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15Why beliefs are not dispositional stereotypesTheoria 89 (4): 483-494. 2023.In a series of papers, Schwitzgebel has attempted to revive the dispositionalist account of belief by tweaking it a little and claiming a previously unconsidered advantage over representationalism. The tweaks are to include phenomenal and cognitive responses, in addition to overt behaviour, in the manifestations of a given belief; and to soften the account of dispositions by allowing for dispositional stereotypes. The alleged advantage is that dispositionalism can deal with what Schwitzgebel cal…Read more
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270Enhanced action control as a prior function of episodic memoryBehavioral and Brain Sciences 41. 2018.Improved control of agency is likely to be a prior and more important function of episodic memory than the epistemic-communicative role pinpointed by Mahr and Csibra. Taking the memory trace upon which scenario construction is based to be a stored internal model produced in past perceptual processing promises to provide a better account of autonoetic character than metarepresentational embedding.
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17Review of Sergio Moravia and Scott Staton: The Enigma of the Mind: The Mind-Body Problem in Contemporary Thought (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 (2): 328-330. 1996.
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124Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will * By ALFRED R. MELE (review)Analysis 70 (2): 395-398. 2010.(No abstract is available for this citation)
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33Sergio Moravia, The Enigma of the Mind: The Mind–Body Problem in Contemporary Thought. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, cloth £35.00, paper £12.95 (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 (2): 328-330. 1996.
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23Particles and Ideas: Bishop Berkeley's Corpuscularian Philosophy (review)Philosophical Books 31 (2): 75-77. 1990.
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20Folk psychology and theoretical statusIn Peter Carruthers & Peter K. Smith (eds.), Theories of Theories of Mind, Cambridge University Press. pp. 105--118. 1996.
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226Contrast, inference and scientific realismSynthese 160 (2): 249-267. 2008.The thesis of underdetermination presents a major obstacle to the epistemological claims of scientific realism. That thesis is regularly assumed in the philosophy of science, but is puzzlingly at odds with the actual history of science, in which empirically adequate theories are thin on the ground. We propose to advance a case for scientific realism which concentrates on the process of scientific reasoning rather than its theoretical products. Developing an account of causal–explanatory inferenc…Read more
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78The internal problem of dreaming: Detection and epistemic riskInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 16 (2). 2008.There are two epistemological problems connected with dreaming, which are of different kinds and require different treatment. The internal problem is best seen as a problem of rational consistency, of how we can maintain all of: Dreams are experiences we have during sleep. Dream-experiences are sufficiently similar to waking experiences for the subject to be able to mistake them for waking experiences. We can tell that we are awake. (1)-(3) threaten to violate a requirement on discrimination: th…Read more
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260Hume on Liberty and NecessityIn Peter Millican (ed.), Reading Hume on Human Understanding: Essays on the First Enquiry, Oxford University Press. 2001.
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42The Secret Connexion: Causation, Realism, and David Hume (review)Philosophical Books 31 (4): 203-205. 1992.
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16Scientism. Philosophy and the Infatuation with SciencePhilosophical Books 34 (4): 232-234. 1993.
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206God and first person in BerkeleyPhilosophy 82 (1): 87-114. 2007.Berkeley claims idealism provides a novel argument for the existence of God. But familiar interpretations of his argument fail to support the conclusion that there is a single omnipotent spirit. A satisfying reconstruction should explain the way Berkeley moves between first person singular and plural, as well as providing a powerful argument, once idealism is accepted. The new interpretation offered here represents the argument as an inference to the best explanation of a shared reality. Consequ…Read more
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118Beliefs, functionally discrete states, and connectionist networksBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45 (3): 899-906. 1994.
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189Two Kinds of Causal ExplanationTheoria 76 (4): 287-313. 2010.To give a causal explanation is to give information about causal history. But a vast amount of causal history lies behind anything that happens, far too much to be included in any intelligible explanation. This is the Problem of Limitation for explanatory information. To cope with this problem, explanations must select for what is relevant to and adequate for answering particular inquiries. In the present paper this idea is used in order to distinguish two kinds of causal explanation, on the gro…Read more
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31Review of Hanne Andersen, Peter Barker, Xiang Chen, The Cognitive Structure of Scientific Revolutions (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (3). 2007.
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62Falsification and the existence of God: A discussion of Plantinga's free will defencePhilosophical Quarterly 27 (107): 114-134. 1977.
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51Right and Wrong Reasons in Folk‐Psychological ExplanationInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 17 (4). 2009.Davidson argued that the fact we can have a reason for acting, and yet not be the reason why we act, requires explanation of action in terms of the agent's reasons to be causal. The present paper agrees with Dickenson (_Pacific Philosophical Quarterly_, 2007) in taking this argument to be an inference to the best explanation. However, its target phenomenon is the very existence of a case in which an agent has more than one reason, but acts exclusively becaue of one reason. Folk psychology appear…Read more
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172Contrastive explanation and the many absences problemSynthese 190 (16): 3495-3510. 2013.We often explain by citing an absence or an omission. Apart from the problem of assigning a causal role to such apparently negative factors as absences and omissions, there is a puzzle as to why only some absences and omissions, out of indefinitely many, should figure in explanations. In this paper we solve this ’many absences problem’ by using the contrastive model of explanation. The contrastive model of explanation is developed by adapting Peter Lipton’s account. What initially appears to be …Read more
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