•  90
    Barry Stroud's work has had a profound impact on a very wide array of philosophical topics, but there has heretofore been no book-length treatment of his work. The current collection aims to redress this gap, with 13 essays on Stroud's work, all but one new to this volume.
  •  6
    The Possibility of Philosophical Understanding: Essays for Barry Stroud (edited book)
    with W. Wong and N. Kolodny
    Oxford University Press. 2011.
    I argue that the contextualist anti-skeptical strategy fails because it misconstrues skepticism by overlooking two important aspects of skepticism: first, all of our knowledge of the external world is brought into question at one fell swoop; second, skepticism depends on certain ideas about sense-perception and its role in our knowledge of the world. Contextualists may have solved ‘the skeptical paradox’ in their own terms, but such a solution cannot in any way make skepticism less threatening t…Read more
  •  36
    Epistemic Contextualism: A Defense By Peter Baumann
    Analysis 79 (2): 378-381. 2019.
    Epistemic Contextualism: A Defense By BaumannPeterOxford University Press, 2017. x + 266 pp.
  •  13
    Teleofunctionalism and Psychological Explanation
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 87 (4): 403-421. 2006.
    Fred Dretske’s teleofunctional theory of content aims to simultaneously solve two ground-floor philosophical puzzles about mental content: the problem of naturalism and the problem of epiphenomenalism. It is argued here that his theory fails on the latter score. Indeed, the theory insures that content can have no place in the causal explanation of action at all. The argument for this conclusion depends upon only very weak premises about the nature of causal explanation. The difficulties Dretske’…Read more
  •  58
    Knowledge and presuppositions
    Analysis 77 (2): 473-476. 2017.
    © The Authors 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] Blome-Tillmann’s Knowledge and Presuppositions proposes and defends a novel form of epistemological contextualism. As the title would suggest, the view’s novelty lies in its deployment of the pragmatic-theoretic concept of a conversational presupposition to delineate a role for context in shaping the meaning of our knowl…Read more
  •  3
    Genetic analysis and physiology of a trait for enhanced K + /Na + discrimination in wheat
    with J. Gorham, J. Dubcovsky, J. Dvorak, P. A. Hollington, M. C. Luo, and J. A. Khan
    Variation for K+ and Na+ accumulation at low salinities in hydroponic culture were observed in shoots of different wheat species. Greater discrimination was shown by hexaploid bread wheat than by tetraploid durum wheat. Since Aegilops tauschii Cosson, the source of the D genome in bread wheat, also exhibited high discrimination between K+ and Na+, it was concluded that the character resided in the D genome. Studies of aneuploid bread wheat lines and disomic substitution lines of D genome chromos…Read more
  •  24
    Davidson's Transcendental Externalism
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (2): 290-315. 2007.
    One of the chief aims of Donald Davidson's later work was to show that participation in a certain causal nexus involving two creatures and a shared environment–Davidson calls this nexus “triangulation”–is a metaphysically necessary condition for the acquisition of thought. This doctrine, I suggest, is aptly regarded as a form of what I call transcendental externalism. I extract two arguments for the transcendental‐externalist doctrine from Davidson's writings, and argue that neither succeeds. A …Read more
  • Locating Thought: Externalism and Naturalism About Mental Content
    Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. 2001.
    Externalism about mental content is the view that the contents of thoughts constitutively depend on the thinker's causal relations to the surrounding world. While externalism is most commonly defended by appeal to thought experiments purporting to show that causal relations to the environment individuate particular kinds of content, some philosophers argue for externalism on the basis of the claim that certain causal relations to the environment are necessary for the very capacity to think about…Read more
  •  1301
    This paper offers an interpretation of the later Wittgenstein's handling of the idea of an "essence of human language", and examines in particular his treatment of the 'Augustinean' vision of reference as constituting this "essence". A central theme of the interpretation is the perennial philosophical desire to impose upon linguistic meaning conceptual templates drawn from outside the forms of thought about meaning in which we engage when we exercise our capacity to speak and understand a langua…Read more
  •  55
    Skepticism and Beyond
    Skepsis: A Journal for Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Research (14): 76-99. 2016.
    A sympathetic exegesis of themes in Barry Stroud's later writings, with a particular emphasis on the role of a certain conception of "perceptual experience" in generating the skeptical challenge to our knowledge of the external world. The resultant morals are brought to bear on John McDowell's evolving account of the role of contentful "experiences" in providing for empirical thought. For Stroud's response to this essay (and others) see: http://philosophicalskepticism.org/skepsis/numero-14/
  •  565
    Meaning and Understanding
    In Hans-Johann Glock & John Hyman (eds.), A Companion to Wittgenstein, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 375-389. 2017.
    Explores the central role in Wittgenstein's later work of his opposition to a 'mechanistic' conception of understanding. Offers a diagnosis of Kripke's skeptical paradox on this basis.
  •  103
    A critique of attempts by Charles Travis and others to read contextualism back into Philosophical Investigations. The central interpretive claim is that this reading is not only unsupported; it gets Wittgenstein's intent, in the parts of the text at issue, precisely backwards. The focus of the chapter is on Wittgenstein's treatment of explanation, understanding, proper names, and family-resemblance concepts.
  •  205
    Davidson’s Transcendental Externalism
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (2): 290-315. 2006.
    One of the chief aims of Donald Davidson's later work was to show that participation in a certain causal nexus involving two creatures and a shared environment–Davidson calls this nexus “triangulation”–is a metaphysically necessary condition for the acquisition of thought. This doctrine, I suggest, is aptly regarded as a form of what I call transcendental externalism. I extract two arguments for the transcendental-externalist doctrine from Davidson's writings, and argue that neither succeeds. A …Read more
  •  79
    Context and Use
    The Harvard Review of Philosophy 18 (1): 133-142. 2012.
  •  28
    Semantic contextualism is a view about the meanings of utterances. The relevant notion of meaning is that of what is said by an utterance, as it is sometimes put, of the content of the utterance. Semantic contextualism (which I will henceforth simply label “contextualism”) holds that the content of an utterance is shaped in far-reaching and unobvious ways by the circumstances, the context, in which it is uttered. Two utterances of the same sentence might vary in content as a result of difference…Read more
  • Although in everyday life and thought we take for granted that there are norms of rationality, their existence presents severe philosophical problems. Kolodny (2005) is thus moved to deny that rationality is normative. But this denial is not itself unproblematic, and I argue that Kolodny’s defense of it—especially his Transparency Account, which aims to explain why rationality appears to be normative even though it isn’t—is unsuccessful. I close with a sketch of an alternative proposal, one that…Read more
  •  113
    Dispositions and Rational Explanation
    In Jason Bridges Niko Kolodny & Wai-Hung Wong (eds.), The Possibility of Philosophical Understanding: Reflections on the Thought of Barry Stroud, Oxford University Press. 2011.
    Some philosophers hold that rational explanations­—explanations of people’s attitudes and actions that cite their reasons for forming these attitudes or performing these actions—are dispositional. The hold that rational explanations do their explanatory work by representing these attitudes and actions as the product of dispositions on the part of the subject. I challenge arguments to this effect by Barry Stroud and Michael Smith. And I argue that human beings do not possess, and could not posses…Read more
  •  148
    Teleofunctionalism and psychological explanation
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 87 (4): 359-372. 2006.
    Fred Dretske’s teleofunctional theory of content aims to simultaneously solve two ground-floor philosophical puzzles about mental content: the problem of naturalism and the problem of epiphenomenalism. It is argued here that his theory fails on the latter score. Indeed, the theory insures that content can have no place in the causal explanation of action at all. The argument for this conclusion depends upon only very weak premises about the nature of causal explanation. The difficulties Dretske’…Read more
  •  227
    In this paper, I argue that informational semantics, the most well-known and worked-out naturalistic account of intentional content, conflicts with a fundamental psychological principle about the conditions of belief-formation. Since this principle is an important premise in the argument for informational semantics, the upshot is that the view is self-contradictory??indeed, it turns out to be guilty of a sophisticated version of the fallacy famously committed by Euthyphro in the eponymous Platon…Read more
  •  214
    Rationality, Normativity, and Transparency
    Mind 118 (470): 353-367. 2009.
    Although in everyday life and thought we take for granted that there are norms of rationality, their existence presents severe philosophical problems. Kolodny (2005) is thus moved to deny that rationality is normative. But this denial is not itself unproblematic, and I argue that Kolodny's defence of it—particularly his Transparency Account, which aims to explain why rationality appears to be normative even though it is not—is unsuccessful