Dr David Braddon-Mitchell

David Braddon-Mitchell is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sydney. He was previously at the University of Auckland and a Research Fellow at the Australian National University.

He is the author of articles in leading philosophy journals including The Journal of Philosophy, Nous, Mind, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy and Phenomenological Review, Synthese, Erkenntnis, Analysis, The Monist, Ratio, The Journal of Political Philosophy, and the Australasian Journal of Philosophy.

He is the author, with Frank Jackson, of The Philosophy of Mind and Cognition.

He works in Philosophy of Mind and metaphysics, and cross borders into philosophy of science, philosophy of biology, ethics and political philosophy from time to time. The next section contains some of his recent papers either forthcoming or soon to be forthcoming (touch wood) that may otherwise be hard to get.

Citation: those which are forthcoming may be cited as such. Other preliminary papers may be cited if you send him an email with the relevant passage for approval. You may not cite it without approval, even with qualifications like "David BM once wrote on his website ..."

Philosophy of Mind

• Qualia and Analytic Conditionals (J Phil 2003)
• Folk Theories of the Third Kind ( forthcoming in Ratio)
• Masters of our Meanings (forthcoming in Philosophical Studies)

Metaphysics

• How do we know it is Now Now? (forthcoming in Analysis )
• The Loneliness of Stages (with K. Miller) (forthcoming in Analysis)
• How to be a Conventional Person ( forthcoming in The Monist) (with K. Miller)

Philosophy of Science

The Subsumption of Reference (forthcoming in BJPS)

How can the reference of theoretical terms be stable over changes of theory? I defend an approach to this that does not depend on substantive metasemantic theories of reference. It relies on the idea that in contexts of use, terms may play a role in a theory that in turn points to a further (possibly unknown) theory. Empirical claims are claims about the nature of the further theories, and the falsification of these further theories is understood not as showing that a term in the original theory fails to refer, but rather that a scientific hypothesis encapsulated by the further theory is mistaken.

Ethics and Metaethics

Believing Falsely Makes it So

This paper defends a cogntivist and externalist account of meta-ethics which has all the features that we desire in internalist accounts.

Freedom and Binding Consequentialism

The paper proposes a new version of direct act consequentialism that will provide the same evaluations of the rightness of acts as indirect disposition, motive or character consequentialism, thus reconciling the coherence of direct consequentialism with the plausible results in cases of indirect consequentialism. This is achieved by seeing that adopting certain kinds of moral dispositions causally constrains our future acts, so that the maximizing acts ruled out by the disposition can no longer be chosen. Thus when we act we do the best we can, which is all that is required for rightness according to act consequentialism.

Political Philosophy

What Is Free Speech? (with C West) (forthcoming in J Pol Phil)