On the causal-teleological approach to mind, mental phenomena wind up systematically dependent upon the physical without being reducible thereto. This sort of 'nonreductive materialism' makes it notoriously difficult to understand how mental events can cause physical effects, and answering this last question is one major theme in the papers below.
The other main theme is the nature of linguistic meaning and its relation to language use. On these matters I find Paul Grice's work to be most illuminating, and several papers below attempt to defend, extend, and where necessary revise the Gricean programme.
My research interests include also various topics in metaphysics (especially the nature of causation), epistemology, metaphilosophy, the philosophy of biology, and environmental ethics.
Under construction--more coming soon
Abstract: Advocates of linguistic pragmatics often appeal to a principle which Paul Grice called Modified Occam’s Razor: ‘Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity’. Superficially, Grice’s principle seems a routine application of the principle of parsimony (‘Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity’). But parsimony arguments, though common in science, are notoriously problematic, and their use by Griceans faces numerous objections. This paper argues that Modified Occam’s Razor makes considerably more sense in light of certain assumptions about the processes involved in language acquisition, and it describes recent empirical findings that bear these assumptions out. The resulting account solves several difficulties that otherwise confront Grice’s principle, and it draws attention to problematic assumptions involved in using parsimony to argue for pragmatic accounts of linguistic phenomena.
Abstract. This paper enters the continuing fray over the semantic significance of Donnellan’s referential/attributive distinction. Some hold that the distinction is at bottom a pragmatic one: i.e., that the difference between the referential use and the attributive use arises at the level of speaker’s meaning rather the level of sentence- or utterance- meaning. This view has recently been challenged by Marga Reimer and Michael Devitt, both of whom argue that the fact that descriptions are regularly, that is standardly, used to refer defeats the pragmatic approach. The present paper examines a variety of issues bearing on the regularity in question: whether the regularity would arise in a Russellian language, whether the regularity is similar to the standard use of complex demonstratives, and whether the pragmatic approach founders on the problem of dead metaphors. I argue that the pragmatic approach can readily explain all of these facets of the referential use of descriptions.
Abstract. A typical thesis of contemporary materialism holds that mental properties and events supervene on, without being reducible to, physical properties and events. Many philosophers have grown skeptical about the causal efficacy of irreducibly supervenient properties, however, and one of the main reasons is an assumption about causation which Kim calls the causal exclusion principle. I argue here that this principle runs afoul of cases of genuine causal overdetermination. Many would argue that causal overdetermination is impossible anyway, but a careful analysis of these arguments shows them to be misguided. Finally, I examine the reasons given in support of the causal exclusion principle, and I conclude that it is plausible if, and probably only if, a certain view of the nature of causation turns out to be correct. Since that view of causation is unacceptable to nonreductivists on other grounds, however, it turns out that exclusion-based arguments essentially beg the question.
|
More information is available on my Vitae.
'Yard sale' in the Sun Bowl (Whistler, BC)