this thesis, Semantics, Meta-Semantics, and Ontology, I provide a critique of the method of truth in metaphysics. Davidson has suggested that we can determine the metaphysical nature and structure of reality through semantic investigations. By contrast, I argue that it is not semantics, but meta-semantics, which reveals the metaphysically necessary and sufficient truth conditions of our claims. As a consequence I reject the Quinean criterion of ontological commitment. In Part I, chapter 1, I …Read more
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555Bayesianism, Infinite Decisions, and BindingMind 113 (450). 2004.We pose and resolve several vexing decision theoretic puzzles. Some are variants of existing puzzles, such as 'Trumped' (Arntzenius and McCarthy 1997), 'Rouble trouble' (Arntzenius and Barrett 1999), 'The airtight Dutch book' (McGee 1999), and 'The two envelopes puzzle' (Broome 1995). Others are new. A unified resolution of the puzzles shows that Dutch book arguments have no force in infinite cases. It thereby provides evidence that reasonable utility functions may be unbounded and that reasonab…Read more
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506Knowledge and Objective ChanceIn Patrick Greenough & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Williamson on Knowledge, Oxford University Press. pp. 92--108. 2009.We think we have lots of substantial knowledge about the future. But contemporary wisdom has it that indeterminism prevails in such a way that just about any proposition about the future has a non-zero objective chance of being false.2, 3 What should one do about this? One, pessimistic, reaction is scepticism about knowledge of the future. We think this should be something of a last resort, especially since this scepticism is likely to infect alleged knowledge of the present and past. One anti-s…Read more
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397Relativism and Monadic TruthOxford University Press UK. 2009.Cappelen and Hawthorne present a powerful critique of fashionable relativist accounts of truth, and the foundational ideas in semantics on which the new relativism draws. They argue compellingly that the contents of thought and talk are propositions that instantiate the fundamental monadic properties of truth and falsity
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130ResponseMind and Language 29 (4): 499-510. 2014.We are very grateful to our critics for their kind words and thoughtful engagementwith The Reference Book (hereafter TRB), and also to the editors of Mind & Language for the opportunity to respond. We’ll start our reply by sketching the book’s positive thesis about specific noun phrases and names. In §2 we’ll relate the traditional semantic category we call ‘reference’ to semantic taxonomies given in terms of mechanisms of denotation. In §3, we’ll turn to acquaintance constraints on reference an…Read more
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2Epistemicism and Semantic PlasticityIn Dean Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Volume 2, Oxford University Press. 2006.
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570Pragmatic Encroachment and ClosureIn Brian Kim & Matthew McGrath (eds.), Pragmatic Encroachment in Epistemology, Routledge. forthcoming.
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191Reflexive fictionalismsAnalysis 56 (1): 23-32. 1996.There is a class of fictionalist strategies (the reflexive fictionalisms) which appear to suffer from a common problem: the problem that the entities which are supposedly fictional turn out, by the lights of the fictionalist theory itself, to exist. The appropriate solution is to reject so-called strong fictionalism in each case: that is, to reject the variety of fictionalism which takes appeal to the domain of fictional entities to provide an explanation or analysis of the operators or predi…Read more
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Ity and Possibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)Croatian Journal of Philosophy 4 (10-12): 301. 2004.
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5A metaphysician looks at the Everett interpretationIn Simon Saunders, Jonathan Barrett, Adrian Kent & David Wallace (eds.), Many Worlds?: Everett, Quantum Theory & Reality, Oxford University Press. 2010.
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345Advice for PhysicalistsPhilosophical Studies 109 (1): 17-52. 2002.This paper engages with two compelling challenges to physicalism, each designed to show that the nature of experience is elusive from the standpoint of physical science. It is argued that the physicalist is ultimately well placed to meet both challenges
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202Freedom in ContextPhilosophical Studies 104 (1): 63-79. 2001.David Lewis has recently deployed a contextualist strategy for defending ordinary claims to know.1 In this paper, I wish to extend that strategy to ordinary claims about freedom.2 The result is a species of compatibilism that, while foreign to current debates, has a good deal going for it.
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107Oxford Studies in Epistemology (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2005.Oxford Studies in Epistemology is a biennial publicaton which offers a regular snapshot of state-of-the-art work in this important field.
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15Perceptual Experience (edited book)Oxford University Press UK. 2006.In the last few years there has been an explosion of philosophical interest in perception; after decades of neglect, it is now one of the most fertile areas for new work. Perceptual Experience presents new work by fifteen of the world's leading philosophers. All papers are written specially for this volume, and they cover a broad range of topics to do with sensation and representation, consciousness and awareness, and the connections between perception and knowledge and between perception and ac…Read more