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26Declaration and Bestowal: A Love StorySophia 61 (4): 887-901. 2022.Irving Singer has defended the thesis that the "fine gold thread" of love, its sine qua non, is the bestowal of value by the lover on the beloved, even in those cases where the love itself is grounded in a positive appraisal of the beloved's attributes. He suggests that bestowal is a matter of elevating the importance of the beloved and his or her needs and interests above their appraised merit. I argue that love's bestowal is principally effected through speech acts of the kind that John Searle…Read more
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39Irreplaceability and the intentionality of sexual arousalEuropean Journal of Philosophy 27 (2): 337-346. 2018.European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.
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Reduction and Explanation in the Theory of ContentDissertation, The University of Arizona. 1992.Methodological physicalism is the thesis that causal-explanatory notions appearing in true explanations must be physicalistically reducible. The thesis of methodological physicalism has figured prominently, if tacitly, in much recent work on folk psychology. The thesis serves as a premise in the arguments of both realists and eliminativists. In chapter 1 I discuss seven arguments which argue for the truth of methodological physicalism. ;A principal thesis of this work is that methodological phys…Read more
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33Truth and Value in Rebecca West’s The Return of the SoldierPhilosophy and Literature 38 (2): 368-379. 2014.Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier offers an imaginative and philosophically intriguing twist on the familiar trope of the irreconcilable tension between a man’s love for a woman and his duties to his wife and family. In West’s hands this theme becomes a mere framing device for a deeper conflict, one in which the need for happiness is set against the prerogatives of truth, the whim of fantasy against the realm of public facts. In this paper I discuss these themes in the light of recent phi…Read more
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60Lycan on the subjectivity of the mentalPhilosophical Psychology 11 (2): 229-38. 1998.The subjectivity of the mental consists in the idea that there are features of our mental states that are perspectival in that they are accessible only from the first-person point of view. This is held to be a problem for materialist theories of mind, since such theories contend that there is nothing about the mind that cannot be fully described from a third-person point of view. Lycan suggests a notion of “phenomenal information” that is held to be perspectival in the relevant sense but also pe…Read more
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137What can Austin tell us about truth?Philosophical Investigations 33 (3): 220-228. 2010.In recent discussions of the problem of truth, Austin's views have been largely overlooked. This is unfortunate, since many of his criticisms aimed at Strawson's redundancy theory carry over to more recent incarnations of deflationism. And unlike contemporary versions of the correspondence theory of truth, Austin's manages properly to situate truth in its conceptual neighbourhood wherein it belongs to “a whole dimension of different appraisals which have something or other to do with the relatio…Read more
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36Reinflating truth as an explanatory conceptPacific Philosophical Quarterly 84 (1). 2003.Despite his protests, there have been numerous efforts to enroll Davidson in the deflationist program. Michael Williams has recently continued this enterprise, arguing that a truth‐theoretic Davidsonian approach to meaning can be harnessed to a deflationary approach to truth. It is our contention that Williams’ attempt is unsuccessful.
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36Cognitivism and explanatory relativityCanadian Journal of Philosophy 28 (4): 505-526. 1998.In much of his writing in the philosophy of mind, John Searle has been highly critical of what N. Block refers to as ‘The Computer Model of the Mind’ — the approach that treats the mind as a symbol-manipulating device akin in spirit, if not detail, to the modem computer. Searle refers to this philosophical approach as ‘cognitivism.’ The extent of his skepticism and animus toward the computer model of the mind is plainly apparent in the following quotation from Searle: ‘I used to believe that as …Read more
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93Missed It By That Much: Austin on Norms of TruthPhilosophia 40 (2): 357-363. 2012.A principal challenge for a deflationary theory is to explain the value of truth: why we aim for true beliefs, abhor dishonesty, and so on. The problem arises because deflationism sees truth as a mere logical property and the truth predicate as serving primarily as a device of generalization. Paul Horwich, attempts to show how deflationism can account for the value of truth. Drawing on the work of J. L. Austin, I argue that his account, which focuses on belief, cannot adequately accommodate the …Read more
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Structural causation and psychological explanationJournal of Mind and Behavior 22 (3): 249-261. 2001.A key test of any philosophical account of the mind is its treatment of mental causation. Proponents of the token-identity theory point to its strengths in both “demystifying” mental causation — by identifying mental causes with the physical causal mechanisms underlying bodily movements — and in avoiding commitment to dubious forms of causal overdetermination. I argue against this account of mental causation, pointing out that it mistakenly identifies actions with bodily movements. I suggest ins…Read more
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42Critical Notice/Études critiqueJohn Searle’s Making the Social WorldDialogue 50 (4): 759-778. 2011.
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183The Ethics of Sexual FantasyInternational Journal of Applied Philosophy 23 (1): 27-49. 2009.I defend the thesis that a person’s sexual fantasies function autonomously from his desires, beliefs, and intentions, a fact I attributeto their different forms of intentionality: the contents of sexual fantasies, unlike those of the latter, lack a direction of fit and thus fail to express satisfaction conditions. I then show how the autonomy thesis helps to answer important questions about the ethics of sexual fantasy. I also argue that the autonomy thesis can claim empirical support from sever…Read more
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60Searle's regimen for rediscovering the mindDialogue 36 (2): 361-374. 1997.Like Wittgenstein, John Searle believes that much of analytic philosophy—especially the philosophy of mind—is founded on confusion and falsehood. Unlike Wittgenstein, he does not consider this condition to be endemic to philosophy. As a result, Searle's dual goals in The Rediscovery of the Mind are to rid the philosophy of mind of the fundamental confusions that plague it, and to set the field on the path toward genuine progress. Thus, the book opens with a chapter entitled “What's Wrong with th…Read more
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127Is there life after the death of the computational theory of mind?Minds and Machines 15 (2): 183-194. 2005.In this paper, I explore the implications of Fodor’s attacks on the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM), which get their most recent airing in The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way. I argue that if Fodor is right that the CTM founders on the global nature of abductive inference, then several of the philosophical views about the mind that he has championed over the years founder as well. I focus on Fodor’s accounts of mental causation, psychological explanation, and intentionality
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91Rule following and the backgroundLinguistics and Philosophy 28 (3). 2004.. In his work on language John Searle favors an Austinian approach that emphasizes the speech act as the basic unit of meaning and communication, and which sees speaking a language as engaging in a rule-governed form of behavior. He couples this with a strident opposition to cognitivist approaches that posit unconscious rule following as the causal basis of linguistic competence. In place of unconscious rule following Searle posits what he calls the Background, comprised of nonintentional (nonre…Read more
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90A note on the possibility of silicon brains and fading qualiaJournal of Consciousness Studies 9 (7): 25-31. 2002.John Searle and David Chalmers have each invoked the silicon-brain thought experiment, though to very different effect. Searle uses the possibility of silicon brains to argue that there is no ontological connection between consciousness and causal/functional role. Chalmers, on the other hand, thinks the possibility of silicon brains is grounds for positing a nomological connection between functional structure and consciousness . In this article I attempt to explain how they manage to draw such d…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Intentionality |
Mental Causation |
Areas of Interest
Intentionality |
Mental Causation |