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31II. An unfavorable review oflanguage, sense and nonsense∗Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 28 (1-4): 467-482. 1985.
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53Titles and abstracts for the Pitt-London Workshop in the Philosophy of Biology and Neuroscience: September 2001.
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Saul A. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (review)Philosophy in Review 3 284-286. 1983.
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Saul A. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 3 (6): 284-286. 1983.
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27Knowledge and the State of Nature. An Essay in Conceptual SynthesisPhilosophical Books 33 (3): 156-159. 1992.
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6First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
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27Fire in the Belly: Aristotelian Elements, Organisms, and Chemical CompoundsPacific Philosophical Quarterly 76 (3-4): 370-404. 2017.
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23Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Language: Some Aspects of Its DevelopmentPhilosophical Review 84 (1): 117. 1975.
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43Was wittgenstein a psychologist? (I)Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 7 (1-4): 374-378. 1964.Certain remarks in the Tractatus, taken together with a passage in a letter Wittgenstein wrote to Russell, suggest that at one time Wittgenstein inclined toward a psychologistic theory of language. But textual considerations with regard to the former and a special interpretation of the latter allow us to interpret these statements in a way that is consistent with Wittgenstein's later views
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73Symposium papers, comments and an abstract: Comments on "the sociology of knowledge about child abuse"Noûs 22 (1): 65-66. 1988.
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27Agony in the SchoolsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 11 (1): 1-21. 1981.Functionalist identity theorists argue that if physical states of the central nervous system have the same function as pain, pains should be identified with those physical states. Many objections have been raised against this position. My aim in this paper is to defend it against opponents who argue that it leads to an absurd result: the ascription of pains to things which cannot reasonably be thought to be capable of suffering, or of having any conscious states. In doing this, I will outline a …Read more
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60Freedom and happiness in mill's defence of libertyPhilosophical Quarterly 28 (113): 325-338. 1978.
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27Aristotle’s Great ClockPhilosophy Research Archives 12 387-448. 1986.This paper offers a detailed account of arguments in De Caelo I by which Aristotle tried to demonstrate the necessity of the perpetual existence and the perpetual rotation of the cosmos. On our interpretation, Aristotle’s arguments are naturalistic. Instead of being based (as many have thought) on rules of logic and language, they depend, we argue, on natural science theories about abilities (δυνάμεις), e.g., to move and to change, which things have by nature and about the conditions under which…Read more
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27Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy. Vol. I, 1985 (review)Ancient Philosophy 7 (n/a): 256-258. 1987.
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121Regularities and causality; generalizations and causal explanationsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 36 (2): 397-420. 2005.Machamer, Darden, and Craver argue that causal explanations explain effects by describing the operations of the mechanisms which produce them. One of this paper’s aims is to take advantage of neglected resources of Mechanism to rethink the traditional idea that actual or counterfactual natural regularities are essential to the distinction between causal and non-causal co-occurrences, and that generalizations describing natural regularities are essential components of causal explanations. I think…Read more
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44Causally productive activitiesStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 39 (1): 112-123. 2008.This paper suggests and discusses an answer to the following question: What distinguishes causal from non-causal or coincidental co-occurrences? The answer derives from Elizabeth Anscombe’s idea that causality is a highly abstract concept whose meaning derives from our understanding of specific causally productive activities, and from her rejection of the assumption that causality can be informatively understood in terms of actual or counterfactual regularities.Keywords: Elizabeth Anscombe; Caus…Read more
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80Familiar versions of empiricism overemphasize and misconstrue the importance of perceptual experience. I discuss their main shortcomings and sketch an alternative framework for thinking about how human sensory systems contribute to scientific knowledge.
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45Aristides Baltas. Peeling Potatoes or Grinding Lenses: Spinoza and Young Wittgenstein Converse on Immanence and Its Logic. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012. Pp. vii+290. $65.00 (review)Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 3 (2): 352-356. 2013.
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83Mechanistic Information and Causal ContinuityIn Phyllis McKay Illari Federica Russo (ed.), Causality in the Sciences, Oxford University Press. 2011.Some biological processes move from step to step in a way that cannot be completely understood solely in terms of causes and correlations. This paper develops a notion of mechanistic information that can be used to explain the continuities of such processes. We compare them to processes that do not involve information. We compare our conception of mechanistic information to some familiar notions including Crick’s idea of genetic information, Shannon-Weaver information, and Millikan’s biosemantic…Read more
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65Noise in the WorldPhilosophy of Science 77 (5): 778-791. 2010.This essay uses Györgi Buzsáki's use of EEG data to draw conclusions about brain function as an example to show that investigators sometimes draw conclusions from noisy data by analyzing the noise rather than by extracting a signal from it. The example makes vivid some important differences between McAllister's, Woodward's, and my ideas about how data are interpreted.
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