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307The Argument for Radical Skepticism concerning the External WorldJournal of Philosophy 106 (12): 679-693. 2009.
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139Dennett 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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125Of 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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101On the coherence of pyrrhonian skepticismPhilosophical Review 110 (4): 521-561. 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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93Reclaiming 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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82The inverted spectrumAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 64 (4): 471-6. 1986.This Article does not have an abstract
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76Hume, Goodman and radical inductive skepticismSynthese 191 (12): 2791-2813. 2014.Goodman concurs in Hume’s contention that no theory has any probability relative to any set of data, and offers two accounts, compatible with that contention, of how some inductive inferences are nevertheless justified. The first, framed in terms of rules of inductive inference, is well known, significantly flawed, and enmeshed in Goodman’s unfortunate entrenchment theory and view of the mind as hypothesizing at random. The second, framed in terms of characteristics of inferred theories rather t…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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34The 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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32Russell's New Riddle of InductionPhilosophy 54 (207). 1979.The most innovative and important parts of Bertrand Russell's Human Knowledge were the result of his first attempt in three decades to come to grips with the problem of induction, or, more generally, ‘non-demonstrative inference’. My purpose here is to argue that that work constituted giant progress on the problem; if I succeed, something will have been done to restore this work to its proper place in the history of philosophy and, correlatively, to rearrange that history
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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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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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25Critical Notice: The Oxford Handbook of SkepticismInternational Journal for the Study of Skepticism 1 (1): 56-67. 2011.
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20On Basic Knowledge and JustificationCanadian Journal of Philosophy 15 (4). 1985.Robert F. Almeder believes he has discovered a ‘pressing problem': ‘stating the conditions under which we determine whether a person's basic belief is true without introducing an evidence condition for knowledge’. He believes further that this is ‘a problem needing resolution before any ultimately satisfying explication of basic knowledge can be offered’.My aim is to show that Almeder has failed to discover any problem at all, but I begin by asking: how could the question how we determine the tr…Read more
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19Righting 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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18The 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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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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