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10. Joseph Raz, The Practice of Value Joseph Raz, The Practice of Value (pp. 805-809)Ethics 116 (4). 2006.
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Repeatable artwork sentences and genericsIn Christy Mag Uidhir (ed.), Art & Abstract Objects, Oxford University Press. 2013.
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Moral SkepticismIn Tristram Colin McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, Routledge. pp. 484-498. 2017.
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5Should Kantians Be Consequentialists?In Jussi Suikkanen & John Cottingham (eds.), Essays on Derek Parfit's On what matters, Wiley-blackwell. 2009.
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251Sleeping Beauty, Countable Additivity, and Rational DilemmasPhilosophical Review 119 (4): 411-447. 2010.Currently, the most popular views about how to update de se or self-locating beliefs entail the one-third solution to the Sleeping Beauty problem.2 Another widely held view is that an agent‘s credences should be countably additive.3 In what follows, I will argue that there is a deep tension between these two positions. For the assumptions that underlie the one-third solution to the Sleeping Beauty problem entail a more general principle, which I call the Generalized Thirder Principle, and there …Read more
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11Knowledge, Safety, and Meta‐Epistemic BeliefPacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (3): 550-554. 2018.This article raises problems both for the view that safe belief is necessary for knowledge and for the view that it is sufficient. Focusing on ‘meta‐epistemic beliefs,’ or beliefs about the epistemic status of one's own beliefs, it is shown that the necessity claim has counterintuitive implications and that the sufficiency claim implies a contradiction. It is then shown that meta‐epistemic beliefs raise similar problems for a wide range of accounts of knowledge, and hence that they provide a pow…Read more
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99All roads lead to violations of countable additivityPhilosophical Studies 161 (3): 381-390. 2012.This paper defends the claim that there is a deep tension between the principle of countable additivity and the one-third solution to the Sleeping Beauty problem. The claim that such a tension exists has recently been challenged by Brian Weatherson, who has attempted to provide a countable additivity-friendly argument for the one-third solution. This attempt is shown to be unsuccessful. And it is argued that the failure of this attempt sheds light on the status of the principle of indifference t…Read more
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211Against postulating central systems in the mindPhilosophy of Science 57 (2): 297-312. 1990.This paper is concerned with a recent argument of Jerry Fodor's to the effect that the frame problem in artificial intelligence is in principle insoluble. Fodor's argument is based on his contention that the mind is divided between encapsulated modular systems for information processing and 'central systems' for non-demonstrative inference. I argue that positing central systems is methodologically unsound, and in fact involves a muddle that bears a strong family resemblance to the basic error in…Read more
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98Repeatable Artwork Sentences and GenericsIn Christy Mag Uidhir (ed.), Art and Abstract Objects, Oxford University Press. pp. 125. 2013.We seem to talk about repeatable artworks, like symphonies, films, and novels, all the time. We say things like, "The Moonlight Sonata has three movements" and "Duck Soup makes me laugh". How are these sentences to be understood? We argue against the simple subject/predicate view, on which the subjects of the sentences refer to individuals and the sentences are true iff the referents of the subjects have the properties picked out by the predicates. We then consider two alternative responses that…Read more
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2145Belief, Credence, and Pragmatic EncroachmentPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 88 (2): 259-288. 2014.This paper compares two alternative explanations of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge (i.e., the claim that whether an agent knows that p can depend on pragmatic factors). After reviewing the evidence for such pragmatic encroachment, we ask how it is best explained, assuming it obtains. Several authors have recently argued that the best explanation is provided by a particular account of belief, which we call pragmatic credal reductivism. On this view, what it is for an agent to believe a propo…Read more
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1401Reversibility or DisagreementMind 122 (485): 43-84. 2013.The phenomenon of disagreement has recently been brought into focus by the debate between contextualists and relativist invariantists about epistemic expressions such as ‘might’, ‘probably’, indicative conditionals, and the deontic ‘ought’. Against the orthodox contextualist view, it has been argued that an invariantist account can better explain apparent disagreements across contexts by appeal to the incompatibility of the propositions expressed in those contexts. This paper introduces an impor…Read more
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