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142Counterfactuals and the benefit of hindsightIn Phil Dowe & Paul Noordhof (eds.), Cause and Chance: Causation in an Indeterministic World, Routledge. 2003.Book synopsis: Philosophers have long been fascinated by the connection between cause and effect: are 'causes' things we can experience, or are they concepts provided by our minds? The study of causation goes back to Aristotle, but resurged with David Hume and Immanuel Kant, and is now one of the most important topics in metaphysics. Most of the recent work done in this area has attempted to place causation in a deterministic, scientific, worldview. But what about the unpredictable and chancey w…Read more
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22The Concept of Probability by J. R. Lucas. (Oxford University Press, 1970. Pp. viii + 220. £2.10.)Philosophy 47 (182): 375-. 1972.
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257Possible knowledge of unknown truthSynthese 173 (1). 2010.Fitch’s argument purports to show that for any unknown truth, p , there is an unknowable truth, namely, that p is true and unknown; for a contradiction follows from the assumption that it is possible to know that p is true and unknown. In earlier work I argued that there is a sense in which it is possible to know that p is true and unknown, from a counterfactual perspective; that is, there can be possible, non-actual knowledge, of the actual situation, that in that situation, p is true and unkno…Read more
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Un argumento de Orayen en favor del condicional materialRevista Latinoamericana de Filosofia 13 (1): 54. 1987.
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117
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3Conditionals, truth and assertionIn Ian Ravenscroft (ed.), Minds, Ethics, and Conditionals: Themes from the Philosophy of Frank Jackson, Oxford University Press. 2009.
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1Sorensen on Vagueness and ContradictionIn Richard Dietz & Sebastiano Moruzzi (eds.), Cuts and clouds: vagueness, its nature, and its logic, Oxford University Press. 2010.
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69Verificationism and the Manifestations of MeaningAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 59 (1). 1985.
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163Mellor on chance and causation (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48 (3): 411-433. 1997.Mellor's subject is singular causation between facts, expressed ‘E because C’. His central requirement for causation is that the chance that E if C be greater than the chance that E if C: chc(E)>chc(E). The book is as much about chance as it is about causation. I show that his way of distinguishing chc (E) from the traditional notion of conditional chance leaves than him with a problem about the existence of chQ(P) when Q is false (Section 3); and also that any notion of chance which conforms to…Read more
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183What if ? Questions about conditionalsMind and Language 18 (4). 2003.Section 1 briefly examines three theories of indicative conditionals. The Suppositional Theory is defended, and shown to be incompatible with understanding conditionals in terms of truth conditions. Section 2 discusses the psychological evidence about conditionals reported by Over and Evans (this volume). Section 3 discusses the syntactic grounds offered by Haegeman (this volume) for distinguishing two sorts of conditional.
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26Changing Beliefs Rationally: Some PuzzlesIn Jes Ezquerro (ed.), Cognition, Semantics and Philosophy, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 47--73. 1992.
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15And AssertionIn Ian Ravenscroft (ed.), Minds, Ethics, and Conditionals: Themes from the Philosophy of Frank Jackson, Oxford University Press. pp. 283. 2009.
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27Ramsey's Legacies on Conditionals and TruthIn Hallvard Lillehammer & David Hugh Mellor (eds.), Ramsey's Legacy, Oxford University Press. 2005.Book synopsis: The Cambridge philosopher Frank Ramsey died tragically young, but had already established himself as one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century. Besides groundbreaking work in philosophy, particularly in logic, language, and metaphysics, he created modern decision theory and made substantial contributions to mathematics and economics. In these original essays, written to commemorate the centenary of Ramsey's birth, a distinguished international team of contributors o…Read more
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249Vagueness by DegreesIn Rosanna Keefe & Peter Smith (eds.), Vagueness: A Reader, Mit Press. 1996.Book synopsis: Vagueness is currently the subject of vigorous debate in the philosophy of logic and language. Vague terms-such as "tall", "red", "bald", and "tadpole"—have borderline cases ; and they lack well-defined extensions. The phenomenon of vagueness poses a fundamental challenge to classical logic and semantics, which assumes that propositions are either true or false and that extensions are determinate. Another striking problem to which vagueness gives rise is the sorites paradox. If yo…Read more
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25Graeme Forbes, "The Metaphysics of Modality" (review)Philosophical Quarterly 38 (52): 365. 1988.
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36The Presidential Address: CounterfactualsProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 108 (1pt3). 2008.
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42The Inaugural Address: Two Kinds of PossibilityAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 78 1-22. 2004.I defend a version of Kripke's claim that the metaphysically necessary and the knowable a priori are independent. On my version, there are two independent families of modal notions, metaphysical and epistemic, neither stronger than the other. Metaphysical possibility is constrained by the laws of nature. Logical validity, I suggest, is best understood in terms of epistemic necessity.
London, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Probability |