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A case for causal realism?In Huw Price & Richard Corry (eds.), Causation, Physics and the Constitution of Reality: Russell’s Republic Revisited, Oxford University Press. 2007.
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126Is semantics in the plan?In David Braddon-Mitchell & Robert Nola (eds.), Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism, Bradford. pp. 159--82. 2008.The so-called Canberra Plan is a grandchild of the Ramsey-Carnap treatment of theoretical terms. In its original form, the Ramsey-Carnap approach provided a method for analysing the meaning of scientific terms, such as “electron”, “gene” and “quark”—terms whose meanings could plausibly be delineated by their roles within scientific theories. But in the hands of David Lewis (1970, 1972), the original approach begat a more ambitious descendant, generalised and extended in two distinct ways: first,…Read more
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1The GivenIn Sven Bernecker & Fred I. Dretske (eds.), Knowledge: readings in contemporary epistemology, Oxford University Press. 2000.
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25Psychology in perspectiveIn Murray Michael & John O'Leary-Hawthorne (eds.), Philosophy in Mind: The Place of Philosophy in the Study of Mind, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1994.[email: [email protected]] If recent literature is to be our guide, the main place of philosophy in the study of the mind would seem to be to determine the place of psychology in the study of the world. One distinctive kind of answer to this question begins by noting the central role of intentionality in psychology, and goes on to argue that this sets psychology apart from the natural sciences. Sometimes to be thus set apart is to be exiled, or rejected, but more often it is a protective move, …Read more
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124Pragmatism, quasi-realism, and the global challengeIn Cheryl Misak (ed.), New pragmatists, Oxford University Press. pp. 91. 2007.William James said that sometimes detailed philosophical argument is irrelevant. Once a current of thought is really under way, trying to oppose it with argument is like planting a stick in a river to try to alter its course: “round your obstacle flows the water and ‘gets there just the same’”. He thought pragmatism was such a river. There is a contemporary river that sometimes calls itself pragmatism, although other titles are probably better. At any rate it is the denial of differences, the ce…Read more
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310This is a draft of a new extended edition of Facts and the Function of Truth (Blackwell, 1988), forthcoming from Oxford University Press. If you wish to cite it before the final version appears, please refer to it as ‘Facts and the Function of Truth, Extended Edition (draft)’, including the URL at PhilPapers, and date of access.
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91Does artificial intelligence (AI) pose existential risks to humanity? Some critics feel this question is getting too much attention, and want to push it aside in favour of conversations about the immediate risks of AI. These critics now include the journal Nature, where a recent editorial urges us to 'stop talking about tomorrow's AI doomsday when AI poses risks today.' We argue that this is a serious failure of judgement, on Nature's part. In science, as in everyday life, we expect influential …Read more
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300Review of Zalabardo, Pragmatist Semantics (OUP, 2023) (review)Mind. forthcoming.This is a review of Zalabardo's Pragmatist Semantics (OUP, 2023), forthcoming in Mind.
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196This piece was written as my Presidential Address at the Annual Conference of the Australasian Association of Philosophy, held at Melbourne University in July 1999. I discuss the view ‘that we can’t describe or theorise about the world from outside language.’ I call this idea ‘linguistic imprisonment’, and take it to be a platitude, although one that is interpreted very differently by different philosophers. In so far as language does depend on contingencies of our own ‘location’, how should we …Read more
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630Arntzenius on ‘Why ain’cha rich?’Erkenntnis 77 (1): 15-30. 2012.The best-known argument for Evidential Decision Theory (EDT) is the ‘Why ain’cha rich?’ challenge to rival Causal Decision Theory (CDT). The basis for this challenge is that in Newcomb-like situations, acts that conform to EDT may be known in advance to have the better return than acts that conform to CDT. Frank Arntzenius has recently proposed an ingenious counter argument, based on an example in which, he claims, it is predictable in advance that acts that conform to EDT will do less well than…Read more
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Pragmatism, quasi-realism, and the global challengeIn Cheryl Misak (ed.), New pragmatists, Oxford University Press. 2007.
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393The Practical ArrowAustralasian Philosophical Review. forthcoming.Ismael traces our sense that the past is fixed and the future open to what she calls ‘the practical arrow’ – ‘the sense that we can affect the future but not the past.’ In this piece I draw a sharper distinction than Ismael herself does between agents and mere observers, even self-referential observers; and I use it to argue that Ismael’s explanation of the practical arrow is incomplete. To explain our inability to affect the past we need to appeal to our own temporal orientation as agents, and …Read more
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269From Non-cognitivism to Global Expressivism: Carnap’s Unfinished Journey?In Christian Dambock & Georg Schiemer (eds.), Rudolf Carnap Handbuch, Metzler Verlag. forthcoming.Carnap was one of the first to use the term 'non-cognitivism'. His linguistic pluralism and voluntarism, and his deflationary views of ontology and semantics, are highly congenial to those of us who want to take non-cognitivism in the direction of global expressivism. In his own case, however, this move is in tension with his continued endorsement of what he calls 'the general thesis of logical empiricism', that 'there is no third kind of knowledge besides empirical and logical knowledge.’ So wh…Read more
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378Gibbard on Quasi-realism and Global ExpressivismTopoi 42 (3): 683-697. 2023.In recent work Allan Gibbard claims to be both a local quasi-realist, in Blackburn’s sense, and a global expressivist. His local quasi-realism rests on an argument that for naturalistic discourse but not ethical discourse, the semantic relation of denotation and the causal relation of tracking can and should be identified; that denoting simply is tracking, for naturalistic vocabulary. I argue that Gibbard’s case for this conclusion is unconvincing, and poorly motivated by his own expressivist st…Read more
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Epilogue: Ramsey's ubiquitous pragmatismIn Cheryl Misak & Huw Price (eds.), The Practical Turn: Pragmatism in Britain in the Long Twentieth Century, Oup/ba. 2016.
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176Time for PragmatismIn Josh Gert (ed.), Neopragmatism. forthcoming.Are the distinctions between past, present and future, and the apparent ‘passage’ of time, features of the world in itself, or manifestations of the human perspective? Questions of this kind have been at the heart of metaphysics of time since antiquity. The latter view has much in common with pragmatism, though few in these debates are aware of that connection, and few of the view’s proponents think of themselves as pragmatists. For their part, pragmatists are often unaware of this congenial app…Read more
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59Family Feuds? Relativism, Expressivism, and Disagreements about DisagreementPhilosophical Topics 50 (1): 293-344. 2022.In Expressing Our Attitudes, Mark Schroeder speculates about the relation between expressivism and relativism. Noting that “John MacFarlane has wondered whether relativism is expressivism done right,” he suggests that this may get things back to front: “it is worth taking seriously the idea that expressivism is relativism done right”. In this piece, motivated both by Schroeder’s suggestion and by recent work from Lionel Shapiro, I compare and contrast my version of expressivism with MacFarlane’s…Read more
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53Review. The fabric of reality. D DeutschBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 50 (2): 309-312. 1999.
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11Naturalism and the Fate of the M-WorldsAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 71 247-282. 1997.
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106Expressivism, Pragmatism and RepresentationalismCambridge University Press. 2013.Pragmatists have traditionally been enemies of representationalism but friends of naturalism, when naturalism is understood to pertain to human subjects, in the sense of Hume and Nietzsche. In this volume Huw Price presents his distinctive version of this traditional combination, as delivered in his René Descartes Lectures at Tilburg University in 2008. Price contrasts his view with other contemporary forms of philosophical naturalism, comparing it with other pragmatist and neo-pragmatist views …Read more
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62Discussion. Backward causation and the direction of causal processes: reply to DoweMind 105 (419): 467-474. 1996.Dowe (1996) argues that the success of the backward causation hypothesis in quantum mechanics would provide strong support for a version of Reichenbach's account of the direction of causal processes, which takes the direction of causation to rest on the fork asymmetry. He also criticises my perspectival account of the direction of causation, which takes causal asymmetry to be a projection of our own temporal asymmetry as agents. In this reply I take issue with Dowe's argument at three main point…Read more
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109Introduction (to the special issue on ontological commitment)Philosophical Studies 141 (1): 1-5. 2008.No abstract
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155Ramsey on saying and whistling: A discordant noteNoûs 37 (2). 2003.In 'General Propositions and Causality' Ramsey rejects his earlier view that universal generalizations are infinite conjunctions, arguing that they are not genuine propositions at all. We argue that his new position is unstable. The issues about infinity that lead Ramsey to the new view are essentially those underlying Wittgenstein's rule-following considerations. If they show that generalizations are not genuine propositions, they show that there are no genuine propositions. The connection rais…Read more
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21PrefaceStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 39 (4): 705-708. 2008.
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661Global expressivism and alethic pluralismSynthese 200 (5): 1-55. 2022.This paper discusses the relation between Crispin Wright’s alethic pluralism and my global expressivism. I argue that on many topics Wright’s own view counts as expressivism in my sense, but that truth itself is a striking exception. Unlike me, Wright never seems to countenance an expressivist account of truth, though the materials needed are available to him in his approaches to other topics.
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275The Problem of the Single CaseDissertation, Cambridge University. 1981.This is my Cambridge PhD thesis, written under the supervision of Hugh Mellor and Richard Healey, and examined by Mary Hesse and Simon Blackburn. It addresses what it takes to be the core of the problem of single case probability, namely, the interpretation of claims such as ‘It is probable that P’ (where the probabilistic component occurs as a sentential or propositional operator). I argue that claims of this form are not genuinely truth-apt, and that such operators modify the force, rather tha…Read more
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360This is an unpublished piece from July 1998. It discusses the use of semantic notions such as reference in the Canberra Plan, the question whether this use creates a problematic circularity if the Canberra Plan is applied to the semantic notions themselves, and the relation of this question to Putnam’s model-theoretic argument. I used some of the ideas in later papers such as (Price 2004, 2009) and (Menzies & Price, 2009), but the bulk of discussion of the relation of my concern to Putnam’s argu…Read more
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54Accidents and Contingencies (review)Society 2022. 2022.This is a review of Cheryl Misak's book, Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers (OUP, 2020).
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19Risk and Scientific Reputation: Lessons from Cold FusionIn Managing Extreme Technological Risk, World Scientific. forthcoming.Many scientists have expressed concerns about potential catastrophic risks associated with new technologies. But expressing concern is one thing, identifying serious candidates another. Such risks are likely to be novel, rare, and difficult to study; data will be scarce, making speculation necessary. Scientists who raise such concerns may face disapproval not only as doomsayers, but also for their unconventional views. Yet the costs of false negatives in these cases -- of wrongly dismissing warn…Read more
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45Entanglement Swapping and Action at a DistanceFoundations of Physics 51 (6): 1-24. 2021.A 2015 experiment by Hanson and Delft colleagues provided further confirmation that the quantum world violates the Bell inequalities, being the first Bell test to close two known experimental loopholes simultaneously. The experiment was also taken to provide new evidence of ‘spooky action at a distance’. Here we argue for caution about the latter claim. The Delft experiment relies on entanglement swapping, and our main claim is that this geometry introduces an additional loophole in the argument…Read more