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370Conceptual Ethics IIPhilosophy Compass 8 (12): 1102-1110. 2013.Which concepts should we use to think and talk about the world, and to do all of the other things that mental and linguistic representation facilitates? This is the guiding question of the field that we call ‘conceptual ethics’. Conceptual ethics is not often discussed as its own systematic branch of normative theory. A case can nevertheless be made that the field is already quite active, with contributions coming in from areas as diverse as fundamental metaphysics and social/political philosoph…Read more
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132Metalinguistic Descriptivism for MilliansAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 91 (3): 443-457. 2013.Metalinguistic descriptivism is the view that proper names are semantically equivalent to descriptions featuring their own quotations (e.g., ?Socrates? means ?the bearer of ?Socrates??). The present paper shows that Millians can actually accept an inferential version of this equivalence thesis without running afoul of the modal argument. Indeed, they should: for it preserves the explanatory virtues of more familiar forms of descriptivism while avoiding objections (old and new) to Kent Bach's nom…Read more
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1Metaphysics as Make-BelieveIn John Woods (ed.), Fictions and Models: New Essays, Philosophia. 2010.
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195What in the World Is Semantic Indeterminacy?Analytic Philosophy 56 (4): 298-317. 2015.Discussions of “indeterminacy” customarily distinguish two putative types: semantic indeterminacy (SI)—indeterminacy that’s somehow the product of the semantics of our words/concepts—and metaphysical indeterminacy (MI)—indeterminacy that exists as a mind/language-independent feature of reality itself. A popular and influential thought among philosophers is that all indeterminacy must be SI. In this paper we challenge this thought. Our challenge is guided by the question: What, exactly, does i…Read more
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25Fiction and Narrative by Derek Matravers, 2014 Oxford, Oxford University Press192 pp., £30 (review)Journal of Applied Philosophy 31 (4): 434-436. 2014.
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212Mainstream semantics + deflationary truthLinguistics and Philosophy 34 (5): 397-410. 2011.Recent philosophy of language has been profoundly impacted by the idea that mainstream, model-theoretic semantics is somehow incompatible with deflationary accounts of truth and reference. The present article systematizes the case for incompatibilism, debunks circularity and “modal confusion” arguments familiar in the literature, and reconstructs the popular thought that truth-conditional semantics somehow “presupposes” a correspondence theory of truth as an inference to the best explanation. Th…Read more
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Pomona CollegeVisiting Assistant Professor
Claremont, California, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |