David Barnett's Papers
Publications:
Counterfactual Entailment. Forthcoming in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. PDF
Chitchat on Personal Identity. Forthcoming in Personal Identity: Complex or Simple? edited by Georg Gasser and Matthias Stefan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. PDF
Future Conditionals and DeRose's Thesis. Forthcoming in Mind. PDF
Does Vagueness Exclude Knowledge? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 82: 22-44 (2010). PDF
Zif Would Have Been If: A Suppositional View of Counterfactuals. Noûs 44: 269-304 (2010). PDF
You are Simple. In The Waning of Materialism, edited by George Bealer and Robert Koons, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2010). PDF
Yalcin on 'Might'. Mind 118: 771-75 (2009). PDF
Is Vagueness Sui Generis? Australasian Journal of Philosophy 87: 5-34 (2009). PDF
The Myth of the Categorical Counterfactual. Philosophical Studies 144: 281-296 (2009). PDF
Indeterminacy and Incomplete Definitions. Journal of Philosophy 105: 167-91 (2008). PDF
The Simplicity Intuition and Its Hidden Influence on Philosophy of Mind. Noûs 42: 308-35 (2008). PDF
Ramsey + Moore ≠ God. Analysis 68: 168-74 (2008). PDF (Definitive version available at www.blackwell-synergy.com)
Zif is If. Mind 115: 519-566 (2006). PDF
The Problem of Material Origins. Noûs 39: 529-540 (2005). PDF
Some Stuffs are Not Sums of Stuff. Philosophical Review 113: 89-100 (2004). PDF
Against A Posteriori Moral Naturalism. Philosophical Studies 107: 239-257 (2002). PDF
Vagueness-Related Attitudes. In Philosophical Issues 10: Skepticism, edited by E. Sosa and E. Villanueva. Boston: Blackwell. (2000). PDF
Is Water Necessarily Identical to H2O? Philosophical Studies 98: 99–112 (2000). PDF
Work in Progress:
Against the Stalnaker-Lewis Analysis of Counterfactuals PDF
Vague Entailment PDF
Vagueness and Rationality PDF
This Wooden Table Could Have Been Made from Plastic PDF
On the Very Possibility of Indeterminacy PDF
Book Project:
You Can't Have Mental Content!: New Directions in the Study of Content, Belief, and Conditionals - Stage 1
Or can you? In this book, I provide a framework with which to consider questions of Content that diverges significantly from the old-fashioned Content thinkers such as Bradshaw, Staubach, et al. This framework is based fundamentally on the application of Sui Generis towards finding new solutions to a broad array of Content-related problems. The book will be organized into thirds. The first third will introduce several examples of how Sui Generis -- itself, and a priori -- can be used to clarify issues of material origins, inverted conditionals, second-order sensory phenomena, as well as more specific issues such as the roundness of ellipses and what Chauncey Reynolds likes to call "the extremeness of happenstance". The second third of the book will take a focused lens to the probable certainty of material origins beginning with Roncaillare's Table of Uncertain Materials and moving forth into problems of pseudo-uncertain materiality, vaguely uncertain materiality, extreme likelihood, almost-total believability, and portability in the context of materiality, with inclusion of the more germane (yet unsuccessful) refutations of the Sui Generis-centric views. The next third will introduce the Problem of Disgust. Though not often associated with the issues of Content, I will show several ways in which the logical integration of Disgust and Sui Generis can undermine Connor's Totem of Credibility as well as some of the more taken-for-granted epistemological and semantic constructs required by outdated views of materials and their likelihood of existence. The final third will deal with proportionality.