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374Moderate holism and the instability thesisAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 36 (4): 361-69. 1999.This paper argues that popular criticisms of semantic holism (such as that it leaves the ideas of translation, disagreement and change of mind problematic) are more properly directed at an "instability assumption" which, while often associated with holism, can be separated from it. The versions of holism that follow from 'interpretational' account of meaning are not committed to the instability assumption and can thus avoid many of the problems traditionally associated with holism.
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206Justification, Ambiguity, and Belief: Comments on McEvoy’s “The internalist counterexample to reliabilism”Southwest Philosophy Review 21 (2): 183-186. 2005.Unadorned process reliabilism (hereafter UPR) takes any true belief produced by a reliable process (undefeated by any other reliable process) to count as knowledge. Consequently, according to UPR, to know p, you need not know that you know it. In particular, you need not know that the process by which you formed your belief was reliable; its simply being reliable is enough to make the true belief knowledge. Defenders of UPR are often presented with purported counterexamples describing subjects…Read more
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687Foundationalism, coherentism, and rule-following skepticismInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 11 (1): 25-41. 2003.Semantic holists view what one's terms mean as function of all of one's usage. Holists will thus be coherentists about semantic justification: showing that one's usage of a term is semantically justified involves showing how it coheres with the rest of one's usage. Semantic atomists, by contrast, understand semantic justification in a foundationalist fashion. Saul Kripke has, on Wittgenstein's behalf, famously argued for a type of skepticism about meaning and semantic justification. However, Kri…Read more
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66John Haugeland has recently attempted to provide a naturalistic account of intentionality that explains how we can (collectively) misidentify objects in the world in terms of the interplay of two types of 'recognitional' skill. Nevertheless, it is argued here that his inegalitarian conception of the two sorts of skill leaves him with a quasi-conventionalist account of our relation to the world which lacks the more robust sort of objectivity that a more holistic theory could provide
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757Semantic intuitions, conceptual analysis, and cross-cultural variationPhilosophical Studies 146 (2). 2008.While philosophers of language have traditionally relied upon their intuitions about cases when developing theories of reference, this methodology has recently been attacked on the grounds that intuitions about reference, far from being universal, show significant cultural variation, thus undermining their relevance for semantic theory. I’ll attempt to demonstrate that (1) such criticisms do not, in fact, undermine the traditional philosophical methodology, and (2) our underlying intuitions abou…Read more
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18Many philosophers have suggested that belief predicates are ambiguous between a de dicto and a de re reading. However, the impression of ambiguity is a function of the narrow ranges of examples that philosophers focus on. When we consider our ascriptional practices as a whole, the suggestion that belief predicates are ambiguous is neither plausible nor needed to explain the de dicto/de re distinction. This paper will argue that understanding paradigmatic de dicto and de re ascriptions in terms o…Read more
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290Jamesian Pluralism and Moral ConflictTransactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 41 (1). 2005.While most pragmatists view themselves as pluralists of one sort or another, Talisse and Aikin argue thatthe two views are, in fact, "not compatible". However, while their charge may be true of the types of pluralism that they consider, these pluralisms all presuppose a type of realism about value that the pragmatic pluralist need not accept. In what follows, I'll argue that the 'non-realist' account of value that one finds in James underwrites a type of pluralism that is both substantial and c…Read more
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232This paper will appeal a recent argument for the indeterminacy of translation to show not that meaning is indeterminate, but rather that assertion cannot be explained in terms of an independent grasp of the concept of truth. In particular, it will argue that if we try to explain assertion in terms of truth rather than vice versa, we ultimately will not be able to make sense of the difference between assertion and denial. This problem with such 'semantic' accounts of assertion then illustrates wh…Read more
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479William JamesIn Cheryl Misak (ed.), The Oxford handbook of American philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 60-86. 2008.A brief (10,000 word) introduction to James's philosophy with particular focus on the relation between James's naturalism and his account of various normative notions like rationality, goodness and truth.
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425Deference and self-knowledgeSouthwest Philosophy Review 16 (1): 171-180. 2000.It has become increasingly popular to suggest that non-individualistic theories of content undermine our purported a priori knowledge of such contents because they entail that we lack the ability to distinguish our thoughts from alternative thoughts with different contents. However, problems relating to such knowledge of 'comparative' content tell just as much against individualism as non-individualism. Indeed, the problems presented by individualistic theories of content for self-knowledge are …Read more
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328Temporal externalism, constitutive norms, and theories of vaguenessIn Tomáš Marvan (ed.), What determines content?: the internalism/externalism dispute, Cambridge Scholars Press. 2006.Another paper exploring the relation between Temporal externalism and Epistemicism about Vagueness, but with slightly more emphasis on the role of constitutive norms relating to our concept of truth.
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239Belief, rationality, and psychophysical lawsIn Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Volume 9: Philsophy of Mind, Philosophy Documentation Center. pp. 47-54. 2000.This paper argues that Davidson's claim that the connection between belief and the "constitutive ideal of rationality" precludes the possibility of any type-type identities between mental and physical events relies on blurring the distinction between two ways of understanding this "constitutive ideal", and that no consistent understanding the constitutive ideal allows it to play the dialectical role Davidson intends for it
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Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Volume 9: Philsophy of MindPhilosophy Documentation Center. 2000.
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William James |
American Pragmatism |
Philosophy of Language |
Pragmatism |
Metaphilosophy |
Epistemology |