Results for 'Frances Muecke'

409 found
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  1. How to think about mental content.Frances Egan - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 170 (1):115-135.
    Introduction: representationalismMost theorists of cognition endorse some version of representationalism, which I will understand as the view that the human mind is an information-using system, and that human cognitive capacities are representational capacities. Of course, notions such as ‘representation’ and ‘information-using’ are terms of art that require explication. As a first pass, representations are “mediating states of an intelligent system that carry information” (Markman and Dietrich 2001, p. 471). They have two important features: (1) they are physically realized, and so (...)
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  2. A Deflationary Account of Mental Representation.Frances Egan - 2020 - In Joulia Smortchkova, Krzysztof Dołęga & Tobias Schlicht (eds.), What Are Mental Representations? New York, NY, United States of America: Oxford University Press.
    Among the cognitive capacities of evolved creatures is the capacity to represent. Theories in cognitive neuroscience typically explain our manifest representational capacities by positing internal representations, but there is little agreement about how these representations function, especially with the relatively recent proliferation of connectionist, dynamical, embodied, and enactive approaches to cognition. In this talk I sketch an account of the nature and function of representation in cognitive neuroscience that couples a realist construal of representational vehicles with a pragmatic account of (...)
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  3. Philosophical proofs against common sense.Bryan Frances - 2021 - Analysis 81 (1):18-26.
    Many philosophers are sceptical about the power of philosophy to refute commonsensical claims. They look at the famous attempts and judge them inconclusive. I prove that, even if those famous attempts are failures, there are alternative successful philosophical proofs against commonsensical claims. After presenting the proofs I briefly comment on their significance.
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  4. The Nature and Function of Content in Computational Models.Frances Egan - 2018 - In Mark Sprevak & Matteo Colombo (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Computational Mind. Routledge.
    Much of computational cognitive science construes human cognitive capacities as representational capacities, or as involving representation in some way. Computational theories of vision, for example, typically posit structures that represent edges in the distal scene. Neurons are often said to represent elements of their receptive fields. Despite the ubiquity of representational talk in computational theorizing there is surprisingly little consensus about how such claims are to be understood. The point of this chapter is to sketch an account of the nature (...)
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  5. The Structure of Perceptual Experience: A New Look at Adverbialism.Frances Egan - 2025 - In Deflating Mental Representation. MIT Press (open access).
    In the philosophy of perception, representationalism is the view that all phenomenological differences among mental states are representational differences, in other words, differences in content. In this paper I defend an alternative view which I call external sortalism, inspired by traditional adverbialism, and according to which experiences are not essentially representational. The central idea is that the external world serves as a model for sorting, conceptualizing, and reasoning surrogatively about perceptual experience. On external sortalism, contents are construed as a kind (...)
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  6. Is It Rational to Reject Expert Consensus?Bryan Frances - 2020 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 10 (3-4):325-345.
    Philosophers defend, and often believe, controversial philosophical claims. Since they aren’t clueless, they are usually aware that their views are controversial—on some occasions, the views are definitely in the minority amongst the relevant specialist-experts. In addition, most philosophers are aware that they are not God’s gift to philosophy, since they admit their ability to track truth in philosophy is not extraordinary compared to that of other philosophers. In this paper I argue that in many real-life cases, such beliefs in controversial (...)
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  7. Content is pragmatic: Comments on Nicholas Shea's Representation in cognitive science.Frances Egan - 2020 - Mind and Language 35 (3):368-376.
    Nicholas Shea offers Varitel Semantics as a naturalistic account of mental content. I argue that the account secures determinate content only by appeal to pragmatic considerations, and so it fails to respect naturalism. But that is fine, because representational content is not, strictly speaking, necessary for explanation in cognitive science. Even in Shea’s own account, content serves only a variety of heuristic functions.
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  8. Extensive Philosophical Agreement and Progress.Bryan Frances - 2017 - Metaphilosophy 48 (1-2):47-57.
    This article argues, first, that there is plenty of agreement among philosophers on philosophically substantive claims, which fall into three categories: reasons for or against certain views, elementary truths regarding fundamental notions, and highly conditionalized claims. This agreement suggests that there is important philosophical progress. It then argues that although it's easy to list several potential kinds of philosophical progress, it is much harder to determine whether the potential is actual. Then the article attempts to articulate the truth that the (...)
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  9. In search of the deep structure of morality: an interview with Frances Kamm.Alex Voorhoeve & Frances Kamm - 2006 - Imprints 9 (2):93-117.
    An extended discussion with Frances Kamm about deontology and the methodology of ethical theorizing. (An extended and revised version appears in Alex Voorhoeve, Conversations on Ethics, OUP 2009).).
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  10. Worrisome Skepticism About Philosophy.Bryan Frances - 2016 - Episteme 13 (3):289-303.
    A new kind of skepticism about philosophy is articulated and argued for. The key premise is the claim that many of us are well aware that in the past we failed to have good responses to substantive objections to our philosophical beliefs. The conclusion is disjunctive: either we are irrational in sticking with our philosophical beliefs, or we commit some other epistemic sin in having those beliefs.
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  11. Metaphysics, bullshit, and the analysis of philosophical problems.Bryan Frances - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):11541-11554.
    Although metaphysics has made an impressive comeback over the past half century, there are still a great many philosophers today who think it is bullshit, under numerous precisifications of ‘That’s just bullshit’ so that it’s a negative assessment and doesn’t apply to most philosophy. One encounters this attitude countless times in casual conversations, social media, and occasionally in print. Is it true?
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  12. The Epistemology of Disagreement.Bryan Frances - forthcoming - In Gerry Dunne (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Educational Theory and Philosophy.
    Short introduction to the epistemology of disagreement.
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  13. The New Leibniz's Law Arguments for Pluralism.Bryan Frances - 2006 - Mind 115 (460):1007-1022.
    For years philosophers argued for the existence of distinct yet materially coincident things by appealing to modal and temporal properties. For instance, the statue was made on Monday and could not survive being flattened; the lump of clay was made months before and can survive flattening. Such arguments have been thoroughly examined. Kit Fine has proposed a new set of arguments using the same template. I offer a critical evaluation of what I take to be his central lines of reasoning.
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  14. Defending Millian Theories.Bryan Frances - 1998 - Mind 107 (428):703-728.
    In this article I offer a three-pronged defense of Millian theories, all of which share the rough idea that all there is to a proper name is its referent, so it has no additional sense. I first give what I believe to be the first correct analysis of Kripke’s puzzle and its anti-Fregean lessons. The main lesson is that the Fregean’s arguments against Millianism and for the existence of semantically relevant senses (that is, individuative elements of propositions or belief contents (...)
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  15. The Four Puzzles of Reference.Bryan Frances - manuscript
    This is an essay for undergraduates. I present the basic problems of reference for descriptions and names.
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  16. The Epistemic Consequences of Paradox.Bryan Frances - 2022 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    By pooling together exhaustive analyses of certain philosophical paradoxes, we can prove a series of fascinating results regarding philosophical progress, agreement on substantive philosophical claims, knockdown arguments in philosophy, the wisdom of philosophical belief, the epistemic status of metaphysics, and the power of philosophy to refute common sense. As examples, this Element examines the Sorites Paradox, the Liar Paradox, and the Problem of the Many – although many other paradoxes can do the trick too.
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  17. Externalism, Physicalism, Statues, and Hunks.Bryan Frances - 2007 - Philosophical Studies 133 (2):199-232.
    Content externalism is the dominant view in the philosophy of mind. Content essentialism, the thesis that thought tokens have their contents essentially, is also popular. And many externalists are supporters of such essentialism. However, endorsing the conjunction of those views either (i) commits one to a counterintuitive view of the underlying physical nature of thought tokens or (ii) commits one to a slightly different but still counterintuitive view of the relation of thought tokens to physical tokens as well as a (...)
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  18. The Epistemology of Theistic Philosophers’ Reactions to the Problem of Evil.Bryan Frances - 2020 - American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 94 (4):547-572.
    I first argue that, contrary to many atheistic philosophers, there is good reason to think the typical theistic philosopher’s retaining of her theism when faced with the Problem of Evil is comparatively epistemically upstanding even if both atheism is true and the typical theistic philosopher has no serious criticism of the atheist’s premises in the PoE argument. However, I then argue that, contrary to many theistic philosophers, even if theism is true, the typical theistic philosopher has no good non-theistic reasons (...)
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  19. How Much Suffering Is Enough?Bryan Frances - forthcoming - Religious Studies.
    Isn’t there something like an amount and density of horrific suffering whose discovery would make it irrational to think God exists? Use your imagination to think of worlds that are much, much, much worse than you think Earth is when it comes to horrific suffering. Isn’t there some conceivable scenario which, if you were in it, would make you say “Ok, ok. God doesn’t exist, at least in the way we thought God was. We were wrong about that”? Pursuing this (...)
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  20. The Beauty of Philosophy.Bryan Frances - manuscript
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  21. On the Explanatory Deficiencies of Linguistic Content.Bryan Frances - 1999 - Philosophical Studies 93 (1):45-75.
    The Burge-Putnam thought experiments have generated the thesis that beliefs are not fixed by the constitution of the body. However, many philosophers have thought that if this is true then there must be another content-like property. Even if the contents of our attitudes such as the one in ‘believes that aluminum is a light metal’, do not supervene on our physical makeups, nevertheless people who are physical duplicates must be the same when it comes to evaluating their rationality and explaining (...)
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  22. Matière et espace dans le système cartésien.Françoise Monnoyeur - 2017 - Paris: Éditions l'Harmattan.
    Descartes développe, dans ses Principes de la Philosophie, les principes fondateurs de son système construit sur l’identification de la matière à l’espace. L’analyse de ses principes nous invite à repenser le rôle de la métaphysique dans la constitution de la science et permet aussi de comprendre comment les concepts de matière, substance, espace, étendue géométrique, mouvement, infini et vide sont devenus les questions centrales de la science du XVIIe siècle.
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  23. The We-Perspective on the Racing Sailboat.Frances Egan - 2022 - In Roberto Casati (ed.), The Sailing Mind. Springer.
    Successful sports teams are able to adopt what is known as the 'we-perspective,' forming intentions and making decisions, somewhat as a unified mind does, to achieve their goals. In this paper I consider what is involved in establishing and maintaining the we-perspective on a racing sailboat. I argue that maintaining the we-perspective contributes to the success of the boat in at least two ways: (1) it facilitates the smooth execution of joint action; and (2) it increases the chance that individual (...)
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  24. The Unfortunate Consequences of Progress in Philosophy.Bryan Frances - 2024 - In Maria Baghramian, J. Adam Carter & Rach Cosker-Rowland (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Disagreement. New York, NY: Routledge.
    We tend to think that philosophical progress, to the extent that it exists, is a good thing. I agree. Even so, it has some surprising unfortunate consequences for the rationality of philosophical belief.
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  25. Disquotation and Substitutivity.Bryan Frances - 2000 - Mind 109 (435):519-25.
    Millianism is reasonable; that is, it is reasonable to think that all there is to the semantic value of a proper name is its referent. But Millianism appears to be undermined by the falsehood of Substitutivity, the principle that interchanging coreferential proper names in an intentional context cannot change the truth value of the resulting belief report. Mary might be perfectly rational in assenting to ‘Twain was a great writer’ as well as ‘Clemens was not a great writer’. Her confusion (...)
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  26. Plato’s Response to the Third Man Argument in the Paradoxical Exercise of the Parmenides.Bryan Frances - 1996 - Ancient Philosophy 16 (1):47-64.
    An analysis of the Third Man Argument, especially in light of Constance Meinwald's book Plato's Parmenides. I argue that her solution to the TMA fails. Then I present my own theory as to what Plato's solution was.
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  27. Justifying a Large Part of Philosophy.Bryan Frances - 2019 - Think 18 (51):93-99.
    I explain why research in non-applied, non-interdisciplinary, non-historical philosophy is worthwhile. The key move in the explanation is the realization that many philosophical problems can be put in the form of a set of highly plausible yet apparently jointly inconsistent claims regarding a fundamental notion.Export citation.
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  28. Defending the Defense.Bryan Frances - 1999 - Mind 108 (431):563-566.
    My hunch has always been that in the end, Fregeanism will defeat Millianism. So I suspect that my (1998) arguments on behalf of Millianism are flawed. Peter Graham (1999) is confident he has found the flaws, but he has not. I hope that some clarification will encourage others to reveal the errors.
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  29. Ontology, Composition, Quantification and Action.Bryan Frances - 2016 - Analysis 76 (2):137-142.
    The literature on material composition has largely ignored the composition of actions and events. I argue that this is a mistake. I present a set of individually plausible yet jointly inconsistent claims regarding the connection between quantification and existence, the composition of physical entities and the logical forms of action sentences.
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  30. The Reflective Epistemic Renegade.Bryan Frances - 2010 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 81 (2):419 - 463.
    Philosophers often find themselves in disagreement with contemporary philosophers they know full well to be their epistemic superiors on the topics relevant to the disagreement. This looks epistemically irresponsible. I offer a detailed investigation of this problem of the reflective epistemic renegade. I argue that although in some cases the renegade is not epistemically blameworthy, and the renegade situation is significantly less common than most would think, in a troublesome number of cases in which the situation arises the renegade is (...)
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  31. Empirical Analysis of Current Approaches to Incidental Findings.Frances Lawrenz & Suzanne Sobotka - 2008 - Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 36 (2):249-255.
    This paper presents results found through searching publicly available U.S. data sources for information about how to handle incidental fndings (IF) in human subjects research, especially in genetics and genomics research, neuroimaging research, and CT colonography research. We searched the Web sites of 14 federal agencies, 22 professional societies, and 100 universities, as well as used the search engine Google for actual consent forms that had been posted on the Internet. Our analysis of these documents showed that there is very (...)
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  32. Metaphysics and Computational Cognitive Science: Let's Not Let the Tail Wag the Dog.Frances Egan - 2012 - Journal of Cognitive Science 13:39-49.
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  33. Rationally held ‘P, but I fully believe ~P and I am not equivocating’.Bryan Frances - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (2):309-313.
    One of Moore’s paradoxical sentence types is ‘P, but I believe ~P’. Mooreans have assumed that all tokens of that sentence type are absurd in some way: epistemically, pragmatically, semantically, or assertively. And then they proceed to debate what the absurdity really is. I argue that if one has the appropriate philosophical views, then one can rationally assert tokens of that sentence type, and one can be epistemically reasonable in the corresponding compound belief as well.
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  34. Function-Theoretic Explanation and Neural Mechanisms.Frances Egan - forthcoming - In David M. Kaplan (ed.), Integrating Mind and Brain Science: Mechanistic Perspectives and Beyond. Oxford University Press.
    A common kind of explanation in cognitive neuroscience might be called function-theoretic: with some target cognitive capacity in view, the theorist hypothesizes that the system computes a well-defined function (in the mathematical sense) and explains how computing this function constitutes (in the system’s normal environment) the exercise of the cognitive capacity. Recently, proponents of the so-called ‘new mechanist’ approach in philosophy of science have argued that a model of a cognitive capacity is explanatory only to the extent that it reveals (...)
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  35. Kripke.Bryan Frances - 2011 - In Barry Lee (ed.), Key Thinkers in the Philosophy of Language. Continuum. pp. 249-267.
    This chapter introduces Kripke's work to advanced undergraduates, mainly focussing on his "A Puzzle About Belief" and "Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language".
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  36. Representationalism.Frances Egan - 2012 - In Eric Margolis, Richard Samuels & Stephen P. Stich (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science. Oxford University Press.
    Representationalism, in its most widely accepted form, is the view that the human mind is an information-using system, and that human cognitive capacities are to be understood as representational capacities. This chapter distinguishes several distinct theses that go by the name "representationalism," focusing on the view that is most prevalent in cogntive science. It also discusses some objections to the view and attempts to clarify the role that representational content plays in cognitive models that make use of the notion of (...)
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  37. The Dual Concepts Objection to Content Externalism.Bryan Frances - 2016 - American Philosophical Quarterly 53 (2):123-138.
    Many philosophers have used premises about concepts and rationality to argue that the protagonists in the various Twin Earth thought experiments do not have the concepts that content externalists say they have. This essay argues that this popular internalist argument is flawed in many different ways, and more importantly it cannot be repaired in order to cast doubt on externalism.
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  38. The Rationality of Religious Beliefs.Bryan Frances - 2015 - Think 14 (40):109-117.
    Many highly educated people think religious belief is irrational and unscientific. If you ask a philosopher, however, you'll likely get two answers: most religious belief is rational in some respects and irrational in other respects. In this essay I explain why they think religious belief is rational. In a sequel essay I explain why they think the very same beliefs are irrational.
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  39. The Elusive Role of Normal-Proper Function in Cognitive Science.Frances Egan - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105:468-475.
    Comments on Karen Neander's A Mark of the Mental.
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  40. (1 other version)Disagreement.Bryan Frances - 2010 - In Sven Bernecker & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Epistemology. New York: Routledge.
    This is a short essay that presents what I take to be the main questions regarding the epistemology of disagreement.
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  41. Why the Vagueness Paradox is Amazing.Bryan Frances - 2018 - Think 17 (50):27-38.
    One of the hardest problems in philosophy, one that has been around for over two thousand years without generating any significant consensus on its solution, involves the concept of vagueness: a word or concept that doesn't have a perfectly precise meaning. There is an argument that seems to show that the word or concept simply must have a perfectly precise meaning, as violently counterintuitive as that is. Unfortunately, the argument is usually so compressed that it is difficult to see why (...)
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  42. The Atheistic Argument from Outrageousness.Bryan Frances - 2018 - Think 17 (48):107-116.
    When pressed, many atheists offer three reasons why they reject theism: there is strong evidence against theism, there is no strong evidence for theism, and theism is so outrageous that it needs a great deal of support in order for us to believe it in a reasonable manner. I examine the third reason, arguing that it fails.
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  43. The elusive role of normal‐proper function in cognitive science.Frances Egan - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (2):468-475.
    Comments on Karen Neander's A Mark of the Mental.
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  44. (3 other versions)Function-Theoretic Explanation and the Search for Neural Mechanisms.Frances Egan - 2017 - In David Michael Kaplan (ed.), Explanation and Integration in Mind and Brain Science. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. pp. 145-163.
    A common kind of explanation in cognitive neuroscience might be called functiontheoretic: with some target cognitive capacity in view, the theorist hypothesizes that the system computes a well-defined function (in the mathematical sense) and explains how computing this function constitutes (in the system’s normal environment) the exercise of the cognitive capacity. Recently, proponents of the so-called ‘new mechanist’ approach in philosophy of science have argued that a model of a cognitive capacity is explanatory only to the extent that it reveals (...)
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  45. Presentism: Foreigner-Friendly or Xenophobic?Bryan Frances - 2016 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (3):479-488.
    I argue that, for all we know, there are perfectly ordinary actual entities that are temporal in the usual sense and yet never present, past, or future. This epistemic fact requires us to modify the theses of presentism and eternalism. More importantly, it generates three new and quite serious objections to presentism, which I formulate and partially evaluate in this paper.
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  46. Philosophical Renegades.Bryan Frances - 2013 - In David Christensen & Jennifer Lackey (eds.), The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 121-166.
    If you retain your belief upon learning that a large number and percentage of your recognized epistemic superiors disagree with you, then what happens to the epistemic status of your belief? I investigate that theoretical question as well has the applied case of philosophical disagreement—especially disagreement regarding purely philosophical error theories, theories that do not have much empirical support and that reject large swaths of our most commonsensical beliefs. I argue that even if all those error theories are false, either (...)
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  47. (1 other version)Religious Disagreement.Bryan Frances - 2014 - In Graham Oppy (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion. London: Routledge.
    In this essay I try to motivate and formulate the main epistemological questions to ask about the phenomenon of religious disagreement. I will not spend much time going over proposed answers to those questions. I address the relevance of the recent literature on the epistemology of disagreement. I start with some fiction and then, hopefully, proceed with something that has at least a passing acquaintance with truth.
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  48. When a Skeptical Hypothesis Is Live.Bryan Frances - 2005 - Noûs 39 (4):559–595.
    I’m going to argue for a set of restricted skeptical results: roughly put, we don’t know that fire engines are red, we don’t know that we sometimes have pains in our lower backs, we don’t know that John Rawls was kind, and we don’t even know that we believe any of those truths. However, people unfamiliar with philosophy and cognitive science do know all those things. The skeptical argument is traditional in form: here’s a skeptical hypothesis; you can’t epistemically neutralize (...)
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  49. The Irrationality of Religious Belief.Bryan Frances - 2016 - Think 15 (42):15-33.
    Many highly educated people think religious belief is irrational and unscientific. If you ask a philosopher, however, you'll likely get two answers: most religious belief is rational in some respects and irrational in other respects. In my previous essay I explained why they think so many religious beliefs are rational. In this essay I explain why they think those same beliefs are irrational.
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  50. Live Skeptical Hypotheses.Bryan Frances - 2008 - In John Greco (ed.), The Oxford handbook of skepticism. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 225-245.
    Those of us who take skepticism seriously typically have two relevant beliefs: (a) it’s plausible (even if false) that in order to know that I have hands I have to be able to epistemically neutralize, to some significant degree, some skeptical hypotheses, such as the brain-in-a-vat (BIV) one; and (b) it’s also plausible (even if false) that I can’t so neutralize those hypotheses. There is no reason for us to also think (c) that the BIV hypothesis, for instance, is plausible (...)
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