•  9
    A recurrent 16p12.1 microdeletion supports a two-hit model for severe developmental delay
    with Santhosh Girirajan, Jill A. Rosenfeld, Gregory M. Cooper, Francesca Antonacci, Priscillia Siswara, Andy Itsara, Laura Vives, Tom Walsh, Shane E. McCarthy, Heather C. Mefford, Jeffrey M. Kidd, Sharon R. Browning, Brian L. Browning, Diane E. Dickel, Deborah L. Levy, Blake C. Ballif, Kathryn Platky, Darren M. Farber, Gordon C. Gowans, Jessica J. Wetherbee, Alexander Asamoah, David D. Weaver, Paul R. Mark, Jennifer Dickerson, Bhuwan P. Garg, Sara A. Ellingwood, Rosemarie Smith, Valerie C. Banks, Wendy Smith, Marie T. McDonald, Joe J. Hoo, Beatrice N. French, Cindy Hudson, John P. Johnson, Jillian R. Ozmore, John B. Moeschler, Urvashi Surti, Luis F. Escobar, Dima El-Khechen, Jerome L. Gorski, Jennifer Kussmann, Bonnie Salbert, Yves Lacassie, Alisha Biser, Donna M. McDonald-McGinn, Elaine H. Zackai, Matthew A. Deardorff, Tamim H. Shaikh, Eric Haan, Kathryn L. Friend, Marco Fichera, Corrado Romano, Jozef Gécz, Lynn E. DeLisi, Jonathan Sebat, Mary-Claire King, Lisa G. Shaffer, and Eic
    We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number var…Read more
  •  124
    Expressivism and Moral Dilemmas: A Response to Marino
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 14 (4): 445-455. 2011.
    Simon Blackburn’s expressivist logic of attitudes aims to explain how we can use non-assertoric moral judgements in logically valid arguments. Patricia Marino has recently argued that Blackburn’s logic faces a dilemma: either it cannot account for the place of moral dilemmas in moral reasoning or, if it can, it makes an illicit distinction between two different kinds of moral dilemma. Her target is the logic’s definition of validity as satisfiability, according to which validity requires a…Read more
  •  765
    Some have argued that the possibility of faultless disagreement gives relativist semantic theories an important explanatory advantage over their absolutist and contextualist rivals. Here I combat this argument, focusing on the specific case of aesthetic discourse. My argument has two stages. First, I argue that while relativists may be able to account for the possibility of faultless aesthetic disagreement, they nevertheless face difficulty in accounting for the intuitive limits of faultless dis…Read more
  •  365
    Indexical contextualism and the challenges from disagreement
    Philosophical Studies 157 (1): 107-123. 2012.
    In this paper I argue against one variety of contextualism about aesthetic predicates such as “beautiful.” Contextualist analyses of these and other predicates have been subject to several challenges surrounding disagreement. Focusing on one kind of contextualism— individualized indexical contextualism —I unpack these various challenges and consider the responses available to the contextualist. The three responses I consider are as follows: giving an alternative analysis of the concept of disagr…Read more
  •  1308
    The role of disagreement in semantic theory
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy (1): 1-18. 2013.
    Arguments from disagreement often take centre stage in debates between competing semantic theories. This paper explores the theoretical basis for arguments from disagreement and, in so doing, proposes methodological principles which allow us to distinguish between legitimate arguments from disagreement and dialectically ineffective arguments from disagreement. In the light of these principles, I evaluate Cappelen and Hawthorne's [2009] argument from disagreement against relativism, and show that…Read more
  •  694
    An Absolutist Theory of Faultless Disagreement in Aesthetics
    with Jon Robson
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (3): 429-448. 2017.
    Some philosophers writing on the possibility of faultless disagreement have argued that the only way to account for the intuition that there could be disagreements which are faultless in every sense is to accept a relativistic semantics. In this article we demonstrate that this view is mistaken by constructing an absolutist semantics for a particular domain – aesthetic discourse – which allows for the possibility of genuinely faultless disagreements. We argue that this position is an improvement…Read more