Comments on Stanley *Know How*, Pacific APA 2012

This is the long-form version of my comments on Jason Stanley's book on knowledge-how from the 2012 Pacific APA. A later and shorter version, entitled 'Skill before Knowledge' is forthcoming in a PPR symposium on Stanley's book.

How Proper Names Refer (final version)

*Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society* 2011

§1 argues that a right account of reference-fixing for proper names should respect an intuitive claim: the claim that my uses of ν stand for o only if I am committed to using ν in ways that match the representationally relevant ways it is possible for o to behave. §2 provides a new account of how proper names refer that meets this condition. (This is my current 'proper names' companion piece to the view of demonstratives I develop in 'We Are Acquainted With Ordinary Things' and 'Visual Attention Fixes Demonstrative Reference by Eliminating Referential Luck')

The Generality of Particular Thought

Forthcoming, *Philosophical Quarterly', published online at this journal's 'early view' page: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120120980/issue. The version here is my final pre-copyedited version. The *Phil Quarterly* version is a bit different.

This is my current take on Gareth Evans's 'Generality Constraint'. The first half of the paper considers what I take to be the two main extant arguments for the Generality Constraint - Evans's own argument, and John Campbell's 'inferentialist' argument. I argue that neither argument establishes the Generality Constraint. The second half of the paper uses Shoemaker's 'causal powers' account of properties to argue for a weaker version of the constraint.

The Sortal Dependence of Demonstrative Reference

Forthcoming *European Journal of Philosophy* - this is my final pre-publication version

Sortalism about demonstrative reference’ is the view that the capacity to refer to things demonstratively rests on the capacity to classify them according to their kinds. This paper argues for one form of sortalism. §1 distinguishes two sortalist views. §2 argues that one of them is false. §3 argues that the other is true. §4 uses the argument from §3 to develop a new response to the objection to sortalism from examples where we seem to succeed in referring even though we get sortal classification wrong, or do not attempt to classify at all.

Visual Attention Fixes Demonstrative Reference by Eliminating Referential Luck

To appear in Chris Mole, Declan Smithies and Wayne Wu (eds.) *Attention: Philosophical and Psychological Essays* forthcoming from OUP.

§1 motivates two constraints on right accounts of perceptual demonstrative thought - one to do with the kind of non-luckiness mentioned in the title; the other to do with the role of attention. The rest of the paper develops an account of perceptual demonstrative reference-fixing that meets these constraints.

This paper gives a different motivation for, and different applications of, the kind of view on this topic proposed in 'We Are Acquainted With Ordinary Things'

We Are Acquainted With Ordinary Things

Forthcoming in Robin Jeshion (ed) *New Essays on Singular Thought*, OUP.

This uses recent empirical results about visual selective attention to build an account of acquaintance with ordinary middle sized material objects.

Sense, Communication, and Rational Engagement

This is co-authored with my Toronto colleague Gurpreet Rattan - forthcoming in *Dialectica*

We consider how Fregean it is possible to be in your account of communication while respecting the pressures that have led people to anti-Fregean views.

Informative Identities in the *Begriffsschrift* and 'On Sense and Reference'

*Canadian Journal of Philosophy* 2008. The CJP version is at http://www.canadianjournalofphilosophy.com/38-2-toc.shtml

This is about how we should understand Frege's move from the early 'metalinguistic' solution to Frege's Puzzle to the solution in terms of sameness and difference in sense.

'Negation, Anti-Realism, and the Denial Defence'

Forthcoming in *Philosophical Studies*; up online at their 'early view' page: http://www.springerlink.com/content/54p25612418v413l/fulltext.pdf

This is about the significance of recent work about the relation between negation and denial for (i) the intuitionist argument against classical negation and (ii)  the anti-realist argument that you get when you combine the argument against classical negation with a traditional characterisation of realism and a plausible claim about truth.