•  18
    Analytic debates about truth are wide-ranging, but certain key themes tend to crop up time and again. The three themes that we will examine in this paper are (i) the nature and behaviour of the ordinary concept of truth, (ii) the meaning of discourse about truth, and (iii) the nature of the property truth. We will start by offering a brief overview of the debates centring on these themes. We will then argue that cross-linguistic experimental philosophy has an indispensable yet underappreciated r…Read more
  •  7
    Is Correspondence Truth One or Many?
    Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 79 (3): 1003-1022. 2023.
    On the correspondence theory of truth, a proposition is true if and only if it corresponds to fact. Criticisms of the correspondence theory of truth have argued that such a strict interpretation of the correspondence relation will not be able to account for the truth of statements about fiction or mathematics. This challenge has resulted in the introduction of more permissive correspondence relations, such as Austin’s correspondence as correlation or Tarski’s correspondence as reference satisfac…Read more
  •  14
    Virtue, Self-Narratives, and the Causes of Action
    with David Lumsden
    Acta Analytica 1-16. forthcoming.
    Virtues can be considered to play a causal role in the production of behaviour and so too can our self-narratives. We identify a point of connection between the two cases and draw a parallel between them. But, those folk psychological notions, virtues and self-narratives, fail to reduce smoothly to the underlying human physiology. As a first step towards handling that failure to connect with the scientific framework that is the familiar grounding for our understanding of causation, we consider t…Read more
  •  9
    There is a growing body of empirical evidence which shows that infants and non-human primates have the ability to represent the mental states of other agents, i.e. that they possess a Theory of Mind. We will argue that this evidence also suggests that infants and non-human primates possess the concept of truth, which, as we will explain, is good news for primitivists about truth. First, we will offer a brief overview of alethic primitivism, focusing on Jamin Asay’s conceptual version of the view…Read more
  •  12
    Do Political Convictions Infect Every Fibre of Our Being?
    with David Lumsden
    Social Epistemology. forthcoming.
    1. The current political scene in many countries is populated by polarised groups with sharply contrasting loyalties and beliefs implying that there are fundamental schisms between opposing groups....
  • Anti-irrationalism in Izydora Dąmbska (1904-1983)
    Encyclopedia of Concise Concepts by Women Philosophers. 2023.
  •  15
    Prosentential theory of truth in Dorothy Grover (1936-2017)
    Encyclopedia of Concise Concepts by Women Philosophers. 2022.
    In this entry, we offer a very brief overview of Dorothy Grover's prosentential theory of truth.
  •  93
    All in the Family: The History and Philosophy of Experimental Philosophy
    with Justin Sytsma and Chad Gonnerman
    In Alexander Max Bauer & Stephan Kornmesser (eds.), The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Experimental philosophy (or “x-phi”) is a way of doing philosophy. It is “traditional” philosophy, but with a little something extra: In addition to the expected philosophical arguments and engagement, x-phi involves the use of empirical methods to test the empirical claims that arise. This extra bit strikes some as a new, perhaps radical, addition to philosophical practice. We don’t think so. As this chapter will show, empirical claims have been common across the history of Western philosophy, …Read more
  •  19
    There are many variants of deflationism about truth, but one of them, Paul Horwich’s minimalism, stands out because it accepts as axiomatic practical variants of the equivalence schema: 〈p〉 is true if and only if p. The equivalence schema is epistemologically fundamental. In this paper, I call upon empirical studies to show that practical variants of the equivalence schema are widely accepted by non-philosophers. While in the empirical data there is variation in how non-philosophers and philosop…Read more
  •  119
    The time has come to consider whether experimental philosophy’s (“x-phi”) early arguments, debates, and conceptual frameworks, that may have worn well in its early days, fit with the diverse range of projects undertaken by experimental philosophers. Our aim is to propose a novel taxonomy for x-phi that identifies four paths from empirical findings to philosophical consequences, which we call the “fourfold route.” We show how this taxonomy can be fruitfully applied even at what one might have tak…Read more
  •  15
    Virtue, Narrative, and Self connects two philosophical areas of study that have long been treated as distinct: virtue theory and narrative accounts of personal identity. Chapters address several important issues and neglected themes at the intersection of these research areas. Specific examples include the role of narrative in the identification, differentiation, and cultivation of virtue, the nature of practical reasoning and moral competence, and the influence of life's narrative structure on …Read more
  •  137
    Resolute Readings of Wittgenstein and Nonsense
    Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 8 (10). 2020.
    The aim of this paper is to show that a corollary of resolute readings of Wittgenstein’s conception of nonsense cannot be sustained. First, I describe the corollary. Next, I point out the relevance to it of Wittgenstein’s discussion of family resemblance concepts. Then, I survey some typical uses of nonsense to see what they bring to an ordinary language treatment of the word “nonsense” and its relatives. I will subsequently consider the objection, on behalf of a resolute reading, that “nonsense…Read more
  •  17
    A cardinal rule of academic research with human participants is to protect their confidentiality. While there are limits to confidentiality, universities and researchers will make strenuous efforts...
  •  253
    How Self Narratives and Virtues Cause Action
    with David Lumsden
    In Joseph Ulatowski & Liezl Van Zyl (eds.), Virtue, Narrative, and Self: Explorations of Character in the Philosophy of Mind and Action, Routledge. pp. 69-90. 2021.
    While the nature of the virtues and their role in human action are controversial, we wish to explore the thesis that virtues play a causal role in the production of action. One fruitful, though controversial, approach to understanding the nature of the self is through the notion of a narrative and in particular a person’s self narrative or narratives. Similarly we wish to explore the thesis that self narratives play a causal role in action. We consider how virtues and self-narratives interrelate…Read more
  •  214
    Help! Virtue Profiles and Horses for Courses
    with David Lumsden
    Australasian Philosophical Review. forthcoming.
    Glen Pettigrove addresses the proportionality principle in ethics, the principle that “our actions, attitudes, or emotions should be proportional to the degree of value present in the object or events to which they are responding” [p. 1]. He argues this is inconsistent with some familiar features of common-sense morality. In response, he brings virtuous character into the picture, a move we support but wish to modify. We show that certain helping actions should be guided by whether one has the…Read more
  •  215
    A comprehensive bibliography of truth from 1873 to 1939. (I do not intend to publish this manuscript; rather, I post it as a resource for others with an interest in theories of truth during the early analytic period.)
  •  2136
    What Is It Like To Be Immortal?
    Diametros 16 (62): 65-77. 2019.
    The idea of an eternal and immortal life like the one we lead now seems quite appealing because (i) it will be sufficiently like our own earth-bound life and (ii) we will have the same kinds of desires we have now to want to live an eternal life. This paper will challenge the view that we have a conception of what the conscious experience of an immortal is like, regardless of whether we might want to live it. Given that for us to conceive of an immortal life we must project onto it our own view …Read more
  •  555
    Casting Light Upon The Great Endarkenment
    with David Lumsden
    Metaphilosophy 50 (5): 729-742. 2019.
    While the Enlightenment promoted thinking for oneself independent of religious authority, the ‘Endarkenment’ (Millgram 2015) concerns deference to a new authority: the specialist, a hyperspecializer. Non-specialists need to defer to such authorities as they are unable to understand their reasoning. Millgram describes how humans are capable of being serial hyperspecializers, able to move from one specialism to another. We support the basic thrust of Millgram’s position, and seek to articulate ho…Read more
  •  39
    The Cambridge Companion to Bertrand Russell (review)
    Disputatio 1 (19): 282-286. 2005.
    In this brief article, I review Nicholas Griffin's edited anthology The Cambridge Companion to Bertrand Russell.
  •  14
    Paradoxes (review)
    American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 78 (3): 514-517. 2004.
  •  99
    The Anthropocentrism of the Cosmic Perspective Argument
    with Seth Sivinski
    Ethics and the Environment 24 (1): 1-19. 2019.
    New developments in cosmology make it unlikely that life on Earth is unique. The Cosmic Perspective Argument states that given these developments we should not be concerned with the Earth’s environmental degradation. In this paper, we argue that although scaling our analysis upwards into the cosmos provides the Cosmic Perspective with its strength, when we apply the Cosmic Perspective downwards, the view appears to be terribly flawed. After examining the Cosmic Perspective at an individual level…Read more
  •  637
    How Many Accounts of Act Individuation Are There?
    Dissertation, University of Utah. 2008.
    The problem of act individuation is a debate about the identity conditions of human acts. The fundamental question about act individuation is: how do we distinguish between actions? Three views of act individuation have dominated the literature. First, Donald Davidson and G.E.M. Anscombe have argued that a number of different descriptions refer to a single act. Second, Alvin Goldman and Jaegwon Kim have argued that each description designates a distinct act. Finally, Irving Thalberg and Jud…Read more
  •  63
    Is there a Commonsense Semantic Conception of Truth?
    Philosophia 46 (2): 487-500. 2018.
    Alfred Tarski’s refinement of an account of truth into a formal system that turns on the acceptance of Convention-T has had a lasting impact on philosophical logic, especially work concerning truth, meaning, and other semantic notions. In a series of studies completed from the 1930s to the 1960s, Arne Næss collected and analysed intuitive responses from non-philosophers to questions concerning truth, synonymy, certainty, and probability. Among the formulations of truth studied by Næss were pract…Read more
  •  565
    The objectivity of truth, a core truism?
    Synthese 198 (2): 717-733. 2017.
    A typical guiding principle of an account of truth is: “truth is objective,” or, to be clear, judging whether an assertion is true or false depends upon how things are in the world rather than how someone or some community believes it to be. Accordingly, whenever a claim is objectively true, its truth conditions ought not depend upon the context in which it is uttered or the utterer making the claim. Part of our ongoing empirical studies surveying people’s responses to questions about truth invo…Read more
  •  52
    Truth is a pervasive feature of ordinary language, deserving of systematic study, and few theorists of truth have endeavoured to chronicle the tousled conceptual terrain forming the non-philosopher’s ordinary view. Joseph Ulatowski recasts the philosophical treatment of truth in light of historical and recent work in experimental philosophy. He argues that the commonsense view of truth is deeply fragmented along two axes, across different linguistic discourses and among different demographics. C…Read more
  •  478
    One Self per Customer? From Disunified Agency to Disunified Self
    with David Lumsden
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 55 (3): 314-335. 2017.
    The notion of an agent and the notion of a self are connected, for agency is one role played by the self. Millgram argues for a disunity thesis of agency on the basis of extreme incommensurability across some major life events. We propose a similar negative thesis about the self, that it is composed of relatively independent threads reflecting the different roles and different mind-sets of the person's life. Our understanding of those threads is based on theories of the narrative construction of…Read more
  •  54
    Rationality and Logic (review)
    Polish Journal of Philosophy 2 (2): 148-152. 2008.
    In this brief article, I review the main argument's of Robert Hanna's <em>Rationality and Logic</em>.
  •  51
    On Katherine Dimitriou’s “Drowning Man”
    Southwest Philosophy Review 28 (2): 25-28. 2012.
    Ms. Dimitriou's motivist view has a simple upshot: for at least some cases, our moral assessment of an action should depend on the motives behind it (Dimitriou, passim). This may be contrasted with the antimotivist position, the view that argues motives should not figure into our moral assessment of an action. She presents two provocative cases where an agent’s motive “infects” the concomitant action. One example involves racist thinking and the other a form of sexual self-gratification. Given t…Read more