some published and unpublished work   

  epistemology philosophy of mindemotions & imagination   ethics       language          other     

a full list of my publications  


epistemologyxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Precis and contents of Bounded Thinking: epistemic virtues for limited agents  OUP, 2012. Analytical epistemology marries descriptive decision theory and their offspring solves problems of bounded cognition.

Accomplishment  A radical symmetry between belief and action. a xxxxxx
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Accomplishing Accomplishment (Acta Analytica 2011) Consequences of the symmetry.

Acting to Know. Synthese, to appear.  Experimentation as a special case of doing something in order to know something.

Contrastive Knowledge (in M Blaauw, ed. Contrastivism in Philosophy.) What is gained by taking knowledge as contrastive.

Human Bounds (Synthese 2010 - issue on bounded rationality). Why giving advice about coping with our limits is different from finding the best ways of coping with them.

Knowing what to think about: when epistemology meets the theory of choice  in Epistemology Futures, edited by Stephen Hetherington, Oxford University Press. (pdf) 

If you’re so smart why are you ignorant  (Analysis, 2002)   Epistemic analogs of  causal decision theory, even of Newcomb’s paradox. 

Epistemic virtues, metavirtues, and computational complexity (Nous 38, 2004) Limitations on our ability to think givereasons for describing ourselves in terms of cognitive virtues instead of justified beliefs. 

Contrastive Knowledge (Philosophical Explorations, May 2003 -with Antti Karjalainen) "a knows that p rather than q" is often less puzzling than "a knows that p".  

Contrastivity and indistinguishability  (Social Epistemology 2008) Contrastive attitudes in general

Saving epistemology from the epistemologists (British J. for the Phil. of Science, 1999) survey article.

review of John Hawthorne Knowledge and Lotteries   Philosophical Quarterly 2005 

review of Ernest Sosa Knowing Full Well.  Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2011 (link)

emotions

Precis and contents of Emotion and Imagination, Polity Press, 2013.  Imagining points of view gives us such a range of emotions, among them moral emotions, and among these undesirable moral emotions such as  smugness and priggery. A small book that began as a collection of papers. 

Imaginary Emotions (The Monist, to appear)  We imagine and ascribe emotions that do not exist.

Surprise (to appear in Todd and Roeser, Emotion and Value)  The value of the emotion of surprise, and of our lack of surprise that surprising things happen.

Imagination and misimagination (in Shaun Nichols, ed. The Architecture of the Imagination.) Imaginative perspective, imagination versus misimagination, fiction. 

Empathy for the devil (in Peter Goldie and Amy Coplan, eds. Empathy.Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives) How we can imagine evil actions, and why decent people find it difficult. 

Beware Stories (in Peter Goldie, ed. Understanding Emotions Ashgate 2001) Emotions are closely related to virtues, but there are important contrasts between them. 

Emotional Accuracy  (half of a Joint Session symposium, 2002,  with Ronald de Sousa).  Emotions are not true or false, but they can be accurate or inaccurate with respect to situations.

review of Ronald de Sousa Emotional Truth (Philosophical Quarterly 2011) 


philosophy of mind

But are they right? The prospects for empirical conceptology   A commentary on papers in a XPhi issue of the Journal of Cognition and Culture  

folk psychology does not exist  (in D. Hutto & M. Ratcliffe eds Folk Psychology Reassessed) So have I been working on a myth, all these years? 

From tracking relations to propositional attitudes  European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 2009.  Propositional attitudes may not be basic in our concept of mind. 

other

Gibbard's principle of commitment   (unpublished)  a note criticising the central move of Allan Gibbard's Thinking how to Live.  

Felosophy    Cat philosophy! 

Philosophy as engineering  (from Mo Bou, ed. Two Roads to Wisdom?

Mathematical modelling and contrastive explanation (CJP supp vol 16, 1990: hard to find in libraries)   (html)

Disasters and Dilemmas  (book: out of print) 

ethics  xxxxxx
Good neighours and moral heroes  (in Pedro Tabensky, ed. The positive function of evil) There is no such thing as an all-round good person, because the perfect neighbour may not be what you need in a real crisis

Moral incompetence (in Values and Virtues, edited by T.J. Chappell.)  Often good people produce terrible results, and one reason is moral incompetence. 

The disunity of the moral  Morality is many different things.

Bad versus evil  Some of the conclusions of my book On Evil

language

Against the Ramsey Test (Analysis, 2004)  We don't evaluate indicative conditionals in terms of conditional probability.  (pdf)    

Indicative versus subjunctive in future conditionals  (Analysis, 2004)  There are both indicative and subjunctive future-tense conditionals. and sometimes the same words can be used to express both. 

Suppose, suppose (Analysis, 1993)  The embedding of one conditional in anothe.

Where demonstratives meet vagueness  My Aristotelian Society presidential address.  Ttwo unpopular views. (a) there are deep connections between vagueness and demonstratives, and (b) we can clarify some basic aspects of language by considering invented natural languages. 

Mathematics as language (in Benacerraf and his Critics, Blackwell 1996) Another experimental piece exploring the idea that we can learn something about how we understand language by considering our grasp of the non-natural symbol systems used in mathematics.