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695Two Kinds of PossibilityAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 78 (1): 1-22. 2004.I defend a version of Kripke's claim that the metaphysically necessary and the knowable a priori are independent. On my version, there are two independent families of modal notions, metaphysical and epistemic, neither stronger than the other. Metaphysical possibility is constrained by the laws of nature. Logical validity, I suggest, is best understood in terms of epistemic necessity.
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255Possible knowledge of unknown truthSynthese 173 (1). 2010.Fitch’s argument purports to show that for any unknown truth, p , there is an unknowable truth, namely, that p is true and unknown; for a contradiction follows from the assumption that it is possible to know that p is true and unknown. In earlier work I argued that there is a sense in which it is possible to know that p is true and unknown, from a counterfactual perspective; that is, there can be possible, non-actual knowledge, of the actual situation, that in that situation, p is true and unkno…Read more
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243Vagueness by DegreesIn Rosanna Keefe & Peter Smith (eds.), Vagueness: A Reader, Mit Press. 1997.Book synopsis: Vagueness is currently the subject of vigorous debate in the philosophy of logic and language. Vague terms-such as "tall", "red", "bald", and "tadpole"—have borderline cases ; and they lack well-defined extensions. The phenomenon of vagueness poses a fundamental challenge to classical logic and semantics, which assumes that propositions are either true or false and that extensions are determinate. Another striking problem to which vagueness gives rise is the sorites paradox. If yo…Read more
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175What if ? Questions about conditionalsMind and Language 18 (4). 2003.Section 1 briefly examines three theories of indicative conditionals. The Suppositional Theory is defended, and shown to be incompatible with understanding conditionals in terms of truth conditions. Section 2 discusses the psychological evidence about conditionals reported by Over and Evans (this volume). Section 3 discusses the syntactic grounds offered by Haegeman (this volume) for distinguishing two sorts of conditional.
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159Mellor on chance and causation (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48 (3): 411-433. 1997.Mellor's subject is singular causation between facts, expressed ‘E because C’. His central requirement for causation is that the chance that E if C be greater than the chance that E if C: chc(E)>chc(E). The book is as much about chance as it is about causation. I show that his way of distinguishing chc (E) from the traditional notion of conditional chance leaves than him with a problem about the existence of chQ(P) when Q is false (Section 3); and also that any notion of chance which conforms to…Read more
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138Counterfactuals and the benefit of hindsightIn Phil Dowe & Paul Noordhof (eds.), Cause and Chance: Causation in an Indeterministic World, Routledge. 2003.Book synopsis: Philosophers have long been fascinated by the connection between cause and effect: are 'causes' things we can experience, or are they concepts provided by our minds? The study of causation goes back to Aristotle, but resurged with David Hume and Immanuel Kant, and is now one of the most important topics in metaphysics. Most of the recent work done in this area has attempted to place causation in a deterministic, scientific, worldview. But what about the unpredictable and chancey w…Read more
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133We provide an introduction to some of the key issues raised in this volume by considering how individual chapters bear on the prospects of what may be called a ‘counterfactual process view’ of causal reasoning. According to such a view, counterfactual thought is an essential part of the processing involved in making causal judgements, at least in a central range of cases that are critical to a subject’s understanding of what it is for one thing to cause another. We argue that one fruitful way of…Read more
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91The applicability of bayesian convergence-of-opinion theorems to the case of actual scientific inferenceBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 27 (2): 160-161. 1976.
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91Estimating Conditional Chances and Evaluating CounterfactualsStudia Logica 102 (4): 691-707. 2014.The paper addresses a puzzle about the probabilistic evaluation of counterfactuals, raised by Ernest Adams as a problem for his own theory. I discuss Brian Skyrms’s response to the puzzle. I compare this puzzle with other puzzles about counterfactuals that have arisen more recently. And I attempt to solve the puzzle in a way that is consistent with Adams’s proposal about counterfactuals
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85Frank RamseyStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2019.Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1903–30) made seminal contributions to philosophy, mathematics and economics. Whilst he was acknowledged as a genius by his contemporaries, some of his most important ideas were not appreciated until decades later; now better appreciated, they continue to bear an influence upon contemporary philosophy. His historic significance was to usher in a new phase of analytic philosophy, which initially built upon the logical atomist doctrines of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgen…Read more
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67Suppose and Tell: The Semantics and Heuristics of Conditionals: Timothy Williamson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. viii + 278 pp. £30.00. ISBN 978-0-19-886066-2History and Philosophy of Logic 43 (2): 188-195. 2021.Conditional judgements—judgements employing ‘if’—are essential to practical reasoning about what to do, as well as to much reasoning about what is the case. We handle them well enough from an early...
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61Verificationism and the Manifestations of MeaningAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 59 (1). 1985.
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59The philosophical problem of vaguenessLegal Theory 7 (4): 371-378. 2001.Think of the color spectrum, spread out before you. You can identify the different colors with ease. But if you are asked to indicate the point at which one color ends and the next begins, you are at a loss. "There is no such point", is a natural thought: one color just shades gradually into the next
London, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Probability |