Princeton University
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 1995
Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
  • Taking Responsibility for Uncertainty
    with Zoe Fritz
    In Ben Davies, Gabriel De Marco, Neil Levy & Julian Savulescu (eds.), Responsibility and Healthcare. forthcoming.
  •  7
    Primitive Self‐Ascription
    In Barry Loewer & Jonathan Schaffer (eds.), A Companion to David Lewis, Wiley. 2015.
    David Lewis's account of the de se has two parts. The first part involves treating the objects of the attitudes, not as propositions but as properties. The second part involves treating our attitude to these properties as that of self‐ascription. In particular, much recent literature has tried to incorporate his account simply by treating the objects of the attitudes as centered worlds, where a centered world is an ordered pair of a possible world together with a spatiotemporal location. The exp…Read more
  •  204
    Knowing, Telling, Trusting
    Philosophical Quarterly 73 (3): 762-782. 2023.
    This paper falls into three parts. The first looks at wh-constructions, focussing on the so-called factual whs, ‘X knows where… ’, ‘when’, ‘who’, ‘what’ etc. I suggest, drawing on both linguistic considerations and evidence from developmental psychology, that these constructions take things as their objects, not propositions; and that this may be why they are learned before those taking sentential complements. The second part moves to the case of telling-wh: to constructions such as telling some…Read more
  •  46
    Too much medicine: not enough trust?
    with Zoë Fritz
    Journal of Medical Ethics 45 (1): 31-35. 2019.
    As many studies around the theme of ‘too much medicine’ attest, investigations are being ordered with increasing frequency; similarly the threshold for providing treatment has lowered. Our contention is that trust is a significant factor in influencing this, and that understanding the relationship between trust and investigations and treatments will help clinicians and policymakers ensure ethical decisions are more consistently made. Drawing on the philosophical literature, we investigate the na…Read more
  • Book Reviews (review)
    Theory, Culture and Society 8 (3): 245-246. 1991.
  • Causation and responsibility
    In John Tasioulas (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Law, Cambridge University Press. 2020.
  •  50
    Review of Feeling Like It, by Tamar Schapiro (review)
    Mind. forthcoming.
  •  37
    Memory, Persons and Dementia
    Studies in Christian Ethics 29 (3): 256-260. 2016.
    Memory is a complex phenomenon, so the loss of memory that occurs in dementia is equally complex. Accounts that deny personhood to dementia sufferers typically fail to accommodate that complexity.
  •  32
    Not Thinking About the Worst
    The Philosophers' Magazine 90 50-53. 2020.
  •  33
    The Illusion of Conscious Will
    Mind 113 (449): 218-221. 2004.
  •  18
    Too much medicine and the poor climate of trust
    with Zoe Fritz
    Journal of Medical Ethics 45 (11): 748-749. 2019.
    Joshua Parker has made many interesting points, and we welcome the opportunity to develop the ideas of ‘Too Much Medicine, Not Enough Trust’. We will address: (i) the asymmetry between the trust that patients extend to doctors, and the trust that doctors extend to patients; (ii) our reasons for doubting that litigation or complaints reflect a betrayal of the patient–doctor relationship and (iii) the importance of institutional trust, both for the doctor and the patient.
  •  87
    Lying About
    Journal of Philosophy 116 (2): 99-105. 2019.
    We do not report lies with that-clauses but with about-clauses: he lied about x. It is argued that this is because the content of a lie need not be the content of what is said, and about-clauses give us the requisite flexibility. Building on the work of Stephen Yablo, an attempt is made to give an account of lying about in terms of partial content and topic.
  •  1760
    What in the World is Weakness of Will?
    with Joshua May
    Philosophical Studies 157 (3). 2012.
    At least since the middle of the twentieth century, philosophers have tended to identify weakness of will with akrasia—i.e. acting, or having a disposition to act, contrary to one‘s judgments about what is best for one to do. However, there has been some recent debate about whether this captures the ordinary notion of weakness of will. Richard Holton (1999, 2009) claims that it doesn’t, while Alfred Mele (2010) argues that, to a certain extent, it does. As Mele recognizes, the question about an…Read more
  •  248
    The act of choice
    Philosophers' Imprint 6 1-15. 2006.
    Choice is one of the central elements in the experience of free will, but it has not received a good account from either compatibilists or libertarians. This paper develops an account of choice based around three features: (i) choice is an action; (ii) choice is not determined by one's prior beliefs and desires; (iii) once the question of what to do has arisen, choice is typically both necessary and sufficient for moving to action. These features might appear to support a libertarian account, bu…Read more
  •  202
    I am delighted to be able to comment on this piece by Baumeister, Crescioni and Alquist (henceforth BCA). Baumeister’s earlier work has had a huge influence on my own, and I find myself in very substantial agreement with what BCA have to say here. In particular, I agree that if the philosophical debate on free will is to move forward we need to pay close attention to what it is that agents are thinking when they talk of free will, to the experiences that give rise to their conviction that they h…Read more
  •  82
    Review: The Illusion of Conscious Will (review)
    Mind 113 (449): 218-221. 2004.
  •  36
    Some telling examples: A reply to Tsohatzidis
    Journal of Pragmatics 28 625-628. 1997.
    In a recent paper Savas Tsohatzidis has provided a number of putative counterexamples to the well-attested Kartunnen-Vendler (K-V) thesis that the use of 'tell' with a wh-complement requires that the speaker spoke truthfully. His counterexamples are sentences like: (1) Old John told us who he saw in the fog, but it turned out that he was mistaken. I argue that such examples do not serve to refute the K-V thesis. Rather, they are examples of a more general phenomenon that I label participant proj…Read more
  •  5065
    The Exception Proves the Rule
    Journal of Political Philosophy 18 (4): 369-388. 2009.
    When faced with a rule that they take to be true, and a recalcitrant example, people are apt to say: “The exception proves the rule”. When pressed on what they mean by this though, things are often less than clear. A common response is to dredge up some once-heard etymology: ‘proves’ here, it is often said, means ‘tests’. But this response—its frequent appearance even in some reference works notwithstanding1—makes no sense of the way in which the expression is used. To insist that the exception …Read more
  •  265
    Sources and Leapfrogging: Reply to Pickles
    Mind 104 (415): 583-584. 1995.
  •  50
    Animals and Alternatives
    The Philosophers' Magazine 81 14-15. 2018.
  •  217
    Rational resolve
    Philosophical Review 113 (4): 507-535. 2004.
    Empirical findings suggest that temptation causes agents not only to change their desires, but also to revise their beliefs, in ways that are not necessarily irrational. But if this is so, how can it be rational to maintain a resolution to resist? For in maintaining a resolution it appears that one will be acting against what one now believes to be best. This paper proposes a two-tier account according to which it can be rational neither to reconsider the question of what one is going to do nor …Read more
  •  45
    The Good/Bad Asymmetry
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 35 (1): 26-32. 2018.
  •  89
    Reason, value and the muggletonians
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (3). 1996.
    Michael Smith has argued that to value an action is to believe that if one were fully rational one would desire that one perform it. I offer the Muggletonians as a counter-example. The Muggletonians, a 17th century English sect, believed that reason was the path of the Devil. They believed that their fully rational selves - rational in just Smith's sense - would have blasphemed against God; and that their rational selves would have wanted their actual selves to do likewise. But blaspheming again…Read more
  •  197
    Willing, Wanting, Waiting
    Oxford University Press UK. 2009.
    Richard Holton provides a unified account of intention, choice, weakness of will, strength of will, temptation, addiction, and freedom of the will. Drawing on recent psychological research, he argues that, rather than being the pinnacle of rationality, the central components of the will are there to compensate for our inability to make or maintain sound judgments. Choice is understood as the capacity to form intentions even in the absence of judgments of what action is best. Weakness of will is …Read more
  •  28
    The case for open access
    The Philosophers' Magazine 65 10-13. 2014.
  •  51
    In (Holton 1996) I argued that the account of value that Michael Smith has offered was vulnerable to a counter-example in the person of the Muggletonians. Smith argued, roughly, that what one values is what one would desire if one were fully rational. I objected that the Muggletonians held the path of Reason to be the path to evil. According to them, a fully rational person would have their desires so corrupted that they would become, quite literally, Satan. Thus they believed that their fully r…Read more
  •  321
    What is the role of the self in self-deception?
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 101 (1): 53-69. 2001.
    The orthodox answer to my question is this: in a case of self-deception, the self acts to deceive itself. That is, the self is the author of its own deception. I want to explore an opposing idea here: that the self is rather the subject matter of the deception. That is, I want to explore the idea that self-deception is more concerned with the self’s deception about the self, than with the self’s deception by the self. The expression would thus be semantically comparable to expressions like ‘self…Read more
  •  132
    Self-control in the modern provocation defence
    with Stephen Shute
    Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 27 (1): 49-73. 2005.
    Most recent discussion of the provocation defence has focused on the objective test, and little attention has been paid to the subjective test. However, the subjective test provides a substantial constraint: the killing must result from a provocation that undermines the defendant's self-control. The idea of loss of self-control has been developed in both the philosophical and psychological literatures. Understanding the subjective test in the light of the conception developed there makes for a f…Read more