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8Les tremblements de terre aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: La naissance d'un risque (review)Isis 100 164-165. 2009.
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A Little Sensitivity goes a Long WayIn Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter (eds.), Context-sensitivity and semantic minimalism: new essays on semantics and pragmatics, Oxford University Press Uk. 2007.
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13À L'aube De La Géologie Moderne: Henri Gautier By François Ellenberger (review)Isis 70 619-619. 1979.
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109De Re And De Dicto: Against The Conventional WisdomNoûs 36 (s16): 225-265. 2002.Conventional wisdom has it that there is a class of attitude ascriptions such that in making an ascription of that sort, the ascriber undertakes a commitment to specify the contents of the ascribee’s head in what might be called a notionally sensitive, ascribee-centered way. In making such an ascription, the ascriber is supposed to undertake a commitment to specify the modes of presentation, concepts or notions under which the ascribee cognizes the objects (and properties) that her beliefs are a…Read more
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33Rampant moral relativism is widely decried as the leading source of the degeneracy of modern life.1 Though I proudly count myself a relativist, I rather doubt that relativism has anything like the cultural influence that its most ardent critics fearfully attribute to it. Much of what gets criticized under the rubric of relativism is often really no such thing. Relativists need not be hedonists, egoists, nihilists or even moral skeptics. Moreover, when it comes to the upper reaches of our intelle…Read more
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99Meaning, Reference and Cognitive SignificanceMind and Language 10 (1-2): 129-180. 1995.I argue that a certain initially appealing Fregean conception of our shared semantic competence in our shared language cannot be made good. In particular, I show that we must reject two fundamental Fregean principles‐what I call Frege's Adequacy Condition and what I call Frege's Cognitive Constraint on Reference Determination. Frege's adequacy condition says that in an adequate semantic theory, sentence meanings must have the same fineness of grain as attitude contents. The Cognitive Constraint …Read more
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124Singular beliefs and their ascriptionsIn Reference and the Rational Mind, Csli Publications. 2003.This essay defends three interlocking claims about singular beliefs and their ascriptions. The first is a claim about the nature of such beliefs; the second is a claim about the semantic contents of ascriptions of such beliefs; the third is a claim about the pragmatic significance of such ascriptions. With respect to the nature of singular belief, I claim that the contents of our singular beliefs are a joint product of mind and world, with neither mind nor world enjoying any peculiar priority ov…Read more
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107Names as Devices of Explicit Co-referenceErkenntnis 80 (S2): 235-262. 2015.This essay examines the syntax of names. It argues that names are a syntactically and not just semantically distinctive class of expressions. Its central claim is that names are a distinguished type of anaphoric device—devices of explicit co-reference. Finally it argues that appreciating the true syntactic distinctiveness of names is the key to resolving certain long-standing philosophical puzzles that have long been thought to be of a semantic nature
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63Toward a naturalistic theory of rational intentionalityIn Reference and the Rational Mind, Csli Publications. 2003.This essay some first steps toward the naturalization of what I call rational intentionality or alternatively type II intentionality. By rational or type II intentionality, I mean that full combination of rational powers and content-bearing states that is paradigmatically enjoyed by mature intact human beings. The problem I set myself is to determine the extent to which the only currently extant approach to the naturalization of the intentional that has the singular virtue of not being a non-sta…Read more
Stanford, California, United States of America