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Practical knowledge and abilities
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009)
The thesis is an exploration of the relations between know-how, abilities, and ordinary knowledge of facts. It is shown that there is a distinctively practical sort of know-how and a corresponding interpretation of 'S knows ...
Two approaches to human rights
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009)
Contemporary philosophy of human rights is dominated by two seemingly opposed approaches. This dissertation is concerned with the choice between them. The traditional approach to human rights is characterized by the belief ...
The significance of fairness/
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009)
This dissertation is about fairness and the role it plays in political and personal morality. Specifically, I investigate when it is appropriate to rely on considerations of fairness to draw substantive conclusions about ...
The articulatory basis of positional asymmetries in phonological acquisition
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009)
Child phonological processes that lack counterparts in adult phonological typology have long posed a problem for formal modeling of phonological acquisition. This dissertation investigates child-specific processes with a ...
Contributions to a physicalistic theory of action
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2002)
My project of giving a general physicalistic reduction of action contrasts with Donald Davidson's view that only individual actions can be explained in physicalistic terms. The main reason for his view is that he thinks ...
Causal efficacy and externalist mental content
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2002)
Internalism about mental content is the view that microphysical duplicates must be mental duplicates as well. This dissertation develops and defends the idea that only a strong version of internalism is compatible with our ...
The time of possibilities : truth and felicity of subjunctive conditionals
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2002)
This dissertation is a study of modality and, in particular, of conditional statements within the framework of possible world semantics. I argue that in order to understand what the meaning of a modal sentence is we need ...
The syntax and processing of relative clauses in Mandarin Chinese
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003)
This thesis investigates relative clauses (henceforth RCs) in Mandarin Chinese as spoken in Taiwan from both syntactic and processing perspectives. I also explore the interaction between these two areas, for example, how ...
Moral Status
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003)
Chapters One through Three present the following view: (i) I explain moral status as follows: something has moral status just in case we have reasons not to cause harms to it simply in virtue of the badness of the harms ...
The autonomy of the political
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003)
This thesis examines and critically assesses five arguments for the autonomy of the political. The arguments I examine are those of Niccol6 Machiavelli, Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt, and John Rawls. After ...