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RH Logie, Visuo-Spatial Working Memory. Hillsdale, NJ: LEA. FN Dempster & CJ Brainerd, Interference and Inhibition in Cognition. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. TC Daddesio, On Minds and Symbols. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. R. McClamrock, Existential Cognition. Chicago: Chicago University Press (review)Cognition 59 241-243. 1996.
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On the persistence of phenomenologyIn Thomas Metzinger (ed.), Conscious Experience, Ferdinand Schoningh. pp. 293--308. 1995.In Thomas Metzinger, Conscious Experience, Schoningh Verlag. 1995. [ online ]
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First‐Person Authority and the Internal Reality of BeliefsIn C. Macdonald, Barry C. Smith & C. J. G. Wright (eds.), Knowing Our Own Minds: Essays in Self-Knowledge, Oxford University Press. 1998.The paper is a response to Davies, arguing that he misdiagnoses the difficulties with the architecturalist and externalist arguments he targets. Whether or not there are independent grounds for the principles limiting the transfer of epistemic warrant across known entailments, the problem with both types of argument is that they equivocate. It is shown that, in each case, if the premise I have mental property M, expresses something about which the subject is non‐empirically authoritative, it sho…Read more
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Michael Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness (review)Journal of Consciousness Studies 4 (2): 188-189. 1997.
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Vagueness in law: placing the blame where it's dueIn Geert Keil & Ralf Poscher (eds.), Vagueness and Law: Philosophical and Legal Perspectives, Oxford University Press. 2016.
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85Theories of VaguenessPhilosophical Review 112 (2): 259-262. 2003.The goal of this book is to defend a supervaluationist theory of vagueness. Keefe begins by laying out a series of desiderata for an adequate theory of vagueness generally: among other things, such a theory will need to solve the sorites paradox, provide a plausible analysis of borderline cases, preserve so-called penumbral connections among borderline predications, accommodate the phenomenon of higher-order vagueness, and comport with as many of our ordinary linguistic intuitions as possible. S…Read more
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2483Vague Projects and the Puzzle of the Self-TorturerEthics 123 (1): 86-112. 2012.In this paper we advance a new solution to Quinn’s puzzle of the self-torturer. The solution falls directly out of an application of the principle of instrumental reasoning to what we call “vague projects”, i.e., projects whose completion does not occur at any particular or definite point or moment. The resulting treatment of the puzzle extends our understanding of instrumental rationality to projects and ends that cannot be accommodated by orthodox theories of rational choice.
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1Similarity spacesIn Mohan Matthen (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception, Oxford University Press Uk. 2015.
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219Modality, morality, and belief: essays in honor of Ruth Barcan Marcus (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 1995.Modality, morality and belief are among the most controversial topics in philosophy today, and few philosophers have shaped these debates as deeply as Ruth Barcan Marcus. Inspired by her work, a distinguished group of philosophers explore these issues, refine and sharpen arguments and develop new positions on such topics as possible worlds, moral dilemmas, essentialism, and the explanation of actions by beliefs. This 'state of the art' collection honours one of the most rigorous and iconoclastic…Read more
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Modality, Morality and Belief: Essays in Honor of Ruth Barcan MarcusPhilosophy 71 (275): 167-172. 1996.
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58Contextualism and the Sorites ParadoxIn Sergi Oms & Elia Zardini (eds.), The Sorites Paradox, Cambridge University Press. pp. 63-77. 2019.
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77Sorites ParadoxIn Ed Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2012.
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20Vagueness, Hysteresis, and the Instability of ColorIn Marcos Silva (ed.), How Colours Matter to Philosophy, Springer. 2017.This paper explores the implications of some experimental data for views that identify colors with objective physical properties such as reflectance profiles. Those who reject objectivist views often argue from the existence of intersubjective differences in color categorization ; but objectivists have managed to stand their ground by identifying colors with sets or ranges of reflectances individuated by the ways in which they stimulate the visual system. In the interest of moving the debate for…Read more
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41Some Thoughts About Thinking About ConsciousnessPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (1): 163-163. 2007.David Papineau’s Thinking About Consciousness tells a skillful, inventive, and plausible story about why, given that the phenomenal character of conscious experience is an unproblematically physical property, we continue to suffer from “intuitions of dualism”. According to Papineau, we are misled by the peculiar structure of the phenomenal concepts we use to introspect upon that phenomenal character. Roughly: unlike physical concepts, phenomenal concepts exemplify the kind of experience they are…Read more
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33Music, philosophy, and cognitive scienceIn Theodore Gracyk & Andrew Kania (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music, Routledge. 2011.Philosophers of music (and also music theorists) have recognized for a long time that research in the sciences, especially psychology, might have import for their own work. (Langer 1941 and Meyer 1956 are good examples.) However, while scientists had been interested in music as a subject of research (e.g., Helmholtz 1912, Seashore 1938), the discipline known as psychology of music, or more broadly cognitive science of music, came into its own only around 1980 with the publication of several land…Read more
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105Even zombies can be surprised: A reply to Graham and HorganPhilosophical Studies 122 (2): 189-202. 2005.In their paper “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary” , George Graham and Terence Horgan argue, contrary to a widespread view, that the socalled Knowledge Argument may after all pose a problem for certain materialist accounts of perceptual experience. I propose a reply to Graham and Horgan on the materialist’s behalf, making use of a distinction between knowing what it’s like to see something F and knowing how F things look
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210Vagueness and context-relativityPhilosophical Studies 81 (2-3). 1996.This paper develops the treatment of vague predicates begun in my "Vagueness Without Paradox" (Philosophical Review 103, 1 [1994]). In particular, I show how my account of vague words dissolves an "eternal" version of the sorites paradox, i.e., a version in which the paradox is generated independently of any particular run of judgments of the items in a sorites series. In so doing I refine the notion of an internal contest, introduced in the earlier paper, and draw a distinction within the class…Read more
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94Relativism, Retraction, and EvidencePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 92 (1): 171-178. 2016.
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108Can we do without concepts?: Comments on Edouard Machery, Doing Without Concepts (review)Philosophical Studies 149 (3). 2010.
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61Toward a cognitive theory of musical ineffabilityReview of Metaphysics 41 (4): 685-706. 1988.DESPITE CONSIDERABLE DIFFERENCES OF IDEOLOGY, objective, and style, these theorists join in giving voice to what is perhaps the most deeply rooted conviction in modern aesthetics: that aesthetic experience is, in some essential respect, ineffable. In apprehending a work of art we come to know something we cannot put into words.
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Marcus, Ruth BarcanIn Donald M. Borchert (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Supplement, Simon and Schuster Macmillan. pp. 322--323. 1996.
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53First-person authority and the internal reality of beliefsIn C. Macdonald, Barry C. Smith & C. J. G. Wright (eds.), Knowing Our Own Minds: Essays in Self-Knowledge, Oxford University Press. 1998.
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Aesthetics Naturalized: Cognitivist Reflections on a Traditional Problem in the Philosophy of ArtDissertation, Yale University. 1986.The thesis develops a cognitivist account of the supposed ineffability of musical experience. It is contended that, when the ineffability is viewed as adhering to a certain kind of perceptual knowledge of a musical signal, its nature can be illuminated by the adoption of a recent cognitivist theory of perception in conjunction with a generative grammar for tonal music . On this two-headed view, music perception consists in a rule-governed process of computing a series of increasingly abstract me…Read more
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86Vagueness and ObservationalityIn Giuseppina Ronzitti (ed.), Vagueness: A Guide, Springer Verlag. pp. 107--121. 2011.Of the many families of words that are thought to be vague, so-called observational predicates may be both the most fascinating and the most confounding. Roughly, observational predicates are terms that apply to objects on the basis of how those objects appear to us perceptually speaking. ‘Red’, ‘loud’, ‘sweet’, ‘acrid’, and ‘smooth’ are good examples. Delia Graff explains that a “predicate is observational just in case its applicability to an object (given a fixed context of evaluation) depends…Read more
Yale University
PhD
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |