Rutgers - New Brunswick
Department of Philosophy
PhD
Davis, California, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language
  •  248
    A drawback for substitutional arguments
    Language Sciences 88 (November). 2021.
    Competing theories on the semantics of group pejorative terms (also known as‘slurs’)comprise both advocates and opponents to the Identity Thesis (IT), according to whichthese terms and their neutral counterparts do not differ in semantic value. In the oppo-nents’camp, Christopher Hom has offered an argument based on substitution of slurs andneutral counterparts that both supports his semanticist approach and cast doubts on all IT-based approaches to slurs. We aim to point to a dilemma triggered …Read more
  •  16
    Semantic Minimalism and Presupposition
    ProtoSociology 31 43-49. 2014.
    This paper is about the interface between two phenomena—context sensitivity and pre­supposition. I argue that favored competing treatments of context sensitivity are incompatible with the received view about presupposition triggering. In consequence, I will urge a reconsideration of a much-maligned view about how best to represent context s ensitivity.
  •  53
    A provocative view has it that word meanings are underdetermined and dynamic, frustrating traditional approaches to theorizing about meaning. Peter Ludlow’s Living Words provides some of the philosophical reasons and motivations for accepting one such view, develops some of its details, and explores some of its ramifications. We critically examine some of the arguments in Living Words, paying particular attention to some of Ludlow’s views about the meanings of predicates, preservation of bivalen…Read more
  •  55
    Pejoratives and Ways of Thinking
    with David Copp
    Analytic Philosophy 58 (3): 248-271. 2017.
  •  356
    Embedding If and Only If
    Journal of Philosophical Logic 41 (2): 449-460. 2012.
    Some left-nested indicative conditionals are hard to interpret while others seem fine. Some proponents of the view that indicative conditionals have No Truth Values (NTV) use their view to explain why some left-nestings are hard to interpret: the embedded conditional does not express the truth conditions needed by the embedding conditional. Left-nestings that seem fine are then explained away as cases of ad hoc, pragmatic interpretation. We challenge this explanation. The standard reasons for NT…Read more
  •  47
  •  128
    Saying and Agreeing
    Mind and Language 25 (5): 583-601. 2010.
    No semantic theory is complete without an account of context sensitivity. But there is little agreement over its scope and limits even though everyone invokes intuition about an expression's behavior in context to determine its context sensitivity. Minimalists like Cappelen and Lepore identify a range of tests which isolate clear cases of context sensitive expressions, such as ‘I’, ‘here’, and ‘now’, to the exclusion of all others. Contextualists try to discredit the tests and supplant them with…Read more
  •  165
    Ambiguity
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2011.
  •  251
    What kind of a mistake is it to use a slur?
    with David Copp
    Philosophical Studies 172 (4): 1079-1104. 2015.
    What accounts for the offensive character of pejoratives and slurs, words like ‘kike’ and ‘nigger’? Is it due to a semantic feature of the words or to a pragmatic feature of their use? Is it due to a violation of a group’s desires to not be called by certain terms? Is it due to a violation of etiquette? According to one kind of view, pejoratives and the non-pejorative terms with which they are related—the ‘neutral counterpart’ terms—have different meanings or senses, and this explains the offens…Read more
  •  44
    Pursuing Meaning (review)
    Philosophical Review 124 (3): 437-440. 2015.
  •  71
    Water and Ice
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (3). 2006.
    (I) In Beyond Rigidity, Scott Soames argues that the term ‘water’ is ambiguous. On one disambiguation, it is an expansive predicate that is true of any quantity of H2O whatsoever. On a second disambiguation, it is a restricted predicate, true only of liquid quantities of H2O. Analytic philosophers are fond of claiming ambiguities where there are none. This, I shall argue, is the case with the claimed expansive‐restricted ambiguity. The predicate‐kind ambiguity I have no quibble with.
  •  141
    Semantic plasticity and epistemicism
    Philosophical Studies 161 (2): 273-285. 2012.
    This paper considers the connections between semantic shiftiness (plasticity), epistemic safety and an epistemic theory of vagueness as presented and defended by Williamson (1996a, b, 1997a, b). Williamson explains ignorance of the precise intension of vague words as rooted in insensitivity to semantic shifts: one’s inability to detect small shifts in intension for a vague word results in a lack of knowledge of the word’s intension. Williamson’s explanation, however, falls short of accounting fo…Read more
  •  111
    An ambiguity test for definite descriptions
    Philosophical Studies 111 (1): 81-95. 2002.
    Donnellan makes a convincing case for two distinct uses ofdefinite descriptions. But does the difference between the usesreflects an ambiguity in the semantics of descriptions? This paperapplies a linguistic test for ambiguity to argue that the differencebetween the uses is not semantically significant
  •  1
    Quine on Paraphrase and Regimentation
    In Gilbert Harman & Ernest Lepore (eds.), A Companion to W. V. O. Quine, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 89--113. 2013.
  •  62
    Presupposition and Context Sensitivity
    Mind and Language 29 (5): 613-627. 2014.
    We argue there is a clash between the standard treatments of context sensitivity and presupposition triggering. We use this criticism to motivate a defense of an often-discarded view about how to represent context sensitivity, according to which there are more lexically implicit items in logical form than has been appreciated
  •  150
    What is the proper way to draw the semantics-pragmatics distinction, and is what is said by a speaker ever enriched by pragmatics? An influential but controversial answer to the latter question is that the inputs to semantic interpretation contains representations of every contribution from context that is relevant to determining what is said, and that pragmatics never enriches the output of semantic interpretation. The proposal is bolstered by a controversial argument from syntactic binding des…Read more
  •  36
    Context, Compositionality and Amity: A Response to Rett
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 42 (1): 29-41. 2012.
    In an insightful and provocative paper, Jessica Rett (2006) claims that attempts to locate the (non-indexical, non-demonstrative) semantic contributions of context in syntax run into problems respecting compositionality. This is an especially biting problem for hidden indexical theorists such as Stanley (2000, 2002) who deploy hidden variables to provide a compositional theory of semantic interpretation. Fortunately for the hidden indexical theorists, her attack fails, albeit in interesting and …Read more
  •  95
    Survey Article: On the Nature of the Political Concept of Privilege
    Journal of Political Philosophy 25 (4): 487-507. 2017.
  •  91
    Unarticulated Constituents and Propositional Structure
    Mind and Language 26 (4): 412-435. 2011.
    Attempts to characterize unarticulated constituents (henceforth: UCs) by means of quantification over the parts of a sentence and the constituents of the proposition it expresses come to grief in more complicated cases than are commonly considered. In particular, UC definitions are inadequate when we consider cases in which the same constituent appears more than once in a proposition that only has one word with the constituent as its semantic value. This article explores some consequences of try…Read more