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793From contextualism to contrastivismPhilosophical Studies 119 (1-2): 73-104. 2004.Contextualism treats ‘knows’ as an indexical that denotes different epistemic properties in different contexts. Contrastivism treats ‘knows’ as denoting a ternary relation with a slot for a contrast proposition. I will argue that contrastivism resolves the main philosophical problems of contextualism, by employing a better linguistic model. Contextualist insights are best understood by contrastivist theory.
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1226The Internal Relatedness of All ThingsMind 119 (474): 341-376. 2010.The argument from internal relatedness was one of the major nineteenth century neo-Hegelian arguments for monism. This argument has been misunderstood, and may even be sound. The argument, as I reconstruct it, proceeds in two stages: first, it is argued that all things are internally related in ways that render them interdependent; second, the substantial unity of the whole universe is inferred from the interdependence of all of its parts. The guiding idea behind the argument is that failure of …Read more
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419Causation, influence, and effluenceAnalysis 61 (1). 2001.Causation, says David Lewis now, is to be understood as the ancestral of counterfactual influence, where C influences E (roughly) iff little changes in C map onto big changes in E. I argue that the influence account provides neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for causation, and suggest that what is missing is the notion of effluence, or physical connection.
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484The Action of the WholeAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 87 (1): 67-87. 2013.I discuss an argument for the monistic idea that the cosmos is the one and only fundamental thing, drawing on the idea that the cosmos is the one and only thing that evolves by the fundamental laws
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385Principled chancesBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 54 (1): 27-41. 2003.There are at least three core principles that define the chance role: (1) the Principal Principle, (2) the Basic Chance Principle, and (3) the Humean Principle. These principles seem mutually incompatible. At least, no extant account of chance meets more than one of them. I offer an account of chance which meets all three: L*-chance. So the good news is that L*-chance meets (1)–(3). The bad news is that L*-chance turns out unlawful and unstable.
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661MonismStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.This entry focuses on two of the more historically important monisms: existence monism and priority monism . Existence monism targets concrete objects and counts by tokens. This is the doctrine that exactly one concrete object exists. Priority monism also targets concrete objects, but counts by basic tokens. This is the doctrine that exactly one concrete object is basic, which will turn out to be the classical doctrine that the whole is prior to its parts.
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195It is the Business of Laws to GovernDialectica 70 (4): 577-588. 2016.Non-Humean accounts of lawhood are said to founder on the Inference Problem, which is the problem of saying how laws that go beyond the regularities can entail the regularities. I argue that the Inference Problem has a simple solution – the Axiomatic Solution – on which the non-Humean only needs to outfit her laws with a law-to-regularity axiom. There is a remaining Epistemic Bulge, as to why one should believe that the posit-so-axiomatized is to be found in nature, but the non-Humean can flatte…Read more
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377The problem of free mass: Must properties cluster?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 (1). 2003.Properties come in clusters. It seems impossible, for instance, that a mass could float free, unattached to any other property. David Armstrong takes this as a reductio of the bundle theory and an argument for substrata, while Peter Simons and Arda Denkel reply by supplementing the bundle theory with accounts of property interdependencies. I argue against both views. Virtually all plausible ontologies turn out to be committed to the existence of free masses.
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518Causation, Physics, and the Constitution of Reality: Russell’s Republic Revisited, edited by Huw Price and Richard Corry (review)Mind 119 (475): 844-848. 2010.This is an outstanding anthology. It contains extended reflections on Russell’s idea that our notion of causation is a relic of stone-age metaphysics, which fails to fit contemporary physics and thus deserves elimination (‘On the Notion of Cause’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 13, 1913, pp. 1–26). It will be of interest to anyone interested in causation or the physical image of the world, and to anyone interested in reconciling the manifest and scientific images.
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1123The deflationary metaontology of Thomasson's ordinary objectsPhilosophical Books 50 (3): 142-157. 2009.In Ordinary Objects, Thomasson pursues an integrated conception of ontology and metaontology. In ontology, she defends the existence of shoes, ships, and other ordinary objects. In metaontology, she defends a deflationary view of ontological inquiry, designed to suck the air out of arguments against ordinary objects. The result is an elegant and insightful defense of a common sense worldview. I am sympathetic—in spirit if not always in letter—with Thomasson’s ontology. But I am skeptical of her …Read more
Areas of Specialization
| Metaphysics |
Areas of Interest
| Epistemology |
| Metaphysics |
| Philosophy of Language |
| Philosophy of Physical Science |
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| Metaphysics |