•  50
    John Heil, Appearance in Reality (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 2023.
    John Heil’s new book ranges over many of the major topics in metaphysics, including substance, properties, causation, space, time, parts and wholes, modality, essence, agency, and consciousness. It has interesting things to say about all of the issues it discusses, but there are three topics that are especially prominent in the book, and which help to organize the discussion. These all flow from the differences between our everyday, commonsense understanding of reality and the representations th…Read more
  • The Philosophy of Daniel Dennett (edited book)
    University of Arkansas Press. 1994.
  •  118
    New Perspectives on Type Identity: The Mental and the Physical (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 2012.
    The type identity theory, according to which types of mental state are identical to types of physical state, fell out of favour for some years but is now being considered with renewed interest. Many philosophers are critically re-examining the arguments which were marshalled against it, finding in the type identity theory both resources to strengthen a comprehensive, physicalistic metaphysics and a useful tool in understanding the relationship between developments in psychology and new results i…Read more
  •  41
    There is an important family of semantic notions that we apply to thoughts and to the conceptual constituents of thoughts - as when we say that the thought that the Universe is expanding is true. Thought and World presents a theory of the content of such notions. The theory is largely deflationary in spirit, in the sense that it represents a broad range of semantic notions - including the concept of truth - as being entirely free from substantive metaphysical and empirical presuppositions. At th…Read more
  •  28
    Perceptual experience
    Oxford University Press. 2022.
    This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Christopher S. Hill argues that perceptual experience constitutively involves representations of worldly items, and that the relevant form of representation can be explained in broadly biological terms. He then maintains that the representational contents of perceptual exp…Read more
  •  41
    Truth in the realm of thoughts
    Philosophical Studies 96 (1): 87-121. 1999.
  •  52
    Watsonian freedom and the freedom of the will
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 62 (3): 294-98. 1984.
    This Article does not have an abstract
  •  50
    This paper has three main concerns. First, it proposes a deflationary theory of the concept of truth, arguing thatthe concept can be explicitly defined in terms of substitutionalquantification. Second, it attempts to describe and explainthe intuitions that have traditionally been thought tofavor correspondence theories of truth over deflationarytheories. And third, it argues that these intuitions areultimately compatible with deflationism, maintaining,among other things, that the relation of sem…Read more
  •  4
    Two Cheers for Process Reliabilism
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 75 (1): 12-28. 1994.
  •  79
    Précis of thought and world: An austere portrayal of truth, reference, and semantic correspondence (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (1). 2006.
    Thought and World has three main concerns.1 First, it presents and defends a deflationary theory of propositional truth—that is, a deflationary theory of the concept of truth that figures in claims like the proposition that snow is white is true. I have long admired the deflationary theory of truth that Paul Horwich developed in the eighties, but I have also had substantial misgivings about that theory.2 In writing TW I was concerned to formulate an alternative view that enjoys the virtues of Ho…Read more
  •  13
  •  61
    Deflationism: the best thing since pizza and quite possibly better
    Philosophical Studies 173 (12): 3169-3180. 2016.
    I defend the deflationary theory of truth and reference I have proposed from the objections raised in Vann McGee’s “Thought, Thoughts, and Deflationism,” trying where possible to use arguments that other deflationists might find useful.
  •  41
    Appearance and reality
    Philosophical Issues 30 (1): 175-191. 2020.
    Philosophical Issues, Volume 30, Issue 1, Page 175-191, October 2020.
  •  29
    Unrevisability
    Synthese 198 (4): 3015-3031. 2019.
    Opposing Quine, I defend the view that some of the statements we accept are immune to empirical revision. My examples include instances of Schema and abbreviative definitions. I argue that it serves important cognitive purposes to hold statements of these kinds immune to revision, and that it is epistemically permissible for us to do so. At the end, I briefly consider the question of whether the rationale for these claims might be extended to show that additional statements are unrevisable.
  •  36
    The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World
    Philosophical Review 110 (2): 300. 2001.
    As the subtitle indicates, this book is concerned with the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. It recommends a novel and disturbingly pessimistic view about this topic that it calls “naturalistic mysterianism.” The view is naturalistic because it maintains that states of consciousness are reducible to physical properties of the brain. It counts as “mysterian” because it asserts that the physical properties in question are entirely beyond our ken—that they lie well beyond t…Read more
  •  9
    Turn It Off: An Action Research Study of Top Management Influence on Energy Conservation in the Workplace
    with Sally V. Russell, Alice Evans, and Kelly S. Fielding
    Frontiers in Psychology 7. 2016.
  •  19
    Conscious Experience: A Logical Inquiry, by Anil Gupta
    Mind 132 (525): 251-259. 2023.
    This dazzlingly original and ambitious book challenges the epistemological and metaphysical preconceptions of contemporary philosophers on many fronts, and prop.
  •  12
    Neander on a Mark of the Mental
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (2): 484-489. 2022.
  • Concepts, teleology, and rational revision
    In Albert Casullo & Joshua C. Thurow (eds.), The a Priori in Philosophy, Oxford University Press Uk. 2013.
  •  32
    Gupta has built a magnificent mansion, but can we live in it?
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (1): 236-242. 2022.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 1, Page 236-242, January 2022.
  •  21
    Sensory Integration and the Unity of Consciousness (edited book)
    with David Bennett and David J. Bennett
    MIT Press. 2014.
    Philosophers and cognitive scientists address the relationships among the senses and the connections between conscious experiences that form unified wholes. In this volume, cognitive scientists and philosophers examine two closely related aspects of mind and mental functioning: the relationships among the various senses and the links that connect different conscious experiences to form unified wholes. The contributors address a range of questions concerning how information from one sense influen…Read more
  •  19
    Perceptual Existentialism Sustained
    Erkenntnis 86 (6): 1391-1410. 2019.
    There are two main accounts of what it is for external objects to be presented in visual experience. According to particularism, particular objects are built into the representational contents of experiences. Existentialism is a quite different view. According to existentialism, the representational contents of perceptual experiences are general rather than particular, in the sense that the contents can be fully captured by existentially quantified statements. The present paper is a defense of e…Read more
  •  54
    Perceptual Existentialism Sustained
    Erkenntnis 86 (6): 1-20. 2019.
    There are two main accounts of what it is for external objects to be presented in visual experience. According to particularism, particular objects are built into the representational contents of experiences. Existentialism is a quite different view. According to existentialism, the representational contents of perceptual experiences are general rather than particular, in the sense that the contents can be fully captured by existentially quantified statements. The present paper is a defense of e…Read more
  •  540
    Hawthorne’s Lottery Puzzle and the Nature of Belief
    Philosophical Issues 17 (1): 120-122. 2007.
    In the first chapter of his Knowledge and Lotteries, John Hawthorne argues that thinkers do not ordinarily know lottery propositions. His arguments depend on claims about the intimate connections between knowledge and assertion, epistemic possibility, practical reasoning, and theoretical reasoning. In this paper, we cast doubt on the proposed connections. We also put forward an alternative picture of belief and reasoning. In particular, we argue that assertion is governed by a Gricean constraint…Read more
  •  27
    Précis of Meaning, Mind, and Knowledge
    Philosophical Studies 173 (3): 827-829. 2016.
  •  34
    Replies to Byrne, McGrath, and McLaughlin
    Philosophical Studies 173 (3): 861-872. 2016.