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1Belief RevisionDissertation, Princeton University. 1991.The dissertation gives an account of the principles guiding the rational revision of belief. I develop a non-probabilistic account of belief revision. My central thesis is the claim that there are two quite different kinds of rational belief change; two methods suited to two different sorts of situation. I call these methods updating and supposing. This claim, presented in Chapter Two, is argued on the basis of results proved in Chapter One. Chapters Three and Four are applications of the distin…Read more
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312Causation and Counterfactuals (edited book)MIT Press. 2004.Thirty years after Lewis's paper, this book brings together some of the most important recent work connecting—or, in some cases, disputing the connection ...
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11Chomsky and IntentionalityIn Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal & Georges Rey (eds.), A Companion to Chomsky, Wiley. 2021.This chapter describes some basic, often puzzling features of intentionality, with an eye to its role not so much in ordinary folk ascriptions but in serious psychological explanations, especially in many of Noam Chomsky's own presentations of his theory. It then considers Chomsky's censure of the notion, leading him to deny what would seem to be the explicit intentionalisms on which he seems to rely. Implicit in Chomsky's treatment of grammar is the idea that the positing of the language facult…Read more
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Internalist perspectives on languageIn Piotr Stalmaszczyk (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge University Press. 2021.
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654Counterfactuals and causation: history, problems, and prospectsIn John Collins, Ned Hall & Laurie Paul (eds.), Causation and Counterfactuals, Mit Press. pp. 1--57. 2004.Among the many philosophers who hold that causal facts1 are to be explained in terms of—or more ambitiously, shown to reduce to—facts about what happens, together with facts about the fundamental laws that govern what happens, the clear favorite is an approach that sees counterfactual dependence as the key to such explanation or reduction. The paradigm examples of causation, so advocates of this approach tell us, are examples in which events c and e— the cause and its effect— both occur, but: ha…Read more
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69Innateness, canalization, and the modality-independence of language: A reply to Griffiths and MacheryPhilosophical Psychology 24 (2): 195-206. 2011.Griffiths and Machery (2008) argue that innateness is a ?folk biological? notion, which, as such, has no useful reconstruction in contemporary biology. If this is so, not only is it wrong to identify the vernacular notion with the precise theoretical concept of canalization, but worse, it would appear that many of the putative scientific claims for particular competences and capacities being innate are simply misplaced. The present paper challenges the core substantive claim of Griffiths and Mac…Read more
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95Nativism: In defense of a biological understandingPhilosophical Psychology 18 (2): 157-177. 2005.In recent years, a number of philosophers have argued against a biological understanding of the innate in favor of a narrowly psychological notion. On the other hand, Ariew ((1996). Innateness and canalization. Philosophy of Science, 63, S19-S27. (1999). Innateness is canalization: in defense of a developmental account of innateness. In V. Hardcastle (Ed.), Where biology meets psychology: Philosophical essays (pp. 117-138). Cambridge, MA: MIT.) has developed a novel substantial account of innate…Read more
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226Methodology, not metaphysics: Against semantic externalismAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 83 (1): 53-69. 2009.Borg (2009) surveys and rejects a number of arguments in favour of semantic internalism. This paper, in turn, surveys and rejects all of Borg's anti-internalist arguments. My chief moral is that, properly conceived, semantic internalism is a methodological doctrine that takes its lead from current practice in linguistics. The unifying theme of internalist arguments, therefore, is that linguistics neither targets nor presupposes externalia. To the extent that this claim is correct, we should be i…Read more
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49Meta-scientific Eliminativism: A Reconsideration of Chomsky's Review of Skinner's Verbal BehaviorBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 58 (4): 625-658. 2007.The paper considers our ordinary mentalistic discourse in relation to what we should expect from any genuine science of the mind. A meta-scientific eliminativism is commended and distinguished from the more familiar eliminativism of Skinner and the Churchlands. Meta-scientific eliminativism views folk psychology qua folksy as unsuited to offer insight into the structure of cognition, although it might otherwise be indispensable for our social commerce and self-understanding. This position flows …Read more
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106Theory of mind, logical form and eliminativismPhilosophical Psychology 13 (4): 465-490. 2000.I argue for a cognitive architecture in which folk psychology is supported by an interface of a ToM module and the language faculty, the latter providing the former with interpreted LF structures which form the content representations of ToM states. I show that LF structures satisfy a range of key features asked of contents. I confront this account of ToM with eliminativism and diagnose and combat the thought that "success" and innateness are inconsistent with the falsity of folk psychology. I s…Read more
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499The big bad bug: What are the humean's chances?British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 44 (3): 443-462. 1993.Humean supervenience is the doctrine that there are no necessary connections in the world. David Lewis identifies one big bad bug to the programme of providing Humean analyses for apparently non-Humean features of the world. The bug is chance. We put the bug under the microscope, and conclude that chance is no special problem for the Humean.
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86The Unity of Linguistic MeaningOxford University Press. 2011.John Collins presents a new analysis of the problem of the unity of the proposition-how propositions can be both single things and complexes at the same time. He surveys previous investigations of the problem and offers his own novel and uniquely satisfying solution, which is defended from both philosophical and linguistic perspectives.
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1Internalist perspectives on languageIn Piotr Stalmaszczyk (ed.), Cambridge Handbook of the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge University Press. 2021.
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130Cutting it (too) finePhilosophical Studies 169 (2): 143-172. 2014.It is widely held that propositions are structured entities. In The Nature and Structure of Content (2007), Jeff King argues that the structure of propositions is none other than the syntactic structure deployed by the speaker/hearers who linguistically produce and consume the sentences that express the propositions. The present paper generalises from King’s position and claims that syntax provides the best in-principle account of propositional structure. It further seeks to show, however, that …Read more
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102The Philosophy of Universal Grammar, by Wolfram Hinzen and Michelle Sheehan (review)Mind 124 (493): 342-347. 2015.
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123Experimental Philosophy, Rationalism, and Naturalism: Rethinking Philosophical Method (edited book)Routledge. 2015.Experimental philosophy is one of the most exciting and controversial philosophical movements today. This book explores how it is reshaping thought about philosophical method. Experimental philosophy imports experimental methods and findings from psychology into philosophy. These fresh resources can be used to develop and defend both armchair methods and naturalist approaches, on an empirical basis. This outstanding collection brings together leading proponents of this new meta-philosophical nat…Read more
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928Cowie on the poverty of stimulusSynthese 136 (2): 159-190. 2003.My paper defends the use of the poverty of stimulus argument (POSA) for linguistic nativism against Cowie's (1999) counter-claim that it leaves empiricism untouched. I first present the linguistic POSA as arising from a reflection on the generality of the child's initial state in comparison with the specific complexity of its final state. I then show that Cowie misconstrues the POSA as a direct argument about the character of the pld. In this light, I first argue that the data Cowie marshals abo…Read more
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28(i) Languages are indefinitely various along every dimension. (ii) Languages are essentially systems of habit/dispositions. (iii) Languages are learnt from experience via analogy and generalisation. (iv) There is no component of the speaker/hearer’s psychology that is..
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501Unsharpenable VaguenessPhilosophical Topics 28 (1): 1-10. 2000.A plausible thought about vagueness is that it involves semantic incompleteness. To say that a predicate is vague is to say (at the very least) that its extension is incompletely specified. Where there is incomplete specification of extension there is indeterminacy, an indeterminacy between various ways in which the specification of the predicate might be completed or sharpened. In this paper we show that this idea is bound to founder by presenting an argument to the effect that there are vague …Read more
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116The redundancy of the actSynthese 195 (8): 3519-3545. 2018.The theory that structured propositions are complex act-types has been independently articulated by Peter Hanks and Scott Soames. The present paper argues that the role of the act in such theories is supererogatory, for the individuation conditions of the act-based propositions remain wholly at the level of concepts and their formal combination, features which the traditional structured proposition theorist endorses. Thus, it is shown that the traditional problems for structured propositions are…Read more
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49Putting Syntax First: On Convention and Implicature in Imagination and ConventionMind and Language 31 (5): 635-645. 2016.
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151Proxytypes and linguistic nativismSynthese 153 (1): 69-104. 2006.Prinz (Perceptual the Mind: Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis, MIT Press, 2002) presents a new species of concept empiricism, under which concepts are off-line long-term memory networks of representations that are ‘copies’ of perceptual representations – proxytypes. An apparent obstacle to any such empiricism is the prevailing nativism of generative linguistics. The paper critically assesses Prinz’s attempt to overcome this obstacle. The paper argues that, prima facie, proxytypes are as incapa…Read more
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48"It as little occurs to me to get involved in the philosophical quarrels and arguments of my times as to go down an ally and take part in a scuffle when I see the mob fighting there." — Arthur Schopenhauer, 1828-30, Adversaria' in Manuscript Remains, Vol. 3: Berlin Manuscripts (1818-1830). Oxford: Berg Publishers.
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2Naturalism in the philosohpy of language; or, Why there is no such thing as languageIn Sarah Sawyer (ed.), New waves in philosophy of language, Palgrave-macmillan. 2010.
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47(i)  Languages are indefinitely various along every dimension. (ii) Languages are essentially systems of habit/dispositions. (iii) Languages are learnt from experience via analogy and generalisation. (iv) There is no component of the speaker/hearer’s psychology that is       specifically linguistic. (v) Syntactic relations are ones of surface immediate constituency. (vi) Linguistics is a descriptive/taxonomic science - there is nothing to      explain.
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166Linguistic competence without knowledge of languagePhilosophy Compass 2 (6). 2007.Chomsky's competence/performance distinction has been traditionally understood as a distinction between our knowledge of language and how we put that knowledge to use. While this construal has its purposes, this article argues that the distinction as Chomsky proposes it depends upon no substantiation of the knowledge locution; rather, the distinction is intended to abstract one system out of an ensemble of systems whose integration underlies performance. The article goes on to assess and reject …Read more
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Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Probability |