papers on metaphilosophy

Philosophical Studies 171:535-44, 2014. In December 2009, David Bourget and I did a survey of professional philosophers, asking for their views on thirty philosophical questions. There were many interesting results. We write them up here. There will probably be a second survey in December 2019. [pdf] [philpapers]

Philosophy 1:3-31, 2015. Also in (T. Honderich, ed.) Philosophers of our Times, and in (J. Keller, ed.) Themes from Peter van Inwagen. The first part of this paper tries to isolate various ways in which philosophy makes progress and ways in which it makes less progress than the hard sciences. The central notion involves convergence to the truth on the big questions. The rest of the paper asks why philosophy makes less progress in this way. A number of answers are canvassed, but I think the question is still open. [pdf] [philpapers]

Philosophical Review 120:515-66, 2011. An analysis of what it is to have a verbal dispute and of how to dissolve them. With applications to philosophical method and to a number of philosophical disputes. I also use the framework to draw out consequences about primitive concepts and analyticity. On some days this paper feels like a statement of my philosophical religion. [pdf] [philpapers]

In (Chalmers, Manley, and Wasserman, eds.) Metametaphysics. This paper is a defense of a broadly Carnapian deflationism about ontological questions. I make sense of a version of Carnap’s internal/external distinction as the distinction between ordinary and ontological existence assertions. I distinguish between lightweight and heavyweight ontological realism and ontological anti-realism, and argue for the latter. I develop a way of making sense of Carnapian frameworks via “furnishing functions” that associate a domain of objects with a world. [pdf] [philpapers]

My remarks at the memorial service for David Lewis at Princeton University on February 8, 2002 .[html]