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40A Map of Selves: Beyond Philosophy of Mind (review)Philosophical Quarterly 73 (3): 887-889. 2023.In many respects, N.M.L. Nathan's latest book feels timeless. Its brevity and pithiness especially remind one of Descartes’ Meditations; it even has similar ove.
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57Against God of the Truth-Value GapsAnalysis. forthcoming.Can God create an unliftable stone? Beall & Cotnoir propose that ‘God can create an unliftable stone’ is a truth-value gap (neither true nor false). However, this yields a revenge paradox on whether God can eschew gaps. Can God avoid gappy ascriptions of power? Either way, God’s power seems to have limits. In response, it may be said that ascribing God the power to avoid gaps is itself gappy—it concerns a power that God neither has nor lacks. Yet this ends up being inconsistent, for it implies t…Read more
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37Modest versus ultra-modest dialetheismAsian Journal of Philosophy 2 (2): 1-17. 2023.Jc Beall is known for defending modest dialetheism; this is the view that there are dialetheia, but only in the form of “spandrels” arising otherwise reasonable semantic terminology (e.g., the Liar paradox). Beall also regards his view as modest in partaking of a deflationary view of truth, a view where ‘true’ is a device of disquotational inference which expresses no “substantive property.” Beall supports deflationism by an appeal to Ockham’s razor; however, the premise that ‘true’ is fundament…Read more
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213Some contemporary philosophers suggest that we know just by introspection that folk psychological states exist. However, such an "armchair refutation" of eliminativism seems too easy. I first attack two strategems, inspired by Descartes, on how such a refutation might proceed. However, I concede that the Cartesian intuition that we have direct knowledge of representational states is very powerful. The rest of this paper then offers an error theory of how that intuition might really be mistaken. …Read more
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72What is Mental Fictionalism?In Tamás Demeter, T. Parent & Adam Toon (eds.), Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations, Routledge. pp. 1-24. 2022.This chapter introduces several versions of mental fictionalism, along with the main lines of objection and reply. It begins by considering the debate between eliminative materialism (“eliminativism”) versus realism about mental states as conceived in “folk psychology” (i.e., beliefs, desires, intentions, etc.). Mental fictionalism offers a way to transcend the debate by allowing talk of mental states without a commitment to realism. The idea is to treat folk psychology as a “story” and three di…Read more
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102Mental fictionalism holds that folk psychology should be regarded as a kind of fiction. The present version gives a Lewisian prefix semantics for mentalistic discourse, where roughly, a mentalistic sentence “p” is true iff “p” is deducible from the folk psychological fiction. An eliminativist version of the view can seem self-refuting, but this charge is neutralized. Yet a different kind of “self-effacing” emerges: Mental fictionalism appears to be a mere “parasite” on a future science of cognit…Read more
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198Philosophy is a Great Success, and We are Fooled into Thinking OtherwiseIn Mitchell Green & Jan Michel (eds.), William Lycan on Mind, Meaning, and Method, Palgrave. forthcoming.[For a planned Festschrift on William Lycan, edited by Mitch Green and Jan Michel.] Lycan (2022) sums up his (2019) _On Evidence in Philosophy_ as a “dolorous” book. This is primarily because the book claims that the field is infected with non-rational socio-psychological forces (fashion, bias, etc.) and that there is a persistent lack of consensus on philosophical questions. In this paper, I primarily rebut Lycan's second reason for dolorousness. For one, if we attend carefully to his text, his…Read more
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72Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations (edited book)Routledge. 2022.What are mental states? When we talk about people’s beliefs or desires, are we talking about what is happening inside their heads? If so, might cognitive science show that we are wrong? Might it turn out that mental states do not exist? Mental fictionalism offers a new approach to these longstanding questions about the mind. Its core idea is that mental states are useful fictions. When we talk about mental states, we are not formulating hypotheses about people’s inner machinery. Instead, we simp…Read more
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111A Critical Introduction to the Metaphysics of Modality, by Andrea Borghini: London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2016, pp. vii + 224, £22.99 (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (1): 204-204. 2018.
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39Halverson’s non-equivalent concepts of equivalence: Hans Halvorson: The logic in philosophy of science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, xiii +296 pp, £26.99 PB (review)Metascience 30 (1): 99-102. 2021.
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91I Think; Therefore, I am a FictionIn Tamás Demeter, T. Parent & Adam Toon (eds.), Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations, Routledge. 2022.The Cartesian thinking self may seem indisputably real. But if it is real, then so thinking, which would undercut mental fictionalism. Thus, in defense of mental fictionalism, this paper argues for fictionalism about the thinking self. In short form, the argument is: (1) If I exist outside of fiction, then I am identical to (some part of/) this biomass [= my body]. (2) If I die at t, I cease to exist at t. (3) If I die at t, no part of this biomass ceases to exist at t. (4) Therefore, no part of…Read more
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174Ontological Commitment and QuantifiersIn Ricki Bliss & James Miller (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics, Routledge. 2020.This is a slightly opinionated review of three main factions in metaontology: Quineans, Carnapians, and Meinongians. Emphasis is given to the last camp, as the metaontological aspect of Meinongianism has been underappreciated. The final section then offers some general remarks about the legitimacy of ontology, touching on ideas I have developed in other publications.
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110Colivan Commitment, vis-à-vis Moore’s ParadoxPhilosophia 47 (2): 323-333. 2019.This is a contribution to a symposium on Annalisa Coliva's book _The Varieties of Self-Knowledge_. I present her notion of a "commitment" and how it is used in her treatment of Moore paradoxical assertions and thoughts (e.g., "I believe that it is raining, but it is not;" "It is raining but I do not believe that it is"). The final section notes the points of convergence between her constitutivism about self-knowledge of commitments, and the constitutivism from my book _Self-Reflection for the Op…Read more
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143Draft of March 2022. This is a draft of the front matter and ch. 1, for a new book manuscript on metametaphysics.
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88This draft now appears (in revised form) as Chapter 6 of _Self-Reflection for the Opaque Mind_. See http://philpapers.org/rec/PARSFT-3.
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329Rule Following and MetaontologyJournal of Philosophy 112 (5): 247-265. 2015.Wittgenstein’s rule-following argument suggests that linguistic understanding does not consist in knowing interpretations, whereas Kripkenstein’s version suggests that meaning cannot be metaphysically fixed by interpretations. In the present paper, rule-following considerations are used to suggest that certain ontological questions cannot be answered by interpretations. Specifically, if the aim is to specify the ontology of a language, an interpretation cannot answer what object an expression of…Read more
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186Infallibilism about self-knowledgePhilosophical Studies 133 (3): 411-424. 2007.Descartes held the view that a subject has infallible beliefs about the contents of her thoughts. Here, I first examine a popular contermporary defense of this claim, given by Burge, and find it lacking. I then offer my own defense appealing to a minimal thesis about the compositionality of thoughts. The argument has the virtue of refraining from claims about whether thoughts are “in the head;” thus, it is congenial to both internalists and externalists. The considerations here also illuminate h…Read more
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471Ontic terms and metaontology, or: on what there actually isPhilosophical Studies 170 (2): 199-214. 2014.Terms such as ‘exist’, ‘actual’, etc., (hereafter, “ontic terms”) are recognized as having uses that are not ontologically committing, in addition to the usual commissive uses. (Consider, e.g., the Platonic and the neutral readings of ‘There is an even prime’.) In this paper, I identify five different noncommissive uses for ontic terms, and (by a kind of via negativa) attempt to define the commissive use, focusing on ‘actual’ as my example. The problem, however, is that the resulting definiens f…Read more
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141Infallibility Naturalized: Reply to HoffmannDialectica 67 (3): 353-358. 2013.The present piece is a reply to G. Hoffmann on my infallibilist view of self-knowledge. Contra Hoffmann, it is argued that the view does not preclude a Quinean epistemology, wherein every belief is subject to empirical revision
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244Here I first raise an argument purporting to show that Lewis’ Modal Realism ends up being entirely trivial. But although I reject this line, the argument reveals how difficult it is to interpret Lewis’ thesis that possibilia “exist.” Five natural interpretations are considered, yet upon reflection, none appear entirely adequate. On the three different “concretist” interpretations of ‘exist’, Modal Realism looks insufficient for genuine ontological commitment. Whereas, on the “multiverse” interpr…Read more
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189An Objection to the Laplacean ChalmersJournal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 47 (1): 237-240. 2016.I discuss David Chalmers’ “scrutability thesis,” roughly that a Laplacean intellect could know every truth about the universe from a “compact class” of basic truths. It is argued that despite Chalmers’ remarks to the contrary, the thesis is problematic owing to quantum indeterminacy. Chalmers attempts to “frontload” various principles into the compact class to help out. But though frontloading may succeed in principle, Chalmers does not frontload enough to avoid the problem.
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393Self‐Knowledge and Externalism about Empty ConceptsAnalytic Philosophy 56 (2): 158-168. 2015.Several authors have argued that, assuming we have apriori knowledge of our own thought-contents, semantic externalism implies that we can know apriori contingent facts about the empirical world. After presenting the argument, I shall respond by resisting the premise that an externalist can know apriori: If s/he has the concept water, then water exists. In particular, Boghossian's Dry Earth example suggests that such thought-experiments do not provide such apriori knowledge. Boghossian himself r…Read more
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244In the Mental Fiction, Mental Fictionalism is FictitiousThe Monist 96 (4): 605-621. 2013.Here I explore the prospects for fictionalism about the mental, modeled after fictionalism about possible worlds. Mental fictionalism holds that the mental states posited by folk psychology do not exist, yet that some sentences of folk psychological discourse are true. This is accomplished by construing truths of folk psychology as “truths according to the mentalistic fiction.” After formulating the view, I identify five ways that the view appears self-refuting. Moreover, I argue that this canno…Read more
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300_Self-Reflection for the Opaque Mind_ attempts to solve a grave problem about critical self-reflection. Psychological studies indicate not just that we are bad at detecting our own "ego-threatening" thoughts; they also suggest that we are ignorant of even our ordinary thoughts. However, self-reflection presupposes an ability to know one’s own thoughts. So if ignorance is the norm, why attempt self-reflection? While admitting the psychological data, this book argues that we are infallible in a li…Read more
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68This draft now appears (in revised form) as Chapter 7 of _Self-Reflection for the Opaque Mind_. See http://philpapers.org/rec/PARSFT-3.
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190Quine and logical truthErkenntnis 68 (1). 2008.It is a consequence of Quine’s confirmation holism that the logical laws are in principle revisable. Some have worried this is at odds with another dictum in Quine, viz., that any translation which construes speakers as systematically illogical is ipso facto inadequate. In this paper, I try to formulate exactly what the problem is here, and offer a solution to it by (1) disambiguating the term ‘logic,’ and (2) appealing to a Quinean understanding of ‘necessity.’ The result is that the different …Read more
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261[Draft substantially revised, September 2021] David Lewis acclimated us to talk of “nonactual concreta that exist,” regarding talking donkeys and the like. I shall argue that this was not for the best, and try to normalize a way of describing them as “actual concreta that do not exist.” The basis of this is a defense of the Meinongian thesis “there are objects of which it is true that there are no such objects,” re: fictitious and illusory objects. I first formulate the problem of negative exist…Read more
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181On the PROVER9 Ontological ArgumentPhilosophia 43 (2): 475-483. 2015.Oppenheimer & Zalta have re-formulated their non-modal version of the ontological argument, with the help of PROVER9, an automated reasoning engine. The authors end up rejecting the new argument; however, the theist has a rejoinder worth considering. But after presenting the rejoinder, I highlight that the conceivability of the being does not imply its possibility. One lesson is that even non-modal ontological arguments must engage modal matters concerning God. Another lesson is that if PROVER9 …Read more
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165Content Externalism and Quine’s Criterion are IncompatibleErkenntnis 82 (3): 625-639. 2017.Externalism holds that the content of our utterances and thoughts are determined partly by the environment. Here, I offer an argument which suggests that externalism is incompatible with a natural view about ontological commitment--namely, the Quinean view that such commitments are fixed by the range of the variables in your theory. The idea in brief is that if Oscar mistakenly believes that water = XYZ, the externalist ontologically commits Oscar to two waterish kinds, whereas the Quinean commi…Read more