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The Unity of UnconsciousnessProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 117 (1): 1-21. 2017.What is the relationship between unconscious and conscious intentionality? Contemporary philosophy of mind treats the contents of conscious 10 intentional mental states as the same kind of thing as the contents of un- conscious mental states. According to the standard view that beliefs and desires are propositional attitudes, for example, the contents of these states are propositions, whether or not the states are conscious or unconscious. I dispute this way of thinking of conscious and unconsci…Read more
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The Knowledge Argument is an Argument about KnowledgeIn Sam Coleman (ed.), The Knowledge Argument, Cambridge University Press. 2019.The knowledge argument is something that is both an ideal for philosophy and yet surprisingly rare: a simple, valid argument for an interesting and important conclusion, with plausible premises. From a compelling thought-experiment and a few apparently innocuous assumptions, the argument seems to give us the conclusion, a priori, that physicalism is false. Given the apparent power of this apparently simple argument, it is not surprising that philosophers have worried over the argument and its pr…Read more
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In this paper, it is argued that the late twentieth century conception of consciousness in analytic philosophy emerged from the idea of consciousness as givenness, via the behaviourist idea of “raw feels”. In the post-behaviourist period in philosophy, this resulted in the division of states of mind into essentially unconscious propositional attitudes plus the phenomenal residue of qualia: intrinsic, ineffable and inefficacious sensory states. It is striking how little in the important questions…Read more
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The Objects of ThoughtOxford University Press. 2013.
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David Lewis in the lab: experimental results on the emergence of meaningSynthese 195 (2): 603-621. 2018.In this paper we use an experimental approach to investigate how linguistic conventions can emerge in a society without explicit agreement. As a starting point we consider the signaling game introduced by Lewis. We find that in experimental settings, small groups can quickly develop conventions of signal meaning in these games. We also investigate versions of the game where the theoretical literature indicates that meaning will be less likely to arise—when there are more than two states for acto…Read more
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Introduction: systematicity, the nature of science?Synthese 196 (3): 1-13. 2019.
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No evidence amalgamation without evidence measurementSynthese 196 (8): 3139-3161. 2019.In this paper we consider the problem of how to measure the strength of statistical evidence from the perspective of evidence amalgamation operations. We begin with a fundamental measurement amalgamation principle : for any measurement, the inputs and outputs of an amalgamation procedure must be on the same scale, and this scale must have a meaningful interpretation vis a vis the object of measurement. Using the p value as a candidate evidence measure, we examine various commonly used approaches…Read more
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Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific ProgressOUP Usa. 2004.This book presents the concept of “complementary science” which contributes to scientific knowledge through historical and philosophical investigations. It emphasizes the fact that many simple items of knowledge that we take for granted were actually spectacular achievements obtained only after a great deal of innovative thinking, painstaking experiments, bold conjectures, and serious controversies. Each chapter in the book consists of two parts: a narrative part that states the philosophical pu…Read more
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Justifying the Principle of IndifferenceEuropean Journal for the Philosophy of Science. forthcoming.This paper presents a new argument for the Principle of Indifference. This argument can be thought of in two ways: as a pragmatic argument, justifying the principle as needing to hold if one is to minimise worst-case expected loss, or as an epistemic argument, justifying the principle as needing to hold in order to minimise worst-case expected inaccuracy. The question arises as to which interpretation is preferable. I show that the epistemic argument contradicts Evidentialism and suggest that th…Read more
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Toward an Epistemology of Moral PrinciplesRes Philosophica 97 (1): 69-92. 2020.The epistemology of moral principles should be developed in relation to general epistemology and integrated with a plausible moral ontology. On both counts, it is important to consider the nature of moral properties and, more generally, normative properties. This paper distinguishes two kinds of normative properties, indicates how they are related to one another and to moral properties, contrasts their supervenience on natural properties with their grounding in those properties, and, in the ligh…Read more
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Mechanistic Causation: Difference-Making is EnoughTeorema: International Journal of Philosophy 3 (38): 53-75. 2019.In this paper we defend the view that mechanisms are underpinned by networks of difference-making relations. First, we distinguish and criticise two different kinds of arguments in favour of an activity-based understanding of mechanism: Glennan’s metaphysics- first approach and Illari and Williamson’s science-first approach. Second, we present an alternative difference-making view of mechanism and illustrate it by looking at the history of the case of scurvy prevention. We use the case of scurvy…Read more
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Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?In John Heil (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: A Guide and Anthology, Oxford University Press. 2003.
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W.V. Quine on Analyticity: “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” in ContextDialogue 51 (2): 231-246. 2012.RÉSUMÉ : Le but de W.V. Quine, dans «Deux dogmes de l’empirisme», n’est pas de prouver contre tous que la distinction analytique/synthétique est intenable ni de fournir une conception originale de la connaissance. Il veut plutôt ébranler l’attrait de l’empiriste pour la distinction et montrer ce en quoi réside un empirisme exempt de dogme. En me concentrant sur §§1-3 et §6, je soutiens que son traitement de l’analyticité est structuré par des hypothèses philosophiques fondamentales et que la con…Read more
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Why “is at”? —On Quine’s Objection to Carnap’s Aufbau in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 6 (4). 2018.In “Two Dogmas”, Quine indicates that Carnap’s Aufbau fails “in principle” to reduce our knowledge of the external world to sense data. This is because in projecting the sensory material to reconstruct the physical world, Carnap gives up the use of operating rules and switches to a procedure informed by general principles. This procedure falls short of providing an eliminative translation for the connective “is at”, which is necessary for the reduction. In dissecting Quine’s objection, I argue t…Read more
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I distinguish between two conceptually different kinds of physical space: a space of ordinary material bodies, which is the space of points at which I could imaginably place the tip of my finger, or the center of a billiard-ball, and a space of elementary physical determinables, which is the smallest space of points such that stipulating what is happening at each one of those points, at every time, amounts to an exhaustive physical history of the universe. In all classical physical theories, the…Read more
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Two Dogmas of EmpiricismPhilosophical Review 60 (1). 1951.Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truth which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill founded. One effect of abandoning them is, …Read more
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The Neural Crossroads of Psychiatric Illness: An Emerging Target for Brain StimulationTrends in Cognitive Sciences 20 (2): 107-120. 2016.
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Are University Students Who Are Taking Philosophy Courses Familiar with the Basic Tools for Argument?Teaching Philosophy 42 (3): 197-220. 2019.Philosophy courses help students develop logical reasoning and argument skills or so it is widely assumed. To test if this is actually the case, we examined university students’ familiarity with the basic tools for argument. Our findings, based on a sample of 651 students enrolled in philosophy courses at six Greek universities, indicate that students who have prior experience with philosophy are more familiar with the basic tools for argument, and that students who have taken philosophy courses…Read more
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The Problem of Mental ActionPhilosophy and Predicitive Processing. 2017.In mental action there is no motor output to be controlled and no sensory input vector that could be manipulated by bodily movement. It is therefore unclear whether this specific target phenomenon can be accommodated under the predictive processing framework at all, or if the concept of “active inference” can be adapted to this highly relevant explanatory domain. This contribution puts the phenomenon of mental action into explicit focus by introducing a set of novel conceptual instruments and de…Read more
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Spirituality and Intellectual HonestySelf-Published. 2013.
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“Take away the life‐lie … “: Positive illusions and creative self‐deceptionPhilosophical Psychology 9 (4). 1996.In a well-known paper “Illusion and well-being”, Taylor and Brown maintain that positive illusions about the self play a significant role in the maintenance of mental health, as well as in the ability to maintain caring inter-personal relations and a sense of well-being. These illusions include unrealistically positive self-evaluations, exaggerated perceptions of personal control, and unrealistic optimism about one's future. Accurate self-knowledge, they maintain, is not an indispensable ingredi…Read more
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The material theory of object-induction and the universal optimality of meta-induction: Two complementary accountsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 82 88-93. 2020.
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Philosophy of Biology: A Very Short IntroductionOxford University Press. 2019.
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Logical Theory ChoiceAustralasian Journal of Logic 16 (7): 283-297. 2019.There is at present a certain dispute about counterfactuals taking place. What is at issue is whether counterfactuals with necessarily false antecedents are all true. Some hold that such counterfactuals are vacuously true, appearances notwithstanding. Let us call such people vacuists. Others hold that some counterfactuals with necessarily false antecedents are true; some are false: it just depends on their contents. Let us call such people non-vacuists. As a notable representative of the vacuist…Read more
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‘The Coolest Subject on the Planet’ How Philosophy Made its Way in Ontario’s High SchoolsAnalytic Teaching and Philosophical Praxis 21 (1): 131-139. 2001.
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The Conceptual Self in Context: Culture Experience Self Understanding (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 1994.
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Self-Knowledge and the SelfRoutledge. 2000.In this clear and reasoned discussion of self- knowledge and the self, the author asks whether it is really possible to know ourselves as we really are. He illuminates issues about the nature of self-identity which are of fundamental importance in moral psychology, epistemology and literary criticism. Jopling focuses on the accounts of Stuart Hampshire, Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Rorty, and dialogical philosophical psychology and illustrates his argument with examples from literature, drama an…Read more
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Talking Cures and Placebo EffectsOxford University Press. 2008.
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The Challenge of Scientific Revolutions: Van Fraassen's and Friedman's ResponsesInternational Studies in the Philosophy of Science 25 (4): 327-349. 2011.This article criticizes the attempts by Bas van Fraassen and Michael Friedman to address the challenge to rationality posed by the Kuhnian analysis of scientific revolutions. In the paper, I argue that van Fraassen's solution, which invokes a Sartrean theory of emotions to account for radical change, does not amount to justifying rationally the advancement of science but, rather, despite his protestations to the contrary, is an explanation of how change is effected. Friedman's approach, which ap…Read more
Athens, Greece
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
History of Western Philosophy |