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Category Archives: The Amateur Philosopher

Philosophy for the fun of it

A Stronger Claim about Projectability

So, I recently wrote a post that was intended to be an attack on Quine’s argument for natural kinds. And tucked away in the very last paragraph, I think I put the most important statement of the post: It’s really not just an attack on Quine’s argument. It’s an attack on a much more general [...]

A Bit of Fluff on Newcomb’s Paradox

So, at first, I was really excited by the argument I’m going to make in this post, and I still think it’s kind of fun. But all it really is is yet another argument for two-boxing. And there are kazillions of arguments for two-boxing out there. At any rate, here’s one more, presented for your [...]

The Trouble with Natural Kinds: Quine’s Version

Although I’m a realist about scientific entities, I’m not a realist about natural kinds. In fact, anti-realism about natural kinds was, at one point, going to be the focus of my dissertaion (around and about my second year). Nothing *deeply* has changed about my problems with most standard accounts of natural kind terms, but I [...]

Moritz Schlick, Hard-Core Realist

I’m not really a verificationist (see here for the beginnings of my account of content), but I have a lot of general sympathy for verificationism, and I think the verificationists were certainly onto something both true and important, even if they didn’t get the formulation quite right.
I am not a metaphysical anti-realist, though, and it’s always [...]

What My Dissertation Should Have Been About

I’m going to do something here that I very rarely did as a graduate student in philosophy: Present the beginnings of a positive theory. This, I think, was what I had seen my dissertation as leading up to, although it never got there and I’ve only recently thought of a completely choate way of expressing [...]