Collaborations with George Graham
The
How to be Realistic About Folk Psychology (with G. Graham), Philosophical Psychology 1 (1988), 69-81.
Folk psychological realism is the view that folk psychology is true and that people really do have propositional attitudes, whereas antirealism is the view that folk psychology is false and people really do not have propositional attitudes. We argue that antirealism 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 nonscientific. We argue that nonscientific realism, while perhaps unpopular among philosophers of mind, is a distinct form of realism from scientific realism, and that it is not yet knowable whether scientific or nonscientific realism is true. We also outline how adopting realism, but remaining neutral between scientific and nonscientific realism, offers fresh insights into such topics as instrumentation, supervenience, the language of thougth hypothesis, and eliminativism.
In Defense of Southern Fundamentalism (with G. Graham), Philosophical Studies 62 (1991), 107-34. Reprinted in S. Christensen and D. Turner, eds., Folk Psychology and the Philosophy of Mind (Erlbuam, 1993).
Southern Fundamentalism, a form of realism about folk psychology, asserts that there is only a minimal conceptual gap between (1) satisfying ordinary, behavior-based standards for the attribution of propositional attitutdes, and (2) being a true believer; hence it is overwhelmingly likely that there are true believers. Under Southern Fundamentalism, the integrity of folk psychology is not threatened by debates about whether folk psychology is destined to become part of mature science, whether there is a language of thought, or whether any other of the strong empirical commitments sometimes attributed to folk psychology are satisfied.
Southern Fundamentalism and the End of Philosophy (with G. Graham), Philosophical Issues 5 (1994), 219-47. Reprinted in M. DePaul and W. Ramsey (eds.), Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophy, Rowman and Littlefield, 1998.
We describe and motivate a metaphilosophical position we call Post-Analytic Metaphilosophy, which asserts that inquiry into the nature and workings of human concepts, and into the semantics of the terms expressing these concepts, is both (1) a centrally important component of philosophy, and (2) a broadly empirical enterprise in which semantic intuitions figure as empirical data much as grammatically intuitions figure as empirical data in linguistics. We also describe, illustrate, and motivate a species of Post-Analytic Metaphilosophy we call Southern Fundamentalist Metaphilosophy, which asserts that philosophically interesting concepts are generally austere, rather than opulent, in their ideological commitments.
Mary Mary, Quite Contrary (with G. Graham). Philosophical
Studies 99 (2000), 59-87.
This paper offers a redesign of the
thought experiment which serves as the basis for the so-called knowledge
argument for antiphysicalism about phenomenal
properties. Instead of Mary, the new experiment features Mary Mary. The main difference between Mary Mary
and Mary is that Mary Mary is a fan of materialist
metaphysics. In particular, she is an advocate of Michael Tye's
"Panic" theory. The redesign strengthens the argument. So much the worse for physicalism.
Sensations and Grain Processes (with G. Graham). In J. Fetzer
and G. Mulhauser (ed.), Consciousness and the Algorithms of Evolution. J. Benjamin
(2002), 63-86.
This article describes an
interdisciplinary research program for achieving a scientific understanding of
phenomenal consciousness. It identifies what we call the 'causal grain' of
phenomenal states, at both the neuropsychological and
functional-representational levels of description. It argues that questions
about the evolution of phenomenal consciousness can be addressed independently
of competing metaphysical positions.
