Masked Abilities and Compatibilism
(draft). This
paper offers an analysis of agential abilities in terms of dispositions. The
analysis is shown to provide the resources to defend a version of the
Principle of Alternate Possibilities against Frankfurt-style
counterexamples. Although this principle is often taken to be congenial to
incompatibilism about free action and determinism, the paper concludes by
using the dispositional analysis of abilities to argue for compatibilism, and
to show why the "master argument" for incompatibilism is unsound.
Knowability and the Capacity to Know
(PDF of
penultimate draft; please don't quote from or cite this version.) Forthcoming
in Synthese. Generalizations of Fitch's paradox of knowability
motivate the thesis that in saying that a truth is knowable, or that it could
be known, we do not mean that it is possible that it is
known. Instead, I argue, claims about knowability express capacities to
know. The paper concludes by explaining the requisite sense of "capacity" at
work here, and by showing how the paradox of knowability and its
generalizations are solved.
Counterparts and Actuality, with Timothy Williamson.
(PDF of penultimate draft;
please don't quote from or cite this version.) Mind 114,
pp.1-30, 2005. The language of quantified modal logic needs an
"actuality" operator to represent many modal claims of natural
language. But David Lewis's counterpart theory can be neither
extended nor revised to accommodate such an operator.
Accordingly counterpart theory should be rejected as a way of
understanding modality.
Dispositions and Habituals (PDF of penultimate draft; please
don't quote from or cite this version.) Noûs 39,
pp.43-82, 2005. Conditional accounts of disposition ascriptions, even
quite sophisticated ones, are mistaken. Instead, we should
accept the "Habitual Account" of disposition ascriptions,
according to which attributions of dispositions entail habitual
sentences, not conditional sentences.
Dispositions (Here) A survey article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
The Paradox of Believability (PDF) Fitch's paradox of knowability does
not depend essentially on the factivity of knowledge. A structurally
similar paradox can be generated for the non-factive attitude of belief.
The key to solving this paradox consists in recognizing a semantic
distinction between "S could believe p" and "It could be that S believes
p".
How Moore Beat the Skeptic (PDF)
Moore was right when it comes to the business about his hands.
