Here you can find some papers in the works and older material not in progress for various reasons but which I thought might be fun to post. Comments and critiques of the papers in preparation are greatly appreciated.
- Drafts in Preparation
- Semantic Defect in Context
I defend the view that some expressions only contingently fail to express truth-evaluable propositions against the objection that this view cannot make systematic sense of the beliefs and intentions of speakers who use these contingently problematic expressions in unfavorable contexts without knowing it. Using Field's recent expression of this objection as a foil, I try to show why appreciating the failure of the objection is important to understanding philosophical applications of the view in question to the liar paradox.
- Fitch's Paradox
Fitch's Paradox consists in a deduction which appears to show that the existence of unknown truths implies the existence of unknowable truths. I offer some reasons for thinking that the conclusion of Fitch's Paradox, once properly understood, is true but uninteresting.
- Revisiting Common Ground
I investigate a possibility connected with the truism that speakers often have reason to express information taken for granted in a conversation. The possibility in question is that certain linguistic expressions function solely to invoke parts of the common ground by rendering their complements presuppositional. This hypothesis explains the embedding behavior of a small group of expressions and thereby yields a result on the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface: the "meaning" of certain words consists exclusively in the manipulation of pragmatic information in a way that constrains their syntactic realizability.
- Projects Underway
I have drafts of these papers, but I'm just a little more reluctant to give them out. Please don't hesitate to contact me, though, if you're interested in reading these somewhat rougher papers.
- Agreement and Circumstance in the Philosophical Investigations
I give a reading of the rule-following sections of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations as comprising a pair of distinct projects: an inquiry into a kind of justification, and a second inquiry into metasemantics. Understanding the nature of these projects and their relationship resolves otherwise perplexing tensions in the text and crucially yields a new view of how and why Wittgenstein makes his controversial appeal to human agreement in explaining rule-following behavior. The reading avoids placing such agreement in a problematic foundational role, thereby making room for Wittgenstein to advocate a relatively modest, but fascinating set of claims about meaning, communication, and intentionality of considerable interest to philosophers of language.
- Context, Content, and Belief De Re
I attempt to amend and clarify aspects of Stalnaker's account of de re belief in response to a series of objections. I try to show how the revamped account makes sense of a recent puzzle involving something like de re belief raised by Cumming. I also present variants of the case that are difficult to account for on Cumming's proposed resolution of the puzzle, but seem to pose no difficulties for Stalnaker.
- Other Material
These are some papers I currently have no future plans for. They can be fun in their own way.
- Rational to be Irrational?
I argue using a (very farfetched) thought experiment that utility maximizing plans do not always involve utility maximizing choices, and that pre-theoretic rationality sometimes involves the disposition to opt for utility maximizing plans, and not choices. This conclusion has the potential to shape our understanding of the Toxin Puzzle and the rationality of using, and responding to, "cheap talk". If examples involving your inability to distinguish yourself from clones of yourself make you uncomfortable, though, this paper is not for you.
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