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2475Reasons for Belief, Reasons for Action, the Aim of Belief, and the Aim of ActionIn Clayton Littlejohn & John Turri (eds.), Epistemic Norms: New Essays on Action, Belief, and Assertion, Oxford University Press. 2014.Subjects appear to take only evidential considerations to provide reason or justification for believing. That is to say that subjects do not take practical considerations—the kind of considerations which might speak in favour of or justify an action or decision—to speak in favour of or justify believing. This is puzzling; after all, practical considerations often seem far more important than matters of truth and falsity. In this paper, I suggest that one cannot explain this, as many have tried, …Read more
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25Mind, Method, and Morality: Essays in Honour of Anthony Kenny – Edited by John Cottingham and Peter Hacker (review)Philosophical Investigations 34 (1): 97-101. 2010.
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177Conservatives and racists: Inferential role semantics and pejorativesPhilosophia 36 (3): 375-388. 2008.According to inferential role semantics, for any given expression to possess a particular meaning one must be disposed to make or, alternatively, acknowledge as correct certain inferential transitions involving it. As Williamson points out, pejoratives such as ‘Boche’ seem to provide a counter-example to IRS. Many speakers are neither disposed to use such expressions nor consider it proper to do so. But it does not follow, as IRS appears to entail, that such speakers do not understand pejorative…Read more
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684Perspectivism and the Argument from GuidanceEthical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (2): 361-374. 2017.Perspectivists hold that what you ought to do is determined by your perspective, that is, your epistemic position. Objectivists hold that what you ought to do is determined by the facts irrespective of your perspective. This paper explores an influential argument for perspectivism which appeals to the thought that the normative is action guiding. The crucial premise of the argument is that you ought to φ only if you are able to φ for the reasons which determine that you ought to φ. We show that …Read more
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64The later Wittgenstein on language (edited book)Palgrave-Macmillan. 2009.Ludwig Wittgenstein's notoriously elusive later writings are dominated by remarks on language. However, while the textual analysis of Wittgenstein's writings is presently a booming industry, the tendency is to focus narrowly on exegetical matters with little attention to their bearing on philosophy at large. Moreover, one finds in contemporary philosophy of language various ideas with a distinctively Wittgensteinian ring to them but whose pedigree is uncertain. This volume brings together distin…Read more
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885Truth: the Aim and Norm of BeliefTeorema: International Journal of Philosophy 32 (3): 121-136. 2013.Invited contribution to The Aim of Belief, a special issue of Teorema, guest-edited by J. Zalabardo.
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663On epistemic conceptions of meaning: Use, meaning and normativityEuropean Journal of Philosophy 17 (3): 416-434. 2008.A number of prominent philosophers advance the following ideas: (1) Meaning is use. (2) Meaning is an intrinsically normative notion. Call (1) the use thesis, hereafter UT, and (2) the normativity thesis, hereafter NT. They come together in the view that for a linguistic expression to have meaning is for there to be certain proprieties governing its employment.1 These ideas are often associated with a third
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633Knowledge Is NOT Belief for Sufficient (Objective and Subjective) ReasonLogos and Episteme 6 (2): 237-243. 2015.Mark Schroeder has recently proposed a new analysis of knowledge. I examine that analysis and show that it fails. More specifically, I show that it faces a problem all too familiar from the post-Gettier literature, namely, that it is delivers the wrong verdict in fake barn cases.
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177Leave Truth Alone: On Deflationism and ContextualismEuropean Journal of Philosophy 19 (4): 607-624. 2010.Abstract: According to deflationism, grasp of the concept of truth consists in nothing more than a disposition to accept a priori (non-paradoxical) instances of the schema:(DS) It is true that p if and only if p.According to contextualism, the same expression with the same meaning might, on different occasions of use, express different propositions bearing different truth-conditions (where this does not result from indexicality and the like). On this view, what is expressed in an utterance depen…Read more
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143Defending semantic generalismAnalysis 67 (4). 2007.‘Particularism’ is a meta-ethical theory resulting from a holistic doctrine in the theory of reasons. According to Jonathan Dancy, the foremost contemporary proponent of particularism, ‘a feature that is a reason in favour of an action in one case may be no reason at all in another, or even a reason against’ (2004: 190). From this, Dancy claims, it follows that the ‘possibility of moral thought and judgement does not depend on the provision of a suitable supply of moral principles’ (2004: 7). Th…Read more
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18Wittgenstein: Meaning and judgement (review)Philosophical Investigations 28 (4). 2005.Books reviewed: Michael Luntley, Wittgenstein: Meaning and Judgement, Blackwell Publishers, 2003, ix + 187, price £16.99 p.b. Reviewed by Daniel Whiting, University of Reading Department of Philosophy University of Reading Whiteknights, Reading RG6 6AA [email protected].
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763Between Old and New: Brandom’s Analytic PragmatismInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 17 (4): 597-607. 2009.In his latest book, Between Saying and Doing, Robert Brandom aims to lay the foundations for a new approach to philosophy, 'analytic pragmatism', which as the name suggests aims to reconcile the insights of the pragmatists with the ambitions of the analytic tradition. To do so, Brandom offers what he describes as a ‘new metatheoretic conceptual apparatus’. In this paper, I raises questions concerning whether the method underlying that apparatus is really so new, and challenge the suggestion that…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Meta-Ethics |
Aesthetics |
17th/18th Century British Philosophy |
Philosophy of Language |
Areas of Interest
20th Century Philosophy |
Value Theory |