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How to refrain from answering Kripke’s puzzlePhilosophical Studies 161 (2): 287-308. 2012.In this paper, I investigate the prospects for using the distinction between rejection and denial to resolve Saul Kripke’s puzzle about belief. One puzzle Kripke presents in A Puzzle About Belief poses what would have seemed a fairly straightforward question about the beliefs of the bilingual Pierre, who is disposed to sincerely and reflectively assent to the French sentence Londres est jolie, but not to the English sentence London is pretty, both of which he understands perfectly well. The ques…Read more
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Hume's Treatment of Denial in the TreatisePhilosophers' Imprint 14. 2014.David Hume fancied himself the Newton of the mind, aiming to reinvent the study of human mental life in the same way that Newton had revolutionized physics. And it was his view that the novel account of belief he proposed in his Treatise of Human Nature was one of that work’s central philosophical contributions. From the earliest responses to the Treatise forward, however, there was deep pessimism about the prospects for his account. It is easy to understand the source of this pessimism: The con…Read more
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Adam SmithIn Margaret Cameron, Benjamin Hill & Robert J. Stainton (eds.), Sourcebook in the History of Philosophy of Language, Springer. pp. 853-858. 2016.Smith proposes an account of how languages developed. He did so not as historian, but as a philosopher with a special concern about how a nominalist could account for general terms. Names for individuals are taken as fairly unproblematic – say ‘Thames’ and ‘Avon’ for each of the respective rivers. But whence the word ‘river,’ applicable to more than one, if all that exist are particular objects? Smith’s view is not the usual one, according to which people deploy a powerful ability to abstract me…Read more
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Speaking Your Mind: Expression in Locke's Theory of LanguageProtoSociology 34 15-30. 2017.There is a tension between John Locke’s awareness of the fundamental importance of a shared public language and the manner in which his theorizing appears limited to offering a psychologistic account of the idiolects of individual speakers. I argue that a correct understanding of Locke’s central notion of signification can resolve this tension. I start by examining a long standing objection to Locke’s view, according to which his theory of meaning systematically gets the subject matter of our di…Read more
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Thomas Reid on Signs and LanguagePhilosophy Compass 12 (3). 2017.Thomas Reid's philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of language all rely on his account of signs and signification. On Reid's view, some entities play a role of indicating other entities to our minds. In some cases, our sensitivity to this indication is learned through experience, whereas in others, the sensitivity is built in to our natural constitutions. Unlike representation, which was presumed to depend on resemblances and necessary connections, signification is the sort of relati…Read more
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How To Avoid Mis‐Reiding Hume's Maxim Of ConceivabilityPhilosophical Quarterly 63 (250): 105-119. 2013.In his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Thomas Reid offers a barrage of objections to the view, held by David Hume, that conceivability implies possibility. In this paper, I present Reid's first two objections to the ‘maxim of conceivability’ and defend Hume from them. The first objection concerns our ability to understand impossible claims, while the second concerns thoughts about impossible claims (such as, for instance, the thought that they are impossible). Reid's objections have sp…Read more
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Conceiving without Concepts: Reid vs. The Way of IdeasProtoSociology 30 221-237. 2013.Thomas Reid is notorious for rejecting the orthodox theory of conception (OTC), according to which conceiving of an object involves a mental relationship to an idea of that object. In this paper, I examine the question of what this rejection amounts to, when we limit our attention to bare conception (rather than the more widely discussed case of perception). I present some of the purported advantages of OTC, and assess whether they provide a genuine basis for preferring OTC to a Reidian alternat…Read more
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Just Imagining Things: Hume's Conception-Based Account of CognitionDissertation, University of Southern California. 2011.Philosophers have routinely taken a pessimistic view of the account of cognition offered by David Hume in his Treatise of Human Nature, claiming that Hume's limited explanatory resources cannot capture the rich complexity of our thought, judgment, and reasoning. I provide a qualified defense of Hume's attempt to analyze a cognitive activity in terms of objectual conception, ie conceiving or imagining an object. I defend Hume from objections offered by his contemporary Thomas Reid (and echoed by …Read more
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Propositions and Judgments in Locke and Arnauld: A Monstrous and Unholy Union?Journal of the History of Philosophy 52 (2): 255-280. 2014.Philosophers have accused locke of holding a view about propositions that simply conflates the formation of a propositional thought with the judgment that a proposition is true, and charged that this has obviously absurd consequences.1 Worse, this account appears not to be unique to Locke: it bears a striking resemblance to one found in both the Port-Royal Logic (the Logic, for short) and the Port-Royal Grammar. In the Logic, this account forms part of the backbone of the traditional logic expou…Read more
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Locke, Hume, and Reid on the Objects of BeliefHistory of Philosophy Quarterly 35 (1): 21-38. 2018.
USC
Department Of Philosophy
Alumnus
Buffalo, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Philosophy of Language |
Areas of Interest
2 more
Epistemology |
Metaphilosophy |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |