A critical look at agent-based modeling in the social sciences. Two misconceptions about the relation between social macroproperties and microproperties afflict agent-based models. These lead current models to systematically ignore factors relevant to the properties they intend to model, and to overlook a wide range...
Argues against a "mentalistic" picture of the social world. It is often seen as a truism that social objects and facts are the product of human intentions. I argue that the role of intentions in social ontology is commonly overestimated. I propose a more worldly...
My aim in this paper is to discuss a metaphysical framework within which to understand “standard linguistic entities” (SLEs), such as words, sentences, phonemes, and other entities routinely employed in linguistic theory. In doing so, I aim to defuse certain kinds of skepticism, challenge convention-based...
I develop a functional theory of linguistic entities. Chomsky and others have denied the relevance of external linguistic entities, such as E-languages, to linguistic explanation, and have questioned their coherence altogether. I discuss a new approach to understanding the nature of linguistic entities, focusing in...
This is a review of a collection of papers on artifacts, edited by Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence. Although I’ve thought a lot about artifacts — objects like screwdrivers, chairs, and dollar bills — I haven’t written much about them directly. This review was a...
This interesting (and massive!) handbook is edited by Ian Jarvie, who also serves as editor of the journal Philosophy of the Social Sciences, and Jesús Zamora-Bonilla, philosopher of science at the National Open University of Spain. It has papers on the history of the philosophy...
Ruth Millikan is one of the most interesting and influential philosophers alive. Her work is also hard to penetrate. In this review, I try to present and assess her work on the nature of language, which is collected in this anthology. I also criticize her...
