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Ch. 19. Quine, Kripke, and PutnamIn Michael Beaney (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of The History of Analytic Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2013.
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58Types of negation in logical reconstructions of meinongGrazer Philosophische Studien 67 (1): 21-36. 2004.Russell's criticisms force Meinong to adopt a distinction between two types of negation. Logical expositions of Meinong's theory show the distinction is easily drawn in formal terms, but that alone does not justify the distinction intuitively.I criticise Routley'streatment of the distinction and argue that only Terence Parsons'theory retains and preserves the tight network of conceptual connections between the notions of negation, contradiction and impossibility. Hence, Parsons' approach best ex…Read more
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Meinong's Theory of Non-Existent ObjectsDissertation, Temple University. 2002.The argument is an investigation of the philosophy of Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong. There are three chapters. The first chapter argues that there are non-existent objects. It is argued that negative existential statements have a simple subject-predicate logical form. The conclusion follows from this premise, together with realist assumptions about truth and predication. Positive and negative existential statements have subject-predicate logical form, I argue, because; that is the grammat…Read more
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36Meinong on IntendingInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 21 (3): 415-427. 2013.In this paper I want to examine Meinong’s account of what it is to think about a particular object in the context of issues that have preoccupied twentieth-century philosophy of language. The central interpretive task is to determine what Meinong might have said about cases of intending where the object is referred to by means of a proper name. The two theoretical notions at the heart of Meinong’s account of intending, intending by way of being and intending by way of being-so, are a species of …Read more
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142The sky over canberra: Folk discourse and serious metaphysicsPhilosophia 38 (2): 365-383. 2010.I take up the task of examining how someone who takes seriously the ambitious programme of conceptual analysis advocated by the Canberra School can minimise the eliminative consequences which I argue the Ramsey-Carnap-Lewis recipe of conceptual analysis is likely to have for many folk discourses. The objective is to find a stable means to preserve the constative appearance of folk discourse and to find it generally successful in its attempts to describe an external world, albeit in non-scientifi…Read more
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165Holism, communication, and the emergence of public meaning: Lessons from an economic analogyPhilosophia 37 (1): 133-147. 2009.Holistic accounts of meaning normally incorporate a subjective dimension that invites the criticism that they make communication impossible, for speakers are bound to differ in ways the accounts take to be relevant to meaning, and holism generalises any difference over some words to a difference about all, and this seems incompatible with the idea that successful communication requires mutual understanding. I defend holism about meaning from this criticism. I argue that the same combination of p…Read more
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85The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of LanguageInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 18 (2): 303-306. 2010.This Article is a review of Barry Smith and Ernest Lepore's "Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language".
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54Meinongs much maligned modal momentGrazer Philosophische Studien 64 (1): 95-118. 2002.Russell's objections to object-theory have been refuted by the proofs of the consistency of Meinong's system given by various writers. These proofs exploit technical distinctions that Meinong apparently uses very little if at all. Instead, Meinong introduces a theoretical postulate called the modal moment. I describe this postulate and its place in Meinong's system, and I argue that it has been much under-rated by Meinong's logician expositors.
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76Understanding as endorsing an inferencePolish Journal of Philosophy 2 (1): 35-54. 2008.Fodor & Lepore (2001) and Williamson (2003) attack the inferentialist account of concept possession according to which possessing or understanding a concept requires endorsing the inference patterns constitutive of its content. I show that Fodor & Lepore's concern – that the conception places an exorbitant epistemological demands on possessors of a concept – is met by Brandom's tolerance of materially bad nonconservative inferences. Such inferences themselves, as Williamson argues, present diffi…Read more
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82Lewis’s SynthesisInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 16 (1). 2008.This article criticises David Lewis's attempt to use his philosophical analysis of convention to reconcile the picture of languages as model-theoretic objects and the picture of languages as human social activity.
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14Understanding as Endorsing an InferencePolish Journal of Philosophy 2 (1): 35-54. 2008.Fodor & Lepore (2001) and Williamson (2003) attack the inferentialist account of concept possession according to which possessing or understanding a concept requires endorsing the inference patterns constitutive of its content. I show that Fodor & Lepore’s concern - that the conception places an exorbitant epistemological demands on possessors of a concept - is met by Brandom’s tolerance of materially bad nonconservative inferences. Such inferences themselves, as Williamson argues, present diffi…Read more
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31Robert Brandom , by Jeremy WandererPhilosophical Papers 38 (2): 277-284. 2009.This Article does not have an abstract
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Philosophy of Language |
20th Century Philosophy |
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Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
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20th Century Philosophy |
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