Objections and replies within the fifth meditation

Malebranche held that God acts only by general volitions and so is not constantly interfering in the world. The content of God's volitions appears to include the general laws of nature and the particular initial configuration of the created world, so that occasional or natural causes have an important explanatory role. It is clear that at the least Malebranche meant by a ‘general volition’ the willing of events which followed general laws. Steven Nadler argued that this is all we should understand by a ‘general volition’, and so we should think that general volitions are simply particular volitions which follow a general law.

I argue that this view is not the correct interpretation of Malebranche's general volitions, for it does not do justice to the theological doctrine of the Treatise, masks the genuine difference between Arnauld and Malebranche, and conflicts with what Malebranche says about practical volitions. I then argue that despite Malebranche's view of general volitions, there is still an important difference between his view and Leibniz's.     

Complex demonstratives as quantifiers: objections and replies

In “Complex Demonstratives: A Quantificational Account” (MIT Press 2001) (henceforth CD), I argued that complex demonstratives are quantifiers. Many philosophers had held that demonstratives, both simple and complex, are referring terms. Since the publication of CD various objections to the account of complex demonstratives I defended in it have been raised. In the present work, I lay out these objections and respond to them.

On Reflective Knowledge: replies to Battaly and Reed

This article is a reply to Baron Reed and Heather Battaly, two critics in a book symposium on my Reflective Knowledge. The reply to Reed concerns the main content and structure of Descartes??s epistemology. The reply to Battaly concerns how best to deal with epistemic circularity.     

Relevant replies to questions: Answers versus evasions

A taxonomy was developed that accounts for all relevant partner responses to questions in the natural discourse of nursery school dyads. Evasive replies as well as answers must be included in such a scheme. Evasive replies are discoursally linked to questions, whereas answers are grammatically linked to questions. Nursery school children in this sample tended to inspect the nature of the relevance of a reply to a question and, at least on some occasions, to acknowledge replies to questions (explicitly or implicitly) and to respond differently to evasive replies than replies in general.This work was supported by a grant from the Spencer Foundation to the second author.