-
923Higher-Order One–Many Problems in Plato's Philebus and Recent Australian MetaphysicsAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 91 (1): 119-138. 2013.We discuss the one–many problem as it appears in the Philebus and find that it is not restricted to the usually understood problem about the identity of universals across particulars that instantiate them (the Hylomorphic Dispersal Problem). In fact some of the most interesting aspects of the problem occur purely with respect to the relationship between Forms. We argue that contemporary metaphysicians may draw from the Philebus at least three different one–many relationships between universals t…Read more
-
1129The Hardness of the Iconic Must: Can Peirce’s Existential Graphs Assist Modal Epistemology?Philosophia Mathematica 20 (1): 1-24. 2012.Charles Peirce's diagrammatic logic — the Existential Graphs — is presented as a tool for illuminating how we know necessity, in answer to Benacerraf's famous challenge that most ‘semantics for mathematics’ do not ‘fit an acceptable epistemology’. It is suggested that necessary reasoning is in essence a recognition that a certain structure has the particular structure that it has. This means that, contra Hume and his contemporary heirs, necessity is observable. One just needs to pay attention, n…Read more
-
5Pragmatic realism: towards a reconciliation of enactivism and realismPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 24 (1): 213-230. 2025.This paper addresses some apparent philosophical tensions between realism and enactivism by means of Charles Peirce’s pragmatism. Enactivism’s Mind-Life Continuity thesis has been taken to commit it to some form of anti-realist ‘world-construction’ which has been considered controversial. Accordingly, a new realist enactivism is proposed by Zahidi (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 13(3), 461–475, 2014), drawing on Ian Hacking’s ‘entity realism’, which places subjects in worlds comprised…Read more
-
134Sellars and Peirce on Truth and the End of InquiryIn Carl Sachs (ed.), Interpreting Sellars: Critical Essays, Cambridge University Press. 2024.Despite some notable similarities between the scientific realisms of Sellars and Peirce (such as both being anti-representationalist, and future-directed), in his mature work Science and Metaphysics Sellars explicitly critiqued Peirce’s account of truth, as lacking “an intelligible foundation” (Sellars 1968: vii). In this paper, I explore Sellars’ proposed remedy to Peirce’s purported lack, in his complex and enigmatic account of picturing – a non-discursive ‘mapping’ of the world. I argue that …Read more
-
155Concepts in PragmatismIn Stephan Schmid & Hamid Taieb (eds.), A Philosophical History of the Concept, Cambridge University Press. forthcoming.Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that understands knowing the world as inseparable from agency within it. It thereby introduces some unique ideas and approaches to the analysis of concepts. Looking largely to pragmatism’s founder, Charles Peirce, this chapter presents an account of concepts as habits which associate specific kinds of environmental stimuli with schemata of action and ensuing experience, within linguistic communities. I explain how this account avoids Sellars’ ‘Myth of the …Read more
-
194Modal Structure and Sellars' Metaphysical MethodologyIn Krisztián Pete & László Kocsis (eds.), Wilfrid Sellars’ Images and the Philosophy in Between: Nature and Norms in a Stereoscopic View, Bloomsbury. 2024.Wilfrid Sellars’ distinctive scientific realism has lately been gaining ground, but a crucial issue is how it can or should theorize modality. We argue that many interesting questions in this area transcend the usual ‘first-order’ concerns: “Is there an objectivist modal ontology?” and “What modal entities should we posit”? Rather, Sellars invites us to take a fresh look at the relationship between logic and metaphysics through an investigation of ‘second-order’ philosophical categories. This in…Read more
-
24Your World is Different from a Pigeon’s - But a New Theory Explains how we can still Live in the Same Reality (review)The Conversation: July 24, 2024. 2024.The “four-dimensional” colour space pigeons see may contain millions more colours than ours. Despite the long history of close association between our species, we might say humans and pigeons live in quite different worlds. If different species effectively live in different worlds, does that mean our biology constructs reality? This article sketches a way to resolve this dilemma based on inquiry and action as theorised by pragmatist philosopher Charles Peirce. It reports on an academic paper rec…Read more
-
11Wittgenstein Tried to Solve all the Problems of Philosophy in his Tractatus…but he Didn’t Quite Succeed (review)The Conversation: June 27, 2022. 2022.How is it that false statements, such as “horses have eight legs”, can be just as meaningful as true statements, such as “horses have four legs”? Where does logical structure come from? We can describe what the world would be like if the laws of physics were different – could we do the same for the laws of logic? Are there facts about ethics? If we ever managed to answer the philosophical questions that humans have pondered for thousands of years, what would life look like on the other side? All…Read more
-
21Getting to Post-Post-TruthJournal of Philosophy in Schools 11 (1): 137-157. 2024.This piece ponders how teachers might best approach the issue of truth in the classroom, now that traditional models of truth-transmission have been problematised by what social epistemologist Steven Fuller calls ‘second-order awareness’—the apparent social construction of any given ‘truth-game’. Drawing on Charles Peirce’s original theorisation of the ‘community of inquiry’ at the birth of pragmatist philosophy, I argue that, as educators our best response to the recent ‘post-truth’ phenomenon …Read more
-
Peirce and Sellars on Nonconceptual contentIn Luca Corti & Antonio M. Nunziante (eds.), Sellars and the History of Modern Philosophy, Routledge. pp. 119-137. 2018.
-
60“All you can eat” ontology-building: Feeding Wikipedia to CycIEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI-09), 15 – 18 September 2009 Università Degli Studi di Milano Bicocca, Milano, Italy. 2009.In order to achieve genuine web intelligence, building some kind of large general machine-readable conceptual scheme (i.e. ontology) seems inescapable. Yet the past 20 years have shown that manual ontology-building is not practicable. The recent explosion of free user-supplied knowledge on the Web has led to great strides in automatic ontology building, but quality-control is still a major issue. Ideally one should automatically build onto an already intelligent base. We suggest that the long-ru…Read more
-
148Habits in Perception: A Diachronic Defense of HyperinferentialismIn Jeremy Dunham & Komarine Romdenh-Romluc (eds.), Habit and the History of Philosophy, Rewriting the History of Philosophy. pp. 243-260. 2022.This paper explores how Charles Peirce’s habit-based epistemology leads him to theorise perception. I show how Peirce’s triadic semiotic analysis of perceptual judgment renders his theory of perception neither a representationalism nor a relationism /direct realism, but an interesting hybrid of the two. His view is also extremely interesting, I argue, in the way that by analysing symbols as habits it refuses the common assumption that perception is an affair best understood synchronically, as a …Read more
-
367Pragmatic Realism: Towards a Reconciliation of Enactivism and RealismPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 24 (1). 2025.This paper addresses some apparent philosophical tensions between realism and enactivism by means of Charles Peirce’s pragmatism. Enactivism’s Mind-Life Continuity thesis has been taken to commit it to some form of anti-realist ‘world-construction’ which has been considered controversial. Accordingly, a new realist enactivism is proposed by Zahidi (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 13(3), 2014), drawing on Ian Hacking’s ‘entity realism’, which places subjects in worlds comprised of the th…Read more
-
63BOOK REVIEW: "Pragmatism’s Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy" by Trevor Pearce (review)Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 13 (2): 557-560. 2023.
-
112“The Meaning of a Thought is Altogether Something Virtual”: Joseph Ransdell and His LegacyTransactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 49 (4): 451. 2013.Joseph Ransdell (1931–2010), who received his Ph.D in philosophy from Columbia University in 1966, where he was advised by Sidney Morgenbesser, and spent most of his career at Texas Tech University, offered an original and focused challenge to academic philosophy at the end of the Second Millennium. His guiding philosophical passion was understanding how communication might best encourage and support truth seeking. This introduction to a special edition of the Transactions of the Charles S. Peir…Read more
-
633What is Intelligence For? A Peircean Pragmatist Response to the Knowing-How, Knowing-That DebateErkenntnis 87 2265-2284. 2022.Mainstream philosophy has seen a recent flowering in discussions of intellectualism which revisits Gilbert Ryle’s famous distinction between ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’, and challenges his argument that the former cannot be reduced to the latter. These debates so far appear not to have engaged with pragmatist philosophy in any substantial way, which is curious as the relation between theory and practice is one of pragmatism’s main themes. Accordingly, this paper examines the contemporary de…Read more
-
76Habits of Mind: New Insights for Embodied Cognition from Classical Pragmatism and PhenomenologyEuropean Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy (2). 2022.Although pragmatism and phenomenology have both contributed significantly to the genealogy of so-called “4E” – embodied, embedded, enactive and extended – cognition, there is benefit to be had from a systematic comparative study of these roots. As existing 4E cognition literature has tended to emphasise one or the other tradition, issues remain to be addressed concerning their commonalities – and possible incompatibilities. We begin by exploring pragmatism and phenomenology’s shared focus on con…Read more
-
56Philosophers and professors behaving badly: Responses to ‘named or nameless’ by Besley, Jackson & Peters. An EPAT collective writing projectEducational Philosophy and Theory 55 (3): 272-284. 2023.
-
1074Perceiving NecessityPacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (3): 320-343. 2017.In many diagrams one seems to perceive necessity – one sees not only that something is so, but that it must be so. That conflicts with a certain empiricism largely taken for granted in contemporary philosophy, which believes perception is not capable of such feats. The reason for this belief is often thought well-summarized in Hume's maxim: ‘there are no necessary connections between distinct existences’. It is also thought that even if there were such necessities, perception is too passive or l…Read more
-
266Comments on Diana B. Heney: "Toward a Pragmatist Metaethics" (review)Syndicate. 2018.This poised and articulate volume addresses an area of pragmatist philosophy as yet relatively unexplored in pragmatism's welcome revival. Neopragmatism's preoccupation with changing philosophers' view of the relation between language (or as Rorty puts it: "vocabularies") and reality, has largely focussed their discussions on the 'metaphysics & epistemology', rather than the 'value' side of philosophy, apart from Rorty's brief flirtations with edifying Western political discourse. Yet the nature…Read more
-
691Discursive Habits: a Representationalist Re-reading of TeleosemioticsSynthese 199 (5-6): 14751-14768. 2021.Enactivism has influentially argued that the traditional intellectualist ‘act-content’ model of intentionality is insufficient both phenomenologically and naturalistically, and minds are built from world-involving bodily habits – thus, knowledge should be regarded as more of a skilled performance than an informational encoding. Radical enactivists have assumed that this insight must entail non-representationalism concerning at least basic minds. But what if it could be shown that representation …Read more
-
442A Properly Pragmatist Pragmatics: Peircean Reflections on the Distinction Between Semantics and PragmaticsPragmatics and Cognition 27 (2): 387-407. 2020.Although most contemporary philosophers of language hold that semantics and pragmatics require separate study, there is surprisingly little agreement on where exactly the line should be drawn between these two areas, and why. In this paper I suggest that this lack of clarity is at least partly caused by a certain historical obfuscation of the roots of the founding three-way distinction between syntax, semantics and pragmatics in Charles Peirce’s pragmatist philosophy of language. I then argue fo…Read more
-
248Grasping Mathematical RealityCUADERNOS DE SISTEMÁTICA PEIRCEANA 7. 2015.This paper presents a Peircean take on Wittgenstein's famous rule-following problem as it pertains to 'knowing how to go on in mathematics'. I argue that McDowell's advice that the philosophical picture of 'rules as rails' must be abandoned is not sufficient on its own to fully appreciate mathematics' unique blend of creativity and rigor. Rather, we need to understand how Peirce counterposes to the brute compulsion of 'Secondness', both the spontaneity of 'Firstness' and also the rational intell…Read more
-
3This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Diagrams, Diagrams 2021, held virtually in September 2021. The 16 full papers and 25 short papers presented together with 16 posters were carefully reviewed and selected from 94 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: design of concrete diagrams; theory of diagrams; diagrams and mathematics; diagrams and logic; new representation systems; analysis …Read more
-
201Towards a philosophy of academic publishingEducational Philosophy and Theory 48 (14): 1401-1425. 2016.This article is concerned with developing a philosophical approach to a number of significant changes to academic publishing, and specifically the global journal knowledge system wrought by a range of new digital technologies that herald the third age of the journal as an electronic, interactive and mixed-media form of scientific communication. The paper emerges from an Editors' Collective, a small New Zealand-based organisation comprised of editors and reviewers of academic journals mostly in t…Read more
-
555Is Truth Made, and if So, What Do we Mean by that? Redefining Truthmaker RealismPhilosophia 48 (2): 587-606. 2020.Philosophical discussion of truthmaking has flourished in recent times, but what exactly does it mean to ‘make’ a truth-bearer true? I argue that ‘making’ is a concept with modal force, and this renders it a problematic deployment for truthmaker theorists with nominalist sympathies, which characterises most current theories. I sketch the outlines of what I argue is a more genuinely realist truthmaker theory, which is capable of answering the explanatory question: In virtue of what does each part…Read more
-
427CRITICAL REVIEW: "Wilfrid Sellars and the Foundations of Normativity" by Peter Olen (review)Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 7 (3). 2019.Commentary on Peter Olen's book "Wilfrid Sellars and the Foundations of Normativity", originally prepared for an 'Author Meets Critics' session organized by Carl Sachs for the Eastern Division Meeting of the APA in Savannah, Georgia, on 5th January, 2018.
-
249BOOK REVIEW: "The Philosophy of Gesture: Completing Pragmatists' Incomplete Revolution" by Giovanni Maddalena (review)Review of Metaphysics 72 (1): 143-147. 2018.Western Philosophy’s modern period has been very much shaped by a representationalism according to which “concepts” (earlier: “ideas”) assembled into “propositions” constitute the fundamental unit of meaning, thought, belief— and even, in the hands of 20th century philosophers such as G.E.M. Anscombe and Jaegwon Kim— action, conceived as performed under a description. What exactly a proposition consists in ontologically is not easy to explain in a manner consonant with prevailing scientific natu…Read more
-
80Phenomenology, Naturalism and Non-reductive Cognitive ScienceAustralasian Philosophical Review 2 (2): 119-124. 2018.Volume 2, Issue 2, June 2018, Page 119-124.
-
398BOOK REVIEW: "Sympathy in Perception" by Mark Eli Kalderon (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2018 (0809). 2018.Mark Eli Kalderon's book boldly positions itself as a work in speculative metaphysics. Its point of departure is the familiar distinction between presentational and representational philosophies of perception. Kalderon notes that the latter has been more popular of late, as it is more amenable to "an account" explicating causal or counterfactual conditions on perception; but he wishes to rehabilitate the former, at least in part. One widely perceived disadvantage of presentationalism has been th…Read more
Deakin, Victoria, Australia
Areas of Interest
2 more
Metaphilosophy |
History of Western Philosophy |
Meaning |
Truth |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Wilfrid Sellars |
Ludwig Wittgenstein |