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The Vagaries of ReferenceErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9 (n/a). 2022.
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[Aristotle], On TrollingJournal of the American Philosophical Association 2 (2): 193-195. 2016.
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In defense of the armchair: Against empirical arguments in the philosophy of perceptionNoûs 57 (4): 784-814. 2022.A recurring theme dominates recent philosophical debates about the nature of conscious perception: naïve realism’s opponents claim that the view is directly contradicted by empirical science. I argue that, despite their current popularity, empirical arguments against naïve realism are fundamentally flawed. The non-empirical premises needed to get from empirical scientific findings to substantive philosophical conclusions are ones the naïve realist is known to reject. Even granting the contentiou…Read more
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Bivs, Space and ‘In’Erkenntnis 87 (1): 369-392. 2020.I present a novel anti-sceptical BIV argument by focusing on conditions on the production and use of the locative preposition ‘in’. I distinguish two uses of ‘in’—material and descriptive phenomenological—and I explain in what respect movement is central to the concept that our use of ‘in’ expresses. I go on to argue that a functionalist semantics of the intelligible use of ‘in’ demands a materialist philosophy of action in the spirit of G.E.M. Anscombe, but also why the structure of space is no…Read more
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Trading on Identity and Singular ThoughtAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (2): 296-312. 2022.On the traditional relationalist conception of singular thought, a thought has singular content when it is based on an ‘information relation’ to its object. Recent work rejects relationalism and suggests singular thoughts are distinguished from descriptive thoughts by their inferential role: only thoughts with singular content can be employed in ‘direct’ inferences, or inferences that ‘trade on identity’. Firstly this view is insufficiently clear, because it conflates two distinct ideas—one abou…Read more
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The Contingency of Creation and Divine ChoiceOxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 10 289-300. 2022.According to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (‘PSR’), every fact has an explanation for why it obtains. If the PSR is true, there must be a sufficient reason for why God chose to create our world. But a sufficient reason for God’s choice plausibly necessitates that choice. It thus seems that God could not have done otherwise, and that our world exists necessarily. We therefore appear forced to pick between the PSR, and the contingency of creation and divine choice. I show that a third option …Read more
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Meta-Metasemantics, or the Quest for the One True MetasemanticsPhilosophical Quarterly 72 (1): 135-154. 2021.What determines the meaning of a context-sensitive expression in a context? It is standardly assumed that, for a given expression type, there will be a unitary answer to this question; most of the literature on the subject involves arguments designed to show that one particular metasemantic proposal is superior to a specific set of alternatives. The task of the present essay will be to explore whether this is a warranted assumption, or whether the quest for the one true metasemantics might be a …Read more
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A Lemma from NowhereCritica 52 (154): 11-47. 2020.
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Frege and saving substitutionPhilosophical Studies 178 (8): 2687-2697. 2021.
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Mind-Dependence in Berkeley and the Problem of PerceptionAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 99 (4): 648-668. 2021.ABSTRACT On the traditional picture, accidents must inhere in substances in order to exist. Berkeley famously argues that a particular class of accidents—the sensible qualities—are mere ideas—entities that depend for their existence on minds. To defend this view, Berkeley provides us with an elegant alternative to the traditional framework: sensible qualities depend on a mind, not in virtue of inhering in it, but in virtue of being perceived by it. This metaphysical insight, once correctly under…Read more
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The value of thinking and the normativity of logicPhilosophers' Imprint 20 (25): 1-23. 2020.(1) This paper is about how to build an account of the normativity of logic around the claim that logic is constitutive of thinking. I take the claim that logic is constitutive of thinking to mean that representational activity must tend to conform to logic to count as thinking. (2) I develop a natural line of thought about how to develop the constitutive position into an account of logical normativity by drawing on constitutivism in metaethics. (3) I argue that, while this line of thought provi…Read more
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Explaining contingent factsPhilosophical Studies 178 (4): 1163-1181. 2020.
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Unity in the Scientific Study of Intellectual AttentionCanadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (4): 444-459. 2020.I argue that using information from a cognitive representation to guide the performance of a primary task is sufficient for intellectual attention, and that this account of attention is endorsed by scientists working in the refreshing, n-back, and retro-cue paradigms. I build on the work of Wayne Wu, who developed a similarly motivated account, but for perceptual attention rather than intellectual attention. The way that I build on Wu’s account provides a principled way of responding to Watzl’s …Read more
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The Role of Attention in Russell's Theory of KnowledgeBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 21 (6): 1175-1193. 2013.In his Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell distinguished knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge of truths. This paper argues for a new interpretation of the relationship between these two species of knowledge. I argue that knowledge by acquaintance of an object neither suffices for knowledge that one is acquainted with the object, nor puts a subject in a position to know that she is acquainted with the object. These conclusions emerge from a thorough examination of the central role played …Read more
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The Situationalist Account of ChangeOxford Studies in Metaphysics. forthcoming.In this paper I propose a new solution to the problem of change: situationalism. According to this view, parts of reality fundamentally disagree about what is the case and reality as a whole is unsettled (i.e. metaphysically indeterminate). When something changes, parts of the world irreconcilably disagree about what properties it has. From this irreconcilable disagreement, indeterminacy arises. I develop this picture using situations, which are parts of possible worlds; this gives it the name s…Read more
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Properties in sight and in thoughtSynthese 198 (8): 7049-7071. 2019.The main focus of acquaintance theorists has been the nature and mechanism of perceptual acquaintance with particulars. Generally, one’s view of perceptual acquaintance with general features has taken its bearings from one’s view of perceptual acquaintance with particulars. This has led to the glossing over of significant differences in the mechanisms of perceptual acquaintance with particulars and with general features. The difference in mechanisms suggests a difference in the sort of epistemic…Read more
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Co-seeing and seeing through: reimagining Kant’s subtraction argument with Stumpf and HusserlBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 28 (6): 1217-1239. 2020.ABSTRACT I draw on Carl Stumpf’s essay “Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie” (1891), and his precocious On the Psychological Origin of the Idea of Space (1873), to set out a charge he raises against Kant’s form/matter distinction. The charge rests, I propose, on the supposition that colourless extension, or empty space, cannot be seen. I consider an objection that Stumpf raises against Kant’s notorious ‘subtraction’ argument. Kant supposes that we can ‘take away’ from the representation of a body …Read more
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Seeing empty spaceEuropean Journal of Philosophy 18 (2): 227-243. 2009.Abstract: In this paper I offer an account of a particular variety of perception of absence, namely, visual perception of empty space. In so doing, I aim to make explicit the role that seeing empty space has, implicitly, in Mike Martin's account of the visual field. I suggest we should make sense of the claim that vision has a field—in Martin's sense—in terms of our being aware of its limitations or boundaries. I argue that the limits of the visual field are our own sensory limitations, and that…Read more
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Must naive realists be relationalists?European Journal of Philosophy 27 (4): 1002-1015. 2019.
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On the Varieties of Abstract ObjectsAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (4): 809-823. 2019.I reconcile the spatiotemporal location of repeatable artworks and impure sets with the non-location of natural numbers despite all three being varieties of abstract objects. This is possible because, while the identity conditions for all three can be given by abstraction principles, in the former two cases spatiotemporal location is a congruence for the equivalence relation featuring in the relevant principle, whereas in the latter it is not. I then generalize this to other ‘physical’ propertie…Read more