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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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145Theories 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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2417Vague 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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220Modality, 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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47Contextualism 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 Peter Adamson (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2012.
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19Vagueness, 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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29Deeper into Pictures: An Essay on Pictorial Representation (review)Philosophical Review 98 (4): 576. 1989.
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94Unruly Words: A Study of Vague LanguageOup Usa. 2013.In Unruly Words, Diana Raffman advances a new theory of vagueness which, unlike previous accounts, is genuinely semantic while preserving bivalence. According to this new approach, called the multiple range theory, vagueness consists essentially in a term's being applicable in multiple arbitrarily different, but equally competent, ways, even when contextual factors are fixed.
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70Précis of Unruly Words: A Study of Vague LanguagePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 90 (2): 452-456. 2015.
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252How to understand contextualism about vagueness: Reply to StanleyAnalysis 65 (3). 2005.accounts in general, contrary to what he seems to think. Stanley’s discussion concerns the dynamic or ‘forced march’ version of the sorites, viz. the version framed in terms of the judgments that would be made by a competent speaker who proceeds step by step along a sorites series for a vague predicate ‘F’. According to Stanley, the contextualist treatment of the paradox is based on the idea that the speaker shifts the content of the predicate whenever necessary to make it the case that each suc…Read more
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114Some 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, RoutledgePhilosophers 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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104Even 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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209Vagueness 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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89Relativism, Retraction, and EvidencePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 92 (1): 171-178. 2016.
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107Can we do without concepts?: Comments on Edouard Machery, Doing Without Concepts (review)Philosophical Studies 149 (3). 2010.
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57Toward 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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52First-person authority and the internal reality of beliefsIn C. Wright, B. Smith, C. Macdonald & the internal reality of beliefs. First-person authority (eds.), Knowing Our Own Minds, Oxford University Press. 1998.
Yale University
PhD
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |