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13On the MetaphysicalIn Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Conceivability and Possibility, Oxford University Press. pp. 309. 2002.
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19Issue six• spring 2004In David Papineau (ed.), Philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 175003. 2009.
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8ConventionalismIn Kathrin Koslicki & Michael J. Raven (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Essence in Philosophy, Routledge. pp. 437-454. 2024.Conventionalism about essence is the view that truths about what is (and isn’t) essential to things are based upon talk and thought about the world, rather than mind-independent facts. This chapter presents motivations for conventionalism, and explains how conventionalism can be (and has been) developed to accommodate essences that can only be discovered with the help of empirical investigation, like “water is H2O” or “Obama is human”. We examine a range of objections that have been raised again…Read more
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303The Grounding MystiqueThe Monist 106 (3): 225-238. 2023.Grounding has become all the rage in recent philosophical work and metaphilosophical discussions. While I agree that the concept of ground marks something useful, I am skeptical about the metaphysical weight many imbue it with, and the picture of ‘worldly layering’ that grounding talk inspires. My skepticism centers around the fact that grounding involves necessitation, combined with reasons for thinking matters of necessity are matters of logical or conceptual (semantic, psychological) relation…Read more
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96Dispositional essentialism and the necessity of laws: a deflationary accountPhilosophical Studies 1-22. forthcoming.Two related claims have lately garnered currency: dispositional essentialism—the view that some or all properties, or some or all fundamental properties, are essentially dispositional; and the claim that laws of nature (or again, many or the fundamental ones) are metaphysically necessary. I have argued elsewhere (On the metaphysical contingency of laws of nature, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002) that the laws of nature do not have a mind-independent metaphysical necessity, but recent devel…Read more
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95Necessity, Essence, and Individuation: A Defense of ConventionalismCornell University Press. 1989.Alan Sidelle's Necessity, Essence, and Individuation is a sustained defense of empiricism—or, more generally, conventionalism—against recent attacks by realists. Sidelle focuses his attention on necessity a posteriori, a kind of necessity which contemporary realists have taken to support realism over empiricism. Turning the tables against the realists, Sidelle argues that if there are in fact truths necessary a posteriori, it is not realism, but rather empiricism which provides the best explanat…Read more
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215The Answering Machine ParadoxCanadian Journal of Philosophy 21 (4): 525--539. 1991.According to an intuitive semantics for 'I,' 'here' and 'now,' 'I am not here now' should always be false when uttered. But occurrences of 'I am not here now' on an answering machine seem to be true (when the speaker is not home). A number of possible solutions are considered and rejected, and a novel solution offered introducing the notion of a 'deferred utterance,' which allows for non-mysterious sort of action at a distance.
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135A semantic account of rigidityPhilosophical Studies 80 (1). 1995.I offer an understanding of what it is for a term to be rigid which makes no serious metaphysical commitments to or about identity across possible worlds. What makes a term rigid is not that it 'refers to the same object(property) with respect to all worlds' - rather (roughly) it is that the criteria of application for the term with respect to other worlds, when combined with the criteria of identity associated with the term, ensure that whatever meets the criteria of identity also meets the cr…Read more
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105Review of Theodore Sider, John Hawthorne, Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (6). 2008.
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35Occasions of Identity (review)Philosophical Review 109 (3): 469-471. 2000.Review of Andre Gallois,' Occasions of identity: The metaphysics of persistence, change, and sameness
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621Is There a True Metaphysics of Material Objects?Noûs 36 (s1): 118-145. 2002.I argue that metaphysical views of material objects should be understood as 'packages', rather than individual claims, where the other parts of the package include how the theory addresses 'recalcitant data', and that when the packages meet certain general desiderata - which all of the currently competing views *can* meet - there is nothing in the world that could make one of the theories true as opposed to any of the others.
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243Does hylomorphism offer a distinctive solution to the grounding problem?Analysis 74 (3): 397-404. 2014.The Aristotelian doctrine of hylomorphism has seen a recent resurgence of popularity, due to the work of a number of well-known and impressive philosophers. One of the recently motivating virtues claimed for the doctrine is its ability to solve the grounding problem for philosophers who believe in coinciding entities. In this brief article, I will argue that when fully spelled out, hylomorphism does not, in fact, contribute a distinctive solution to this problem. It is not that it offers no solu…Read more
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147An argument that internalism requires infallibilityPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 63 (1): 163-179. 2001.Most contemporary internalists are fallibilists, denying that there need be anything about which we are infallible for us to have knowledge or justified beliefs. At the same time, internalists standardly appeal to ‘internal twins’ in arguing against externalism and motivating internalism---a Cartesian demon can ruin the ‘external’ relations we have to the world, but one is equally well justified in one’s beliefs whether or not one is subject to such deception. Even if one doesn’t motivate one’s …Read more
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157The Structure of Objects (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 88 (2): 371-374. 2010.This Article does not have an abstract
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169Identity and the Identity-likePhilosophical Topics 20 (1): 269-292. 1992.Some relations - like supervenience and composition - can appear very much like identity. Sometimes, the relata differ only in modal, or modally-involved features. Yet, in some cases, we judge the pairs to be identical (water/H2O; Hesperus/Phosphorus), while in others, many judge one of the weaker relations to hold (c-fiber firing/pain; statues/lumps). Given the seemingly same actual properties these pairs have, what can justify us in sometimes believing identity is the relation, and sometimes s…Read more
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265A sweater unraveled: Following one thread of thought for avoiding coincident entitiesNoûs 32 (4): 423-448. 1998.One obvious solution to the puzzles of apparently coincident objects is a sort of reductionism - the tree really just is the wood, the statue is just the clay, and nothing really ceases to exist in the purported non-identity showing cases. This paper starts with that approach and its underlying motivation, and argues that if one follows those motivations - specifically, the rejection of coincidence, and the belief that 'genuine' object-destroying changes must differ non-arbitrarily from acciden…Read more
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723On the metaphysical contingency of laws of natureIn Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Conceivability and Possibility, Oxford University Press. pp. 309--336. 2002.This paper defends the traditional view that the laws of nature are contingent, or, if some of them are necessary, this is due to analytic principles for the individuation of the law-governed properties. Fundamentally, I argue that the supposed explanatory purposes served by taking the laws to be necessary --showing how laws support counterfactuals, how properties are individuated, or how we have knowledge of properties--are in fact undermined by the continued possibility of the imagined scenari…Read more
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32Language and Time (review)Review of Metaphysics 48 (3): 679-681. 1995.Review of Quentin Smith Language and Time
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286Finding an intrinsic account of identity: What is the source of duplication cases?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (2): 415-430. 2000.Many philosophers believe that identity through time cannot depend on features extrinsic to the relata and relations between them. This goes with the view that one must deny identity in cases for which there is a ‘duplication case’-a case just like the first, but for an additional, ‘external’ element which provides an equal or better ‘candidate’ for identity with one of the relata. Such friends of intrinsicness cannot remedy the failure of continuity of function/form to be one-one by non-branchi…Read more
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45A Companion to Metaphysics (review)Philosophical Review 105 (3): 418. 1996.This volume is an encyclopedia, with entries on philosophers, issues, views, and concepts in metaphysics, pretty broadly construed. I must admit that I was at first dubious about the value of such a book, particularly with the Encyclopedia of Philosophy being updated, and the new Routledge Encyclopedia coming out. But the Companion has a number of virtues that make it a useful resource for both students and professional philosophers.
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40What’s Wrong with Being Strange?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 56 (1): 209-215. 1996.Contribution to symposium on Eli Hirsch's Dividing Reality
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29Rigidity, Ontology, and Semantic StructureJournal of Philosophy 89 (8): 410. 1992.The phenomenon of rigid designation - in particular, de jure rigidity - is typically treated metaphysically. The picture is: reference is gained in a way that puts no constraints on what an object in other worlds, or counterfactual situations must be like, in order to be the referent of that term, other than 'being this thing'. This allows 'pure metaphysical' investigation into, and discovery of 'the nature' of the referent. It is argued that this presupposes a 'privileged' ontology, of a sor…Read more
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476Conventionalism and the contingency of conventionsNoûs 43 (2): 224-241. 2009.One common objection to Conventionalism about modality is that since it is contingent what our conventions are, the modal facts themselves will thereby be contingent. A standard reply is that Conventionalists can accept this, if they reject the S4 axiom, that what is possibly possible is possible. I first argue that this reply is inadequate, but then continue to argue that it is not needed, because the Conventionalist need not concede that the contingency of our conventions has any bearing on th…Read more
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37Frameworks and Deflation in “Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology” and Recent MetametaphysicsIn Stephan Blatti & Sandra Lapointe (eds.), Ontology after Carnap, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 59-80. 2016.ABSTRACT: Rudolf Carnap’s “Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology” (ESO) has received a good deal of sympathetic interest over the years from philosophers who are not particularly sympathetic to verificationism, or suspicious of metaphysics in general. Recent work has favorably cited ESO in connection with doubts about the genuine content of debates in the metaphysics of material objects. But, when we look at how Carnap introduces his central notion of a ‘framework’, and the questions he wants to …Read more
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488Thought Experiments in PhilosophyPhilosophical Review 107 (3): 480. 1998.Philosophy and science employ abstract hypothetical scenarios- thought experiments - to illustrate, defend, and dispute theoretical claims. Since thought experiments furnish no new empirical observations, the method prompts two epistemological questions: whether anything may be learnt from the merely hypothetical, and, if so, how. Various sceptical arguments against the use of thought experiments in philosophy are discussed and criticized. The thesis that thought experiments in science provide a…Read more
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