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8Nietzsche's Musical Conception of TimeIn Manuel Dries (ed.), Nietzsche on Time and History, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 291. 2008.
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1Color relationalism and color phenomenologyIn Bence Nanay (ed.), Perceiving the world, Oxford University Press. 2010.
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117Nietzsche’s Second TurningPli 25 35-54. 2014.Locates, discusses, and explains the transition between Nietzsche's middle and late periods represented by the first four books of _The Gay Science_.
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24On the presuppositional behavior of coherence-driven pragmatic enrichmentsSemantics and Linguistic Theory 26 961-979. 2016.When interpreting a sentence such as Every time the company fires an employee who comes in late, a union complaint is lodged, an addressee is likely to infer that the union will only complain when an employee is fired because he came in late. One is thus led to ask why a purely pragmatic enrichment of this sort -- one drawn despite no risk of interpretative failure nor other linguistic mandate -- would intrude upon truth conditions. We argue that this effect results from the interaction among th…Read more
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5Information and ContentIn Luciano Floridi (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information, Blackwell. 2004.The prelims comprise: Adequacy Conditions Dretske and the Flow of Information Epistemic Optimality Teleology Asymmetric Dependence Conclusion Glossary of Key Technical Terms.
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Perceptual integration, modularity, and cognitive penetrationIn A. Raftopoulos & J. Zeimbekis (eds.), Cognitive penetrability of perception, Oxford University Press. 2015.
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39Schellenberg on Perceptual CapacitiesAnalysis 79 (4): 720-730. 2019.Did we but compare the miserable scantiness of our capacities with the vast profundity of things, truth and modesty would teach us wary language. –Joseph Glanvill, Scepsis Scientifica, XXIII.2.
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287Interpolating DecisionsAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2): 327-339. 2023.Decision theory requires agents to assign probabilities to states of the world and utilities to the possible outcomes of different actions. When agents commit to having the probabilities and/or utilities in a decision problem defined by objective features of the world, they may find themselves unable to decide which actions maximize expected utility. Decision theory has long recognized that work-around strategies are available in special cases; this is where dominance reasoning, minimax, and max…Read more
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Perceptual integration, modularity, and cognitive penetrationIn John Zeimbekis & Athanassios Raftopoulos (eds.), The Cognitive Penetrability of Perception: New Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford University Press. 2015.
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Perceptual constancyIn Mohan Matthen (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception, Oxford University Press Uk. 2015.
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1Contemporary Debates in the Philosophy of Mind (2nd Edition) (edited book)Blackwell. forthcoming.
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337Conversational EliciturePhilosophers' Imprint 21 (12). 2021.The sentence "The boss fired the employee who is always late" invites the defeasible inference that the speaker is attempting to convey that the lateness caused the firing. We argue that such inferences cannot be understood in terms of familiar approaches to extrasemantic enrichment such as implicature, impliciture, explicature, or species of local enrichment already in the literature. Rather, we propose that they arise from more basic cognitive strategies, grounded in processes of coherence est…Read more
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435Daylight savings: what an answer to the perceptual variation problem cannot bePhilosophical Studies 178 (3): 833-843. 2020.Significant variations in the way objects appear across different viewing conditions pose a challenge to the view that they have some true, determinate color. This view would seem to require that we break the symmetry between multiple appearances in favor of a single variant. A wide range of philosophical and non-philosophical writers have held that the symmetry can be broken by appealing to daylight viewing conditions—that the appearances of objects in daylight have a stronger, and perhaps uniq…Read more
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496What was Molyneux's Question A Question About?In Jonathan Cohen & Mohan Matthen (eds.), Molyneux's Question and the History of Philosophy, Routledge. 2021.Molyneux asked whether a newly sighted person could distinguish a sphere from a cube by sight alone, given that she was antecedently able to do so by touch. This, we contend, is a question about general ideas. To answer it, we must ask (a) whether spatial locations identified by touch can be identified also by sight, and (b) whether the integration of spatial locations into an idea of shape persists through changes of modality. Posed this way, Molyneux’s Question goes substantially beyond questi…Read more
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63There Is No Special Problem About Scientific RepresentationTheoria 21 (1): 67-85. 2010.We propose that scientific representation is a special case of a more general notion of representation, and that the relatively well worked-out and plausible theories of the latter are directly applicable to the scientific special case.
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117Analyticity and Katz’s New IntensionalismPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (1): 115-135. 2000.In the new metalanguage of semantics, it is possible to make statements about the relation of designation and about truth.... To me the usefulness of semantics for philosophy was so obvious that I believed no further arguments were required and it was sucient to list a great number of customary concepts of a semantical nature
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29Color and Perceptual Variation Revisited: Unknown Facts, Alien Modalities, and Perfect PsychosemanticsDialectica 60 (3): 307-319. 2006.An adequate ontology of color must face the empirical facts about perceptual variation. In this paper I begin by reviewing a range of data about perceptual variation, and showing how they tell against color physicalism and motivate color relationalism. Next I consider a series of objections to the argument from perceptual variation, and argue that they are unpersuasive. My conclusion will be that the argument remains a powerful obstacle for color physicalism, and a powerful reason to believe in …Read more
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41Analyticity and Katz's New Intensionalism: Or, if You Sever Sense from Reference, Analyticity is Cheap but UselessPhilosophical and Phenomenological Research 61 (1): 115-135. 2000.In "Analyticity, Necessity, and the Epistemology of Semantics," Jerrold Katz argues against the Fregean thesis that sense determines reference. He proposes a reconception of sense, uses this to give a non-standard understanding of analyticity, and then goes on to show how these moves block arguments for semantic externalism, evade Quine's attacks on analyticity, and ground a "rationalist/internalist" conception of semantic knowledge. For these reasons it seems that quite a lot hangs on the viabi…Read more
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551There Is No Special Problem About Scientific RepresentationTheoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 21 (1): 67-85. 2006.We propose that scientific representation is a special case of a more general notion of representation, and that the relatively well worked-out and plausible theories of the latter are directly applicable to thc scientific special case. Construing scientific representation in this way makes the so-called “problem of scientific representation” look much less interesting than it has seerned to many, and suggests that some of the (hotly contested) debates in the literature are concerned with non-is…Read more
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2Color Properties and Color Perception: A Functionalist AccountDissertation, Rutgers the State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick. 2000.In this dissertation I defend a functionalist theory of color, on which colors are the properties that dispose things to look colored. ;I begin in chapter 1 by saying what I think colors are, and why my view should count as a primary quality theory of color---one on which colors are objective and mind-independent properties of objects in the world. In addition, since my view differs substantially from the sorts of primary quality theories most discussed by philosophers, I spend some time setting…Read more
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24Counterfactuals, Probabilities, and Information: Response to CriticsAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (4): 635-642. 2008.In earlier work we proposed an account of information grounded in counterfactual conditionals rather than probabilities, and argued that it might serve philosophical needs that more familiar probabilistic alternatives do not. Demir [2008] and Scarantino [2008] criticize the counterfactual approach by contending that its alleged advantages are illusory and that it fails to secure attractive desiderata. In this paper we defend the counterfactual account from these criticisms, and suggest that it r…Read more
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325Special Sciences, Conspiracy and the Better Best System Account of LawhoodErkenntnis 73 (3). 2010.An important obstacle to lawhood in the special sciences is the worry that such laws would require metaphysically extravagant conspiracies among fundamental particles. How, short of conspiracy, is this possible? In this paper we'll review a number of strategies that allow for the projectibility of special science generalizations without positing outlandish conspiracies: non-Humean pluralism, classical MRL theories of laws, and Albert and Loewer's theory. After arguing that none of the above full…Read more
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520A better best system account of lawhoodPhilosophical Studies 145 (1). 2009.Perhaps the most significant contemporary theory of lawhood is the Best System (/MRL) view on which laws are true generalizations that best systematize knowledge. Our question in this paper will be how best to formulate a theory of this kind. We’ll argue that an acceptable MRL should (i) avoid inter-system comparisons of simplicity, strength, and balance, (ii) make lawhood epistemically accessible, and (iii) allow for laws in the special sciences. Attention to these problems will bring into focu…Read more
San Diego, California, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Perception |
Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
Perception |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Mind |