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61The Metaphysics of MeasurementIn J. Forge (ed.), Measurement, Realism and Objectivity: Essays on Measurement in the Social and Physical Sciences, Springer Verlag. 1987.My thesis is that there are good reasons for a philosophical account of measurement to deal primarily with the properties or magnitudes of objects measured, rather than with the objects themselves. The account I present here embodies both a realism about measurement and a realism about the existence of the properties involved in measurement. It thus provides an alternative to most current treatments of measurement, many of which are operationalistic or conventionalistic, and nearly all of which …Read more
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24C. Stephen Layman. The power of logic. Mayfield Publishing Company, Mountain View, Calif., London, and Toronto, 1999, ix + 566 pp (review)Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 7 (1): 79-81. 2001.
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52Sense and NonsenseCanadian Journal of Philosophy 9 (4). 1979.“What kind of psychological theory could relate our use of words to sets of possible worlds?” So queries a recent author, but the question is rhetorical, the insinuation being that any analysis or explanation of semantical notions in terms of possible worlds will involve an account that won't square with a naturalistic view of language acquisition or use. Such feelings are widespread; my purpose here is to argue that they are unjustified.
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62Kantian DerivationsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 13 (3). 1983.Although Kant's attempts in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals to derive statements of specific duties from the categorical imperative have received much attention, there is still disagreement over the strategies of particular derivations, the status of the auxiliary assumptions employed therein, and the principles at work in the derivations generally. Yet an understanding of these matters is indispensable for a proper understanding of the Groundwork and bears on a much wider class of e…Read more
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140Complex predicates and logics for properties and relationsJournal of Philosophical Logic 27 (3): 295-325. 1998.In this paper I present a formal language in which complex predicates stand for properties and relations, and assignments of denotations to complex predicates and assignments of extensions to the properties and relations they denote are both homomorphisms. This system affords a fresh perspective on several important philosophical topics, highlighting the algebraic features of properties and clarifying the sense in which properties can be represented by their extensions. It also suggests a natura…Read more
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500» The Nature of Natural Laws «Australasian Journal of Philosophy 60 (3): 1982. 1982.That laws of nature play a vital role in explanation, prediction, and inductive inference is far clearer than the nature of the laws themselves. My hope here is to shed some light on the nature of natural laws by developing and defending the view that they involve genuine relations between properties. Such a position is suggested by Plato, and more recent versions have been sketched by several writers.~ But I am not happy with any of these accounts, not so much because they lack detail or engend…Read more
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21C.I.Lewis’s calculus of predicatesHistory and Philosophy of Logic 16 (1): 19-37. 1995.In 1951 C.I.Lewis published a logic of general terms that he called the calculus of predicates. Although this system is of less significance than Lewis’s earlier work on proposition...
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5Abstract entitiesIn Theodore Sider, John Hawthorne & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics, Blackwell. 2008.
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325Structural representation and surrogative reasoningSynthese 87 (3). 1991.It is argued that a number of important, and seemingly disparate, types of representation are species of a single relation, here called structural representation, that can be described in detail and studied in a way that is of considerable philosophical interest. A structural representation depends on the existence of a common structure between a representation and that which it represents, and it is important because it allows us to reason directly about the representation in order to draw conc…Read more
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75The New Dialectic (review)Philosophical Review 110 (2): 291-295. 2001.These books are part of Douglas Walton’s project to develop a new theoretical framework for informal logic. The first book, on his new dialectic, is extremely ambitious; the goal is nothing less than to construct a systematic and comprehensive theory of rationality that can provide the basis for the normative evaluation of real-life arguments in real-life settings. The second book, on ad hominem arguments, provides an extended application of the framework developed in the first book. Since the f…Read more
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44The early, largely automatic stages of human visual processing involve things like feature detectors (e.g., edge detectors) that do not involve our concepts or beliefs. These stages are called data-driven or bottom up aspects of perceptual information processing. But in the later stages of processing perception often is affected by our concepts, beliefs, and expectations. Such processes are said to be hypothesis-driven or expectation-driven; they are also known as..
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