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63Are Natural Kind Terms Ambiguous?Cognitive Science 47 (9). 2023.Recent experimental studies have claimed to find evidence for the view that natural kind terms such as “water” are ambiguous: that they have two extensions, one determined by superficial properties, the other by underlying essence. In an online experiment, we presented to 600 participants scenarios describing discoveries of novel samples that differ in deep structure from samples of a familiar kind but are superficially identical, such as a water-like substance that is not composed of H2O. We us…Read more
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14Internalism and ExternalismIn Bob Hale, Crispin Wright & Alexander Miller (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Wiley-blackwell. 1997.This chapter understands internalism and externalism as supervenience theses, or rejections thereof. It focuses on different arguments for various kinds of externalist theses, rather than on arguments for internalism. It also reviews the central thought experiments often considered as giving strong support to externalist theses, paying close attention to how internal duplicates figure in the experiments. The chapter looks at methodological and meta‐philosophical aspects of the internalism/extern…Read more
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Variation in Natural Kind ConceptsIn Teresa Marques & Åsa Wikforss (eds.), Shifting Concepts: The Philosophy and Psychology of Conceptual Variability, Oxford University Press. 2020.
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32Why Fodor’s Theory of Concepts FailsProceedings of the Xxii World Congress of Philosophy 39 97-104. 2008.Fodor’s theory of concepts holds that the psychological mechanisms which guide us in applying concepts to objects do not determine reference; instead, causal relations of a specific kind between properties and our dispositions to token a concept are claimed to do so. Fodor does admit that there needs to be some psychological mechanism mediating the property – concept tokening relations, but argues that it is purely accidental for reference. In contrast, I argue that the actual mechanisms that su…Read more
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19The Semantic Basis of a posteriori NecessitiesProceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy 53 71-75. 2018.This paper will look at three closely interrelated questions about necessary a posteriori identities, in particular concerning natural kinds. First-ly, what is the semantic phenomenon responsible for a posteriori necessities in general, and theoretical identity statements concerning natural kinds in particular? I will argue that rigidity, as it is usually defined, cannot do the job for theoretical identity statements. Rather, a posteriori necessities are grounded in a semantic phenomenon that I …Read more
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370Psychological essentialism and semantic externalism: Evidence for externalism in lay speakers' language usePhilosophical Psychology 22 (1). 2009.Some experimental studies have recently claimed to undermine semantic externalism about natural kind terms. However, it is unclear how philosophical accounts of reference can be experimentally tested. We present two externalistic adaptations of psychological placeholder essentialism, a strict externalist and a hybrid externalist view, which are experimentally testable. We examine Braisby, Franks, and Hampton's (1996) study which claims to undermine externalism, and argue that the study fails in …Read more
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33Psychological essentialism and semantic externalism: Evidence for externalism in lay speakers’ language usePhilosophical Psychology 22 (1): 37-60. 2009.
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51Why the New Missing Explanation Argument Fails, TooErkenntnis 64 (2): 169-175. 2006.The so-called missing explanation argument, put forward by Mark Johnston in the late 80’s purported to show that our ordinary concepts of secondary qualities such as the colours cannot be response-dependent. A number of flaws were soon found in the argument. Partly in response to the criticism directed at the original argument, Johnston presented a new version in 1998. In this paper I show that the new version fails, too, for a simple reason: the kind of explanation which Johnston claims to be i…Read more
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334Psychological essentialism and semantic externalism Evidence for externalism in lay speakers' language useProceedings of the Xxii World Congress of Philosophy 39 (1): 105-110. 2008.Some experimental studies have recently claimed to undermine semantic externalism about natural kind terms. However, it is unclear how philosophical accounts of reference can be experimentally tested. We present two externalistic adaptations of psychological placeholder essentialism, a strict externalist and a hybrid externalist view, which are experimentally testable. We examine Braisby’s et al. (1996) study which claims to undermine externalism, and argue that the study fails in its aims. We c…Read more
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Water, Phlogiston, Brains, and VatsSorites 14 16-20. 2002.Ted Warfield has presented a new version of the Putnamian argument for the conclusion that we are not brains in a vat. This version is intended to avoid reliance on some questionable background assumptions which other versions have made. It seems that Warfield's argument fails, for reasons pointed out by Anthony Brueckner. However, in this paper I present a new version of the argument -- my version relies on assumptions no more objectionable than Warfield's, yet it is immune to Brueckner's objec…Read more
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30Semantic burden-shifting and temporal externalismInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (9-10): 919-929. 2020.ABSTRACT Temporal externalism is the view that the meanings and extensions of linguistic expressions can be partly determined by contingent linguistic and/or conceptual developments that take place after the time of utterance. In this paper, I first clarify what it would take for temporal externalism to be true, relying on the notion of burden-shifting dispositions. I then go on to argue that existing thought experiments give us reason to expect that temporal externalism can be true of some natu…Read more
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53Reports from Twin Earth: Both deep structure and appearance determine the reference of natural kind termsMind and Language 36 (3): 377-403. 2020.Following the influential thought experiments by Hilary Putnam and others, philosophers of language have for the most part adopted semantic externalism concerning natural kind terms. In this article, we present results from three experiments on the reference of natural kind terms. Our results confirm some standard externalist assumptions, but are in conflict with others: Ordinary speakers take both appearance and underlying nature to be central in their categorization judgments. Moreover, our re…Read more
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226Semantic externalism and A Priori self-knowledgeRatio 19 (2): 149-159. 2006.The argument known as the 'McKinsey Recipe' tries to establish the incompatibility of semantic externalism (about natural kind concepts in particular) and _a priori _self- knowledge about thoughts and concepts by deriving from the conjunction of these theses an absurd conclusion, such as that we could know _a priori _that water exists. One reply to this argument is to distinguish two different readings of 'natural kind concept': (i) a concept which _in fact _denotes a natural kind, and (ii) a co…Read more
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60Review of David braddon-Mitchell, Robert Nola (eds.), Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (8). 2009.
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94Soames and Zalabardo on kripkes WittgensteinGrazer Philosophische Studien 64 (1): 157-73. 2002.Two counterarguments, given by Scott Soames and Jos
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89Rigid Kind TermsProceedings of the Xxii World Congress of Philosophy 39 55-61. 2008.Kripke argued, famously, that proper names are rigid designators. It is often assumed that some kind terms (most prominently natural kind terms) are rigid designators as well. This is thought to have significant theoretical consequences, such as the necessity of certain a posteriori identities involving natural kind terms. However, there is no agreement on what it is for a kind term to be rigid. In this paper I will first take a detailed look at the most common view: that rigid kind terms are th…Read more
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239Rigidity and actuality-dependencePhilosophical Studies 157 (3): 399-410. 2012.It is generally assumed that rigidity plays a key role in explaining the necessary a posteriori status of identity statements, both between proper names and between natural kind terms. However, while the notion of rigid designation is well defined for singular terms, there is no generally accepted definition of what it is for a general term to be rigid. In this paper I argue that the most common view, according to which rigid general terms are the ones which designate the same kind in all possib…Read more
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3Jessica Brown, Anti-Individualism and Knowledge Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 25 (1): 12-14. 2005.
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29Reality and Humean Supervenience (review)Dialogue 42 (2): 389-390. 2003.When a volume deals with the work of a philosopher such as David Lewis who has worked on a broad range of questions, it is helpful to restrict the topics in some manner. The editors of this collection of essays have chosen Humean supervenience as the unifying theme. However, only one of the papers is directly concerned with supervenience. The rest are on subjects such as modal realism, time travel, endurance vs. perdurance, causation, conditionals, and physicalism about the mind. In Lewis’s phil…Read more
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157On deriving essentialism from the theory of referencePhilosophical Studies 172 (8): 2141-2151. 2015.Causal theories of reference for natural kind terms are widely agreed to play a central role in arguments for the claim that theoretical identity statements such as “Water is H2O” are necessary, if true. However, there is also fairly wide-spread agreement, due to the arguments of Nathan Salmon, that causal theories of reference do not alone establish such essentialism about natural kinds: an independent, non-trivial essentialist premise is also needed. In this paper I will question this latter a…Read more
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153Kripke's finiteness objection to dispositionalist theories of meaningIn M. E. Reicher & J. C. Marek (eds.), Experience and Analysis: Papers of the 27th International Wittgenstein Symposium, Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society. 2004.It is often thought that Blackburn and Boghossian have provided an effective reply to the finiteness objection to dispositional theories of meaning, presented by Kripke's Wittgenstein. In this paper I distinguish two possible readings of the sceptical demand for meaning-constitutive facts. The demand can be formulated in one of two ways: an A-question or a B-question. Any theory of meaning will give one of these explanatory priority over the other. I will then argue that the standard reply only …Read more
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95Proto-RigiditySynthese 150 (2): 155-169. 2006.What is it for a predicate or a general term to be a rigid designator? Two strategies for answering this question can be found in the literature, but both run into severe difficulties. In this paper, it is suggested that proper names and the usual examples of rigid predicates share a semantic feature which does the theoretical work usually attributed to rigidity. This feature cannot be equated with rigidity, but in the case of singular terms this feature entails their rigidity, as understood in …Read more
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108How (not) to specify normal conditions for response-dependent conceptsAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 85 (2). 2007.The extensions of response-dependent concepts are a priori connected with the subjective responses that competent users of that concept have in normal conditions. There are two strategies for specifying normal conditions for response-dependent concepts: topic-specific and topic-neutral. On a topic-specific specification, a characterization of normal conditions would be given separately for each response-dependent concept (or a non-trivial subset of response-dependent concepts, such as our colour…Read more
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88A middle position between meaning finitism and meaning platonismInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 13 (1). 2005.David Bloor and Crispin Wright have argued, independently, that the proper lesson to draw from Wittgenstein's so-called rule-following considerations is the rejection of meaning Platonism. According to Platonism, the meaningfulness of a general term is constituted by its connection with an abstract entity, the (possibly) infinite extension of which is determined independently of our classificatory practices. Having rejected Platonism, both Bloor and Wright are driven to meaning finitism, the vie…Read more
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149Hindriks on rule-followingPhilosophical Studies 126 (2): 219-239. 2005.This paper is a reply to Frank Hindriks
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65A Sceptical Guide to Meaning and Rules: Defending Kripke's WittgensteinPhilosophical Quarterly 57 (229): 688-690. 2007.
Areas of Specialization
Theories of Reference |
The Basis of Meaning |
Rigid Designation |
Reference Failure |
Realism and Anti-Realism |
Areas of Interest
1 more
Theories of Reference |
Aspects of Reference |
The Basis of Meaning |
Rigid Designation |
Reference Failure |
Realism and Anti-Realism |