Papers of Professor Adam Morton, Phd Philosophy

Adam Morton (1945-2020) was a philosopher whose work spanned the gamut of professional philosophy, logic and epistemology, philosophy of language and mind, ethics, and the philosophy of emotions. President of the Aristotelean Society from 1989 to 1999, he was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Through his carreer he worked at Princeton, Ottawa, Bristol, Oklahoma, Alberta, and UBC. He worked on epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics (evil), and wrote textbooks.
These are his papers, his enduring professional legacy. This website is largely untouched from how Adam originally created it.

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emotions

values

other

.in general.

.bounded cognition.

·moral emotions.
.the damage project.

.language.

.contrastive knowledge.

.knowledge & accomplishment.

.metaphysics of.

.disunity.

.mind.

.mathematical knowlege DRAFT.

.book draft on evidence & experiment.

.epistemic virtues & emotions.

.moral virtues.

.conditionals.

c.v.

.list of all my publications.

.confessions of a generalist.

.philPapers list of my publications.

.summary of Should we Colonize Other Planets?


.recent.

.less serious.

.hard to get.



very recent

.summary of Should we Colonize Other Planets?


.probability from possibility DRAFT.


.mathematical knowlege DRAFT.


.evidence from experiment. DRAFT.


drafts are on this site because I may not be able to finish them



fairly recent


logic text

an essay on pitch perception

A Solution to the Donkey Sentence Problem:  'All' but neither universal nor existential.

Shared Knowledge from Individual Vice: the role of unworthy epistemic emotions

Empathy and Imagination: how to be nice to people without faking understanding of them

other essays: mostly political, less connected to my main research (so from a more fragile background.)










the damage project

-- advertising for the project  the papers and their topics, with links
--
pride versus Self-Respect: injuries to self-respect are a special kind of harm, different from injuries to pride
--  damage and imagination  some kinds of harm are hard to imagine
 -- cousins of regret   how factoring in damage affects retrospective emotions
-- damage, flourishing, and two sides of morality fitting damage to rules of conduct suggests that these are not a tight unity

~ imagining motives why these issues matter in law







bounded cogntion

Precis and contents of Bounded Thinking: epistemic virtues for limited agents  OUP, 2012. Analytical epistemology marries descriptive decision theory and their offspring solves problems of bounded cognition.

Human Bounds  giving advice about coping with our limits is different from finding the best ways of coping with them.

Lockhart's Problem if we were smarter would we be more or less puzzled?








knowledge and accomplishment



Accomplishment  A radical symmetry between belief and action.

Accomplishing Accomplishment Consequences of the symmetry.

review of Ernest Sosa Knowing Full Well.  Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2011 (link to another site)

Knowing what to think about: when epistemology meets the theory of choice  in Epistemology Futures, edited by Stephen Hetherington, Oxford University Press.  

Acting to Know  Experimentation as a special case of doing something in order to know something.







contrastive knowledge

Contrastive Knowledge (in M Blaauw, .ed. Contrastivism in Philosophy.) What is gained by taking knowledge as contrastive.

Contrastive Knowledge (with Antti Karjalainen) "a knows that p rather than q" is often less puzzling than "a knows that p".  

Contrastivity and Indistinguishability   Contrastive attitudes in general  

Could it be a conditional? Commenting on an article claiming to reduce contrastive knowledge to simple knowledge







epistemic virtues and emotions 

Surprise (in Todd and Roeser, Emotion and Value):  the value of the emotion of surprise, and of our lack of surprise that surprising things happen.

Shared knowledge from individual vice   epistemic vices are good for us.

Great expectations: virtues presupposed by different ways of handling risk. how a profitable gamble can be worse for most people who take it.

Epistemic virtues, metavirtues, and computational complexity limitations on our ability to think give reasons for describing ourselves in terms of cognitive virtues instead of justified beliefs

 





general epistemology 



mathematical knowlege DRAFT a causal account of knowledge in mathematics

Evidence-based beliefs Experimental evidence is the best kind, but our practice of it is sometimes problematic.

If you’re so smart why are you ignorant  epistemic analogs of causal decision theory, even of Newcomb’s paradox. 

Saving epistemology from the epistemologists survey article of epistemology in the decades before the mid 90’s.

review of John Hawthorne Knowledge and Lotteries   Philosophical Quarterly 2005 





metaphysics of emotions

Precis and contents of Emotion and Imagination, Polity Press, 2013.  Imagining points of view gives us such a range of emotions, among them moral emotions, and among these undesirable moral emotions such as  smugness and priggery. A small book that began as a collection of papers.

Pride versus Self-Respect: injuries to self-respect are a special kind of harm, different from injuries to pride

Imaginary Emotions We imagine and ascribe emotions that do not exist.

Imagination and misimagination (in Shaun Nichols, ed. The Architecture of the Imagination.) Imaginative perspective, imagination versus misimagination, fiction

Beware Stories (in Peter Goldie, ed. Understanding Emotions Ashgate 2001) Emotions are closely related to virtues, but there are important contrasts between them. 

Emotional Accuracy  (half of a Joint Session symposium, 2002,  with Ronald de Sousa).  Emotions are not true or false, but they can be accurate or inaccurate with respect to situations.

review of Ronald de Sousa Emotional Truth







moral emotions 

Precis and contents of Emotion and Imagination, Polity Press, 2013.  Imagining points of view gives us such a range of emotions, among them moral emotions, and among these undesirable moral emotions such as  smugness and priggery. Parts III and IV are about emotions in moral life.

cousins of regret   how factoring in damage affects retrospective emotions


Empathy and Imagination : how to be nice to people without faking understanding of them.

Empathy for the devil (in Peter Goldie and Amy Coplan, eds. Empathy.Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives) How we can imagine evil actions, and why decent people find it difficult. 

Surprise (in Todd and Roeser, Emotion and Value)  The value of the emotion of surprise, and of our lack of surprise that surprising things happen.

Gibbard's principle of commitment   (unpublished)  a note criticising the central move of Allan Gibbard's Thinking how to Live. (See also my review article of Gibbard under 'language'.)





evil



On Evil  precis and contents of the book (Routledge 2004).

Bad versus evil  text of a talk with some of the conclusions of On Evil 







disunity of the moral 

Good Neighours and Moral Heroes  (in Pedro Tabensky, ed. The positive function of evil) There is no such thing as an all-round good person, because the perfect neighbour may not be what you need in a real crisis

The disunity of the moral  Morality is many different things.







moral virtues

Moral incompetence (in Values and Virtues, edited by T.J. Chappell.)  Often good people produce terrible results, and one reason is moral incompetence. 








philosophy of mind

 imagining motives why these issues matter in law



an essay on pitch perception: describing without ostension what it is like to hear a distinction, in a way that makes it easier to hear it

But are they right? The prospects for empirical conceptology:  commentary on papers in a XPhi issue of the Journal of Cognition and Culture 

folk psychology does not exist  (in D. Hutto & M. Ratcliffe eds Folk Psychology Reassessed) So have I been working on a myth, all these years? 

From tracking relations to propositional attitudes.  Propositional attitudes may not be basic in our concept of mind. 




language

A Solution to the Donkey Sentence Problem:  'A' but neither universal nor existential. 

review of Yablo Aboutness (longer version than appeared in NDPR)

Skookumchuck, Kiidk'yaas, Gibbard: normativity, meaning, and idealisation:  review article of Allan Gibbard's Meaning and Normativity

Against the Ramsey Test (Analysis, 2004)  We don't evaluate indicative conditionals in terms of conditional probability.  (pdf)    

Indicative versus subjunctive in future conditionals  (Analysis, 2004)  There are both indicative and subjunctive future-tense conditionals, and sometimes the same words can be used to express both. 

Suppose, Suppose (Analysis, 1993)  Embedding one conditional in another.

Where demonstratives meet vagueness  My Aristotelian Society presidential address. Two unpopular views. (a) there are deep connections between vagueness and demonstratives, and (b) we can clarify some basic aspects of language by considering invented natural languages. 

Mathematics as language (in Benacerraf and his Critics, Blackwell 1996) Another experimental piece exploring the idea that we can learn something about how we understand language by considering our grasp of the non-natural symbol systems used in mathematics.







conditionals



would cause if an event occurred it would have a particular effect. Not a definition of causation in terms of counterfactual causation, but not that far from it.

double conditionals if A and then B, then C is not the same as if A then (if B then C), nor if A & B then C. Remarks on laws of nature.

Suppose, Suppose Generalization and improvement of the above, but with some vulnerable assumptions.

Against the Ramsey Test We don't evaluate indicative conditionals in terms of conditional probability.  (pdf)    

Indicative versus subjunctive in future conditionals   There are both indicative and subjunctive future-tense conditionals, and sometimes the same words can be used to express both. 

Could it be a conditional? Connecting contrastive knowledge with the differences between between kinds of conditionals



lighter

Felosophy    Cat philosophy! 

Philosophy as engineering  (from Mo Bou, ed. Two Roads to Wisdom)

the party-goers guide to philosophy

Lockhart's problem 

Did Lewis Carroll write Genesis?

monotheism vs. polytheism



hard to get

Accomplishment  A radical symmetry between belief and action.

Mathematical Modelling and Contrastive Explanation (CJP supp vol 16, 1990: hard to find in libraries)  

Disasters and Dilemmas   (out of print) You will need to ensure that your country settings on wiley.com are set to the United Kingdom in order to be able to use the link. 






PhilPapers list of my publications

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