Barry Loewer

This paper examines connections between Quine’s epistemology of science and Lewis’ metaphysics of science and their different conceptions of naturalness. It develops a metaphysical account of nomological modalities and fundamental properties Lewisian in spirit but dispensing with his possible worlds and his version of naturalness in favor of probabilities and a Quineian notion of naturalness. This account, called “the Package Deal Account of laws and chances” (PDA), is constructed out of Quine’s epistemology of science. The result is an account of the metaphysics of laws and other nomological modalities that combines features of Quines’ epistemology and Lewis’ physics and brings their views closer together.

Even in the eyes of many of his critics, Fodor is widely regarded as the most important philosopher of psychology of his generation. With Noam Chomsky at MIT in the 1960s he mounted a strenuous attack on the behaviourism that then dominated psychology and most philosophy of mind, and since then, he has articulated and defended in considerable richness and detail a computational theory of intentional causation that is central to the emerging cognitive sciences. This theory provides a framework both for the resolution of many traditional problems in the philosophy of mind and language, and for actual psychological research and experimentation. The present volume contains 16 contributions by philosophers and cognitive scientists who have been critical of this theory, followed by replies Fodor makes to each of them. There is alos a lengthy introduction that provides an overview of Fodor's views and their relation to this critical discussion.

Jaegwon Kim famously argues that no form of “non‐reductive physicalism,” including Davidson's anomalism monism, can provide an adequate account of mental causation. His argument depends on a principle he calls “exclusion” that says, in effect, that if an event has a sufficient physical causal explanation then it doesn't also have an “independent” psychological explanation. This chapter counters by arguing that the exclusion principle depends on a metaphysically loaded account of causation. The chapter develops the counterfactual account of causation discussed in earlier chapters to rebut Kim's argument.

According to Putnam, metaphysical realism is the view that world consists of a fixed totality of mind‐independent objects and properties; that truth involves some sort of correspondence relation between words and these objects; and that there is one true complete description of the way the world is. He goes on to argue that this view is incoherent and he wants to replace it with a view he labels internal realism. His views have not met with wide acceptance. The chapter offers an interpretation of his views that may make his conclusions more palatable.

This chapter explores Cartesian and more contemporary motivations for the view that there must be an internalist semantics for mental representations, including arguments that are intended to show various natural language expressions possess internalist semantics. The conclusion is that that semantics for English is so thoroughly externalist that even if thoughts have internalist contents they cannot be expressed in English. It is then argued that the most plausible theories of meaning for mental representations are also externalist. This discussion results in an apparent dilemma. There are Cartesian intuitions and other motivations for thinking that thoughts possess an internalist semantics but there are arguments that seem to show our usual ways of characterizing thought contents is externalist. The chapter concludes with some tentative remarks on how these two views might be reconciled.

The chapter evaluates various general criticisms of Davidson's semantic program as well as Davidson's own defense of it. One criticism that particularly interests them is that Davidson's semantics fails to assign a correct meaning to each sentence of its object language. Both Davidson and his critics thought that required response to such criticism is to add further constraints to ensure the desired goal. The chapter argues that this debate is misguided. Instead, the chapter seeks to show Davidson had available to him in his paratactic account of indirect discourse the means to dissolve the debate.

This chapter evaluates various general criticisms of Davidson's semantic program as well as Davidson's own defense of it. One criticism that particularly interests this chapter is that Davidson's semantics fails to assign a correct meaning to each sentence of its object language. Both Davidson and his critics thought that required response to such criticism is to add further constraints to ensure the desired goal. The chapter argues this debate is misguided. Instead, the chapter seeks to show Davidson had available to him in his paratactic account of indirect discourse the means to dissolve the debate.

A collection of newly commissioned papers on themes from David Albert's Time and Chance (HUP, 2000), with replies by Albert. Introduction [Barry Loewer, Brad Weslake, and Eric Winsberg] I. Overview of Time and Chance 1. The Mentaculus: A Probability Map of the Universe [Barry Loewer] II. Philosophical Foundations 2. The Metaphysical Foundations of Statistical Mechanics: On the Status of PROB and PH [Eric Winsberg] 3. The Logic of the Past Hypothesis [David Wallace] 4. In What Sense Is the Early Universe Fine-Tuned? [Sean M. Carroll] 5. The Meta-Reversibility Objection [Christopher J. G. Meacham] 6. Typicality versus Humean Probabilities as the Foundation of Statistical Mechanics [Dustin Lazarovici] 7. The Past Hypothesis and the Nature of Physical Laws [Eddy Keming Chen] 8. On the Albertian Demon [Tim Maudlin] III. Underwriting the Asymmetries of Knowledge and Intervention 9. Reading the Past in the Present [Nick Huggett] 10. Causes, Randomness, and the Past Hypothesis [Mathias Frisch] 11. Time, Flies, and Why We Can’t Control the Past [Alison Fernandes] 12. The Concept of Intervention in Time and Chance [Sidney Felder] Conclusion [David Albert]

Physicalism, a topic that has been central to modern philosophy of mind and metaphysics, is the philosophical view that everything in the space-time world is ultimately physical. The physicalist will claim that all facts about the mind and the mental are physical facts and deny the existence of mental events and state insofar as these are thought of as independent of physical things, events and states. This collection of essays, first published in 2001, offers a series of perspectives on this important doctrine and brings depth and breadth to the philosophical debate. A group of distinguished philosophers, comprising both physicalists and their critics, consider a wide range of issues including the historical genesis and present justification of physicalism, its metaphysical presuppositions and methodological role, its implications for mental causation, and the account it provides of consciousness.