Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
PhD, 1994
DeKalb, Illinois, United States of America
  •  8
    The rhetorical relations approach to indirect speech acts
    Pragmatics and Cognition 17 (1): 43-76. 2009.
    Asher and Lascarides maintain that speech act types, the sorts of linguistic actions described and categorized, most influentially, by Austin and Searle are rhetorical relations. This relational account of speech acts is problematic for two reasons: Despite Asher and Lascarides ingenious appeal to dot type speech acts, the relational account is incompatible with the widespread phenomenon of indirect speech; only some speech acts are plausibly identified with rhetorical relations. These problems …Read more
  • Seeing Through Opacity: A Defense of the Russellian View of Propositional Attitudes
    Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1994.
    The primary purposes of my dissertation are, first, to motivate Russellian theories of propositional attitudes and propositional attitude ascriptions by criticizing Fregean theories, and second, to defend Russellian theories from the arguments and problems posed by the phenomenon of opacity. A theory of propositional attitudes and propositional attitude ascriptions is Russellian just in case it respects both the Principle of Direct Reference, and the Principle of Semantic Innocence. The Principl…Read more
  • Review (review)
    Critica 41 (123): 147-162. 2009.
  • What Unarticulated Constituents Could Not Be
    In Joseph K. Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & David Shier (eds.), Meaning and Truth: Investigations in Philosophical Semantics., Seven Bridges Press. pp. 231--256. 2002.