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Perception and demonstrativesIn Mohan Matthen (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception, Oxford University Press Uk. 2015.
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59A Lemma from NowhereCritica 52 (154): 11-47. 2020.This paper uses cases involving empty singular terms (on the one hand, cases of what I call “accidental aboutness-failure”; on the other, cases involving proper names occurring in fictions) to argue for a claim about the goal of ordinary belief-forming activity, and shows how this claim generates new foundations for the theory of reference.
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106Understanding Singular TermsAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 94 (1): 19-55. 2020.This paper uses a puzzle arising from cases of felicitous underspecification in uses of demonstratives to motivate a new model of communication using singular terms.
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181The Sortal Dependence of Demonstrative ReferenceEuropean Journal of Philosophy 22 (1): 34-60. 2011.: ‘Sortalism about demonstrative reference’ is the view that the capacity to refer to things demonstratively rests on the capacity to classify them according to their kinds. This paper argues for one form of sortalism. Section 1 distinguishes two sortalist views. Section 2 argues that one of them is false. Section 3 argues that the other is true. Section 4 uses the argument from Section 3 to develop a new response to the objection to sortalism from examples where we seem to succeed in referring …Read more
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294How Proper Names ReferProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 111 (1pt1): 43-78. 2011.This paper develops a new account of reference-fixing for proper names. The account is built around an intuitive claim about reference fixing: the claim that I am a participant in a practice of using α to refer to o only if my uses of α are constrained by the representationally relevant ways it is possible for o to behave. §I raises examples that suggest that a right account of how proper names refer should incorporate this claim. §II provides such an account.
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95Visual Attention Fixes Demonstrative Reference By Eliminating Referential LuckIn Christopher Mole, Declan Smithies & Wayne Wu (eds.), Attention: Philosophical and Psychological Essays, Oxford University Press. 2011.
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203Informative identities in the begriffsschrift and 'on sense and reference'Canadian Journal of Philosophy 38 (2). 2008.
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96The Essential Connection Between Epistemology and the Theory of ReferencePhilosophical Issues 26 (1): 99-129. 2016.
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61Everybody needs to know?Philosophical Studies 174 (10): 2571-2583. 2017.I propose an amendment to Sosa’s virtue reliabilism. Sosa’s framework assigns a central role to sophisticated, conceptual, motivational states: ‘intentions to affirm aptly’. I argue that the suggestion that ordinary knowers in fact are motivated by such intentions in everyday belief-forming situations is at best problematic, and explore the possibility of an alternative virtue reliabilist framework. In this alternative framework, the role Sosa assigns to ‘intentions to affirm aptly’ is played in…Read more
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8We are acquainted with Ordinary ThingsIn Robin Jeshion (ed.), New Essays on Singular Thought, Oxford University Press. pp. 213-245. 2010.
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221Negation, anti-realism, and the denial defencePhilosophical Studies 150 (2). 2010.Here is one argument against realism. (1) Realists are committed to the classical rules for negation. But (2) legitimate rules of inference must conserve evidence. And (3) the classical rules for negation do not conserve evidence. So (4) realism is wrong. Most realists reject 2. But it has recently been argued that if we allow denied sentences as premisses and conclusions in inferences we will be able to reject 3. And this new argument against 3 generates a new response to the antirealist argume…Read more
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170The generality of particular thoughtPhilosophical Quarterly 60 (240): 508-531. 2010.This paper is about the claim that, necessarily, a subject who can think that a is F must also have the capacities to think that a is G, a is H, a is I, and so on (for some reasonable range of G, H, I), and that b is F, c is F, d is F, and so on (for some reasonable range of b, c, d). I set out, and raise objections to, two arguments for a strong version of this claim (Gareth Evans' generality constraint). I present a new argument for a weaker version of the claim, and sketch some directions of …Read more
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45Fixing ReferenceOxford University Press. 2015.Imogen Dickie develops an account of aboutness-fixing for thoughts about ordinary objects, and of reference-fixing for the singular terms we use to express them. Extant discussions of this topic tread a weary path through descriptivist proposals, causalist alternatives, and attempts to combine the most attractive elements of each. The account developed here is a new beginning. It starts with two basic principles, the first of which connects aboutness and truth, and the second of which connects t…Read more