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5ObservationIn Ernie Lepore & Gilbert Harman (eds.), A Companion to W. V. O. Quine, Wiley-blackwell. 2013.Ernie Lepore: Quine, Analyticity, and Transcendence: In “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” Quine characterizes and rejects three approaches to making sense of analyticity. One approach attempts to reduce putative analytic statements to logical truths by synonym substitution. A second approach is to identify analytic statements with “semantic rules,” or “meaning postulates.” A third approach relies on the verificationist theory of meaning. According to that theory, “every meaningful statement is held to …Read more
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ObservationIn Gilbert Harman & Ernest LePore (eds.), A Companion to W. V. O. Quine, Wiley-blackwell. 2013.
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21Righting Epistemology: Hume's RevolutionOup Usa. 2017.Righting Epistemology defends an unrecognized Humean conception of epistemic justification, showing that he is no skeptic, and an argument of his that refutes all extant alternative conceptions. It goes on to trace the development of his thought in Sir Karl Popper, Nelson Goodman, W. V. Quine and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
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16Of Brains in Vats, Whatever Brains in Vats May BePhilosophical Studies 112 (3): 225-249. 2003.Hilary Putnam has offered two arguments to show that we cannotbe brains in a vat, and one to show that our cognitive situationcannot be fully analogous to that of brains in a vat. The latterand one of the former are irreparably flawed by misapplicationsof, or mistaken inferences from, his semantic externalism; thethird yields only a simple logical truth. The metaphysical realismthat is Putnam’s ultimate target is perfectly consistent withsemantic externalism.
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15Dennett on Qualia and Consciousness: A CritiqueCanadian Journal of Philosophy 27 (1): 47-81. 1997.IntroductionIt is at least a bit embarrassing, perhaps even scandalous, that debate should still rage over the sheer existence of qualia, but they continue to find able defenders after decades of being attacked as relics of ghostly substances, epiphenomenal non-entities, nomological danglers and the like; the intensity of the current confrontation is captured vividly by Daniel Dennett:What are qualia,exactly?This obstreperous query is dismissed by one author (“only half in jest”) by invoking Lou…Read more
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126Of Brains in Vats, Whatever Brains in Vats May BePhilosophical Studies 112 (3): 225-249. 2003.Hilary Putnam has offered two arguments to show that we cannotbe brains in a vat, and one to show that our cognitive situationcannot be fully analogous to that of brains in a vat. The latterand one of the former are irreparably flawed by misapplicationsof, or mistaken inferences from, his semantic externalism; thethird yields only a simple logical truth. The metaphysical realismthat is Putnams ultimate target is perfectly consistent withsemantic externalism.
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94Reclaiming Quine’s epistemologySynthese 191 (5): 1-28. 2014.Central elements of W. V. Quine’s epistemology are widely and deeply misunderstood, including the following. He held from first to last that our evidence consists of the stimulations of our sense organs, and of our observations, and of our sensory experiences; meeting the interpretive challenge this poses is a sine qua non of understanding his epistemology. He counted both “This is blue” and “This looks blue” as observation sentences. He took introspective reports to have a high degree of certai…Read more
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30On the Coherence of Pyrrhonian SkepticismPhilosophical Review 110 (4): 521. 2001.Early in Outlines of Pyrrhonism Sextus Empiricus writes
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94Contextualist Swords, Skeptical PlowsharesPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (2): 385-406. 2001.Radical skepticism, the view that no human being has any contingent knowledge of any external world there may be, has few adherents these days. But many who reject it concede that such skeptical arguments as SA require some sort of response, since they are obviously valid and their premises are, at the very least, highly plausible
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18The Problem of Metaphysics (review)Philosophical Review 85 (1): 106-107. 1976.Reviewed Work: The Problem of Metaphysics by D. M. MacKinnon
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3Steven Luper-Foy, ed., The Possibility of Knowledge: Nozick and His Critics Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 7 (11): 452-455. 1987.
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35The intelligibility of spectrum inversionCanadian Journal of Philosophy 23 (4): 631-6. 1993.Christopher Peacocke has recently made an important and insightful effort to fashion a non-verificationist method for distinguishing sense from nonsense. The argument is subtle and complex, and varies somewhat with each of his three target ‘spurious hypotheses’: that if a perfect fission of one person into two were to occur, one and only one of the resulting persons would be identical with the original; that another person’s visual experience can be qualitatively different from your own when you…Read more
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140Dennett on qualia and consciousness: A critiqueCanadian Journal of Philosophy 27 (1): 47-82. 1997.IntroductionIt is at least a bit embarrassing, perhaps even scandalous, that debate should still rage over the sheer existence of qualia, but they continue to find able defenders after decades of being attacked as relics of ghostly substances, epiphenomenal non-entities, nomological danglers and the like; the intensity of the current confrontation is captured vividly by Daniel Dennett:What are qualia, exactly? This obstreperous query is dismissed by one author by invoking Louis Armstrong's legen…Read more
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28Skeptical RearmamentCanadian Journal of Philosophy 15 (3). 1985.In ‘Skeptism Oisarmed,’ L.S. Carrier asserts the following:… any reasonable person would accept premise only on the ground that both p and q are propositions for which we can get the requisite evidence.Premise, actually a premise schema attributed to Peter Unger, is the following:If A both knows p and knows that p entails q, then A can come to know that q.I suggest, contrary to Carrier's assertion, that many reasonable people, including many philosophers, would regard as a necessary truth knowab…Read more
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47Basic Theistic BeliefCanadian Journal of Philosophy 16 (3). 1986.In several recent writings and in the 1980 Freemantle Lectures at Oxford, Alvin Plantinga has defended the idea that belief in God is ‘properly basic,’ by which he means that it is perfectly rational to hold such a belief without basing it on any other beliefs. The defense falls naturally into two broad parts: a positive argument for the rationality of such beliefs, and a rebuttal of the charge that if such a positive argument ‘succeeds,’ then a parallel argument will ‘succeed’ equally well in s…Read more
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19The Intelligibility of Spectrum InversionCanadian Journal of Philosophy 23 (4): 631-636. 1993.Christopher Peacocke has recently made an important and insightful effort to fashion a non-verificationist method for distinguishing sense from nonsense. The argument is subtle and complex, and varies somewhat with each of his three target ‘spurious hypotheses’: that if a perfect fission of one person into two were to occur, one and only one of the resulting persons would be identical with the original; that another person’s visual experience can be qualitatively different from your own when you…Read more
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