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53Austere Realism: Contextual Semantics Meets Minimal OntologyMIT Press. 2008.The authors of Austere Realism describe and defend a provocative ontological-cum-semantic position, asserting that the right ontology is minimal or austere, in that it excludes numerous common-sense posits, and that statements employing such posits are nonetheless true, when truth is understood to be semantic correctness under contextually operative semantic standards. Terence Horgan and Matjaz [hacek over z] Potrc [hacek over c] argue that austere realism emerges naturally from consideration of…Read more
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144Cognition needs syntax but not rulesIn Robert J. Stainton (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Cognitive Science, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 147--158. 2006.Human cognition is rich, varied, and complex. In this Chapter we argue that because of the richness of human cognition (and human mental life generally), there must be a syntax of cognitive states, but because of this very richness, cognitive processes cannot be describable by exceptionless rules. The argument for syntax, in Section 1, has to do with being able to get around in any number of possible environments in a complex world. Since nature did not know where in the world humans would find …Read more
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391Phenomenal intentionality and the brain in a vatIn Richard Schantz (ed.), The Externalist Challenge, De Gruyter. 2004.
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4Essays on ParadoxesOup Usa. 2016.This volume brings together Terence Horgan's essays on paradoxes, both published and new. A common theme unifying these essays is that philosophically interesting paradoxes typically resist either easy solutions or solutions that are formally/mathematically highly technical. Another unifying theme is that such paradoxes often have deep-sometimes disturbing-philosophical morals.
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52Connectionism and the Philosophy of Mind (edited book)Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1991."A third of the papers in this volume originated at the 1987 Spindel Conference ... at Memphis State University"--Pref.
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85Practicing safe epistemologyPhilosophical Studies 102 (3). 2001.Reliablists have argued that the important evaluative epistemic concept of being justified in holding a belief, at least to the extent that that concept is associated with knowledge, is best understood as concerned with the objective appropriateness of the processes by which a given belief is generated and sustained. In particular, they hold that a belief is justified only when it is fostered by processes that are reliable (at least minimally so) in the believer’s actual world.[1] Of course, rel…Read more
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Reality and Humean Supervenience: Essays on the Philosophy of David LewisLanham: Rowman &Amp; Littlefield. 2001.Reality and Humean Supervenience confronts the reader with central aspects in the philosophy of David Lewis, whose work in ontology, metaphysics, logic, probability, philosophy of mind, and language articulates a unique and systematic foundation for modern physicalism
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212A nonclassical framework for cognitive scienceSynthese 101 (3): 305-45. 1994.David Marr provided a useful framework for theorizing about cognition within classical, AI-style cognitive science, in terms of three levels of description: the levels of (i) cognitive function, (ii) algorithm and (iii) physical implementation. We generalize this framework: (i) cognitive state transitions, (ii) mathematical/functional design and (iii) physical implementation or realization. Specifying the middle, design level to be the theory of dynamical systems yields a nonclassical, alterna…Read more
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4Against the token identity theoryIn Brian P. McLaughlin & Ernest LePore (eds.), Actions and Events: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, Blackwell. 1985.
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3Internal-world skepticism and mental self-presentationIn Uriah Kriegel & Kenneth Williford (eds.), Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness, Mit Press. pp. 41-61. 2006.
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51Levels of description in nonclassical cognitive sciencePhilosophy 34 159-188. 1992.David Marr provided an influential account of levels of description in classical cognitive science. In this paper we contrast Marr'ent with some alternatives that are suggested by the recent emergence of connectionism. Marr's account is interesting and important both because of the levels of description it distinguishes, and because of the way his presentation reflects some of the most basic, foundational, assumptions of classical AI-style cognitive science . Thus, by focusing on levels of descr…Read more
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53Evidentially embedded epistemic entitlementSynthese 197 (11): 4907-4926. 2020.Some hold that beliefs arising out of certain sources such as perceptual experience enjoy a kind of entitlement—as one is entitled to believe what is thereby presented as true, at least unless further evidence undermines that entitlement. This is commonly understood to require that default epistemic entitlement is a non-evidential kind of epistemic warrant. Our project here is to challenge this common, non-evidential, conception of epistemic entitlement. We will argue that although there are ind…Read more
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97Connectionism and the Philosophy of PsychologyMIT Press. 1996.In Connectionism and the Philosophy of Psychology, Horgan and Tienson articulate and defend a new view of cognition.
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142What does it take to be a true believer? Against the opulent ideology of eliminative materialismIn Christina E. Erneling & David Martel Johnson (eds.), Mind As a Scientific Object, Oxford University Press. 2005.
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81How to be realistic about folk psychologyPhilosophical Psychology 1 (1): 69-81. 1988.Folk psychological realism is the view that folk psychology is true and that people really do have propositional attitudes, whereas anti-realism is the view that folk psychology is false and people really do not have propositional attitudes. We argue that anti-realism is not worthy of acceptance and that realism is eminently worthy of acceptance. However, it is plainly epistemically possible to favor either of two forms of folk realism: scientific or non-scientific. We argue that non-scientific …Read more
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67Supervenient bridge lawsPhilosophy of Science 45 (2): 227-249. 1978.I invoke the conceptual machinery of contemporary possible-world semantics to provide an account of the metaphysical status of "bridge laws" in intertheoretic reductions. I argue that although bridge laws are not definitions, and although they do not necessarily reflect attribute-identities, they are supervenient. I.e., they are true in all possible worlds in which the reducing theory is true
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28Modelling the noncomputational mind: Reply to LitchPhilosophical Psychology 10 (3): 365-371. 1997.I explain why, within the nonclassical framework for cognitive science we describe in the book, cognitive-state transitions can fail to be tractably computable even if they are subserved by a discrete dynamical system whose mathematical-state transitions are tractably computable. I distinguish two ways that cognitive processing might conform to programmable rules in which all operations that apply to representation-level structure are primitive, and two corresponding constraints on models of cog…Read more
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Tucson, Arizona, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |