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33Music, philosophy, and cognitive scienceIn Theodore Gracyk & Andrew Kania (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music, Routledge. 2011.Philosophers of music (and also music theorists) have recognized for a long time that research in the sciences, especially psychology, might have import for their own work. (Langer 1941 and Meyer 1956 are good examples.) However, while scientists had been interested in music as a subject of research (e.g., Helmholtz 1912, Seashore 1938), the discipline known as psychology of music, or more broadly cognitive science of music, came into its own only around 1980 with the publication of several land…Read more
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105Even zombies can be surprised: A reply to Graham and HorganPhilosophical Studies 122 (2): 189-202. 2005.In their paper “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary” , George Graham and Terence Horgan argue, contrary to a widespread view, that the socalled Knowledge Argument may after all pose a problem for certain materialist accounts of perceptual experience. I propose a reply to Graham and Horgan on the materialist’s behalf, making use of a distinction between knowing what it’s like to see something F and knowing how F things look
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210Vagueness and context-relativityPhilosophical Studies 81 (2-3). 1996.This paper develops the treatment of vague predicates begun in my "Vagueness Without Paradox" (Philosophical Review 103, 1 [1994]). In particular, I show how my account of vague words dissolves an "eternal" version of the sorites paradox, i.e., a version in which the paradox is generated independently of any particular run of judgments of the items in a sorites series. In so doing I refine the notion of an internal contest, introduced in the earlier paper, and draw a distinction within the class…Read more
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94Relativism, Retraction, and EvidencePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 92 (1): 171-178. 2016.
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108Can we do without concepts?: Comments on Edouard Machery, Doing Without Concepts (review)Philosophical Studies 149 (3). 2010.
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61Toward a cognitive theory of musical ineffabilityReview of Metaphysics 41 (4): 685-706. 1988.DESPITE CONSIDERABLE DIFFERENCES OF IDEOLOGY, objective, and style, these theorists join in giving voice to what is perhaps the most deeply rooted conviction in modern aesthetics: that aesthetic experience is, in some essential respect, ineffable. In apprehending a work of art we come to know something we cannot put into words.
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Marcus, Ruth BarcanIn Donald M. Borchert (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Supplement, Simon and Schuster Macmillan. pp. 322--323. 1996.
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53First-person authority and the internal reality of beliefsIn C. Macdonald, Barry C. Smith & C. J. G. Wright (eds.), Knowing Our Own Minds: Essays in Self-Knowledge, Oxford University Press. 1998.
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Aesthetics Naturalized: Cognitivist Reflections on a Traditional Problem in the Philosophy of ArtDissertation, Yale University. 1986.The thesis develops a cognitivist account of the supposed ineffability of musical experience. It is contended that, when the ineffability is viewed as adhering to a certain kind of perceptual knowledge of a musical signal, its nature can be illuminated by the adoption of a recent cognitivist theory of perception in conjunction with a generative grammar for tonal music . On this two-headed view, music perception consists in a rule-governed process of computing a series of increasingly abstract me…Read more
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86Vagueness and ObservationalityIn Giuseppina Ronzitti (ed.), Vagueness: A Guide, Springer Verlag. pp. 107--121. 2011.Of the many families of words that are thought to be vague, so-called observational predicates may be both the most fascinating and the most confounding. Roughly, observational predicates are terms that apply to objects on the basis of how those objects appear to us perceptually speaking. ‘Red’, ‘loud’, ‘sweet’, ‘acrid’, and ‘smooth’ are good examples. Delia Graff explains that a “predicate is observational just in case its applicability to an object (given a fixed context of evaluation) depends…Read more
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39Review: Some Thoughts about "Thinking about Consciousness" (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (1). 2005.
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155Is twelve-tone music artistically defective?Midwest Studies in Philosophy 27 (1). 2003.Worries about the artistic integrity (for lack of a better term) of twelve-tone music are not new. Critics, philosophers, musicians, even composers them- selves have assailed the idiom with a fervor usually reserved for individual artists or works. Just why it is supposed to be defective is not entirely clear, however. I want to revisit these questions by way of putting some insights from music history and theory together with some insights from the philosophy and psychology of music. To find out…Read more
Yale University
PhD
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |