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43Knowledge by ignoringBehavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (5): 781-781. 1999.Some cases of implicit knowledge involve representations of (implicitly) known propositions, but this is not the only important type of implicit knowledge. Chomskian linguistics suggests another model of how humans can know more than is accessible to consciousness. Innate capacities to focus on a small range of possibilities, thereby ignoring many others, need not be grounded by inner representations of any possibilities ignored. This model may apply to many domains where human cognition “fills …Read more
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95Believing in languagePhilosophy of Science 63 (3): 338-373. 1996.We propose that the generalizations of linguistic theory serve to ascribe beliefs to humans. Ordinary speakers would explicitly (and sincerely) deny having these rather esoteric beliefs about language--e.g., the belief that an anaphor must be bound in its governing category. Such ascriptions can also seem problematic in light of certain theoretical considerations having to do with concept possession, revisability, and so on. Nonetheless, we argue that ordinary speakers believe the propositions e…Read more
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44CensorshipIn Paisley Livingston & Carl Plantinga (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, RoutledgeFor individuals at all points on the political spectrum, and especially for those engaged in any form of expressive enterprise – from comic book illustrators, to film directors, to performance artists – censorship typically carries very negative connotations. Indeed, for many, censorship is the very antithesis of freedom and creativity. However, we can and should conceive of censorship more neutrally – simply as the imposition of constraints. On such a construal, censorship is not obviously alwa…Read more
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62Who's Afraid of Feminism? (review)Dialogue 35 (2): 327-342. 1996.Philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers's target inWho Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Womenis “gender feminism.” Her aim is to convince us that gender feminists are anti-intellectual opportunists who deliberately spread lies about the incidence of date rape (chap. 10), domestic battery (Preface, chap. 9) and about the general state of male-female relations in America (chaps. 1, 9 and 11), thereby generating fear and resentment of men (chap. 2), all so that they may secure vast amounts of gov…Read more
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Robert V. Hannaford, Moral Anatomy and Moral Reasoning (review)Philosophy in Review 15 246-249. 1995.
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Robert V. Hannaford, Moral Anatomy and Moral Reasoning Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 15 (4): 246-249. 1995.
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1Gerald Dworkin, ed., Morality, Harm and the Law Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 15 (1): 29-32. 1995.
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36Does Moral Philosophy have a Future? Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture, and Philosophy, Michele M. Moody-Adams , 270 pp., $35.00 cloth (review)Ethics and International Affairs 13 269-271. 1999.
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7Moral competenceIn Kumiko Murasugi & Robert Stainton (eds.), Philosophy and Linguistics, Westview Press. pp. 169--190. 1999.
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Learning from experience: moral phenomenology and politicsIn Bat-Ami Bar On & Ann Ferguson (eds.), Daring to Be Good: Essays in Feminist Ethico-Politics, Routledge. pp. 28--44. 1998.
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1So far as we know, we are the only species capable of introspection, and thus, sometimes, of insight into our own individual and collective nature. Arguably, the entire discipline of philosophy and, much more recently, of psychology, is premised on this simply stated but complicated fact. We are also a social species, each of us desiring – perhaps, even needing – to live as one among others. Taken together, these perfectly trite observations invite a number of questions regarding the nature of t…Read more
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80Dupoux and Jacob's moral instincts: throwing out the baby, the bathwater and the bathtubTrends in Cognitive Sciences 12 (1): 1-2. 2008.
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68Reconciliation for realistsEthics and International Affairs 13. 1999.The rhetoric of reconciliation is common in situations where traditional judicial responses to past wrongdoing are unavailable because of corruption, large numbers of offenders, or anxiety about the political consequences. But what constitutes reconciliation?
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79We must admire the ambition of Prinz’s title question. But does he provide a convincing answer to it? Prinz’s own view of morality as “a byproduct – accidental or invented – of faculties that evolved for different purposes (1),” which appears to express a negative reply, does not receive much direct argument here. Rather, Prinz’s main aim is to try to show that the considerations he believes are typically presented by moral nativists are insufficient or inadequate to establish that morality is i…Read more
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25Abortion raises a number of difficult questions for morality, law, and public policy. When, if ever, is abortion morally permissible? Do women have a legal right to abortion, and how is that right to be justified? Ought abortions for poor women be funded by the state? These questions are related in the sense that answers to any one of them have implications for answers to the others. But it is crucial to remember that they are different questions. For example, suppose abortion is never morally p…Read more
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214Moral dumbfounding and the linguistic analogy: Methodological implications for the study of moral judgmentMind and Language 24 (3): 274-296. 2009.The manifest dissociation between our capacity to make moral judgments and our ability to provide justifications for them, a phenomenon labeled Moral Dumbfounding, has important implications for the theory and practice of moral psychology. I articulate and develop the Linguistic Analogy as a robust alternative to existing sentimentalist models of moral judgment inspired by this phenomenon. The Linguistic Analogy motivates a crucial distinction between moral acceptability and moral permissibility…Read more
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2Andrews Reath, Barbara Herman, and Christine M. Korsgaard, eds., Reclaiming the History of Ethics. Essays for John Rawls Reviewed by (review)Philosophy in Review 18 (4): 294-297. 1998.
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31Depending on how one looks at it, we have been enjoying or suffering a significant empirical turn in moral psychology during this first decade of the 21st century. While philosophers have, from time to time, considered empirical matters with respect to morality, those who took an interest in actual (rather than ideal) moral agents were primarily concerned with whether particular moral theories were ‘too demanding’ for creatures like us (Flanagan, 1991; Williams, 1976; Wolf, 1982). Faithful adher…Read more
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1Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter, eds., Feminist Epistemologies Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 14 (3): 155-157. 1994.
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90Review of Abigail Levin, The Cost of Free Speech: Pornography, Hate Speech, and Their Challenge to Liberalism (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2011 (2). 2011.
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78Moral Development and Moral ResponsibilityThe Monist 86 (2): 181-199. 2003.At the end of Section III of “Freedom and Resentment,” just after he has drawn our attention to the reactive attitudes, P. F. Strawson remarks, “The object of these commonplaces is to try to keep before our minds something it is easy to forget when we are engaged in philosophy, especially in our cool, contemporary style, viz., what it is actually like to be involved in ordinary inter-personal relationships, ranging from the most intimate to the most casual.” It is striking, then, that the propon…Read more
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16The Meaning of Mind: Language, Morality, and Neuroscience Thomas Szasz Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996, x + 182 pp., $19.95 (review)Dialogue 38 (2): 420-. 1999.
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13Morality is so steeped in the quotidian details of praise and blame, of do’s and don’t’s, and of questions about the justifiability of certain practices it is no wonder that philosophers and psychologists have devoted relatively little effort to investigating what makes moral life possible in the first place. In making this claim, I neither ignore Kant and his intellectual descendants, nor the large literature in developmental moral psychology from Piaget on. My charge has to do with this fact: …Read more
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