Who I am
I'm a philosopher based in Tartu, Estonia, a university town to the south east of the capital, Tallinn (https://sites.google.com/view/alexstewartdavies/). I work on issues related to the use of language in context. A matter that allows me to engage with the following themes: (1) miscommunication, (2) the politics of speech, (3) context-sensitivity, (4) disagreement, and (5) some epistemology. A further interest of mine is university management: (6) adapted preferences in the university.
(1) Miscommunication
Several of my papers explore how the context-sensitivity of linguistic content can create difficulties for communication. Th…
Who I am
I'm a philosopher based in Tartu, Estonia, a university town to the south east of the capital, Tallinn (https://sites.google.com/view/alexstewartdavies/). I work on issues related to the use of language in context. A matter that allows me to engage with the following themes: (1) miscommunication, (2) the politics of speech, (3) context-sensitivity, (4) disagreement, and (5) some epistemology. A further interest of mine is university management: (6) adapted preferences in the university.
(1) Miscommunication
Several of my papers explore how the context-sensitivity of linguistic content can create difficulties for communication. The "How to silence..." paper describes how a person in a courtroom who has limited rights to speak compared with her interlocutor may be barred from expressing the propositions she aims to express, because presuppositions she wants to, but cannot, reject are introduced by the questions she is obliged to answer. This paper draws upon conversation analytic observations about the rights and obligations of different speakers in a courtroom cross-examination. The two papers responding to work by Andrew Peet ("Testimonial Knowledge..." and "Testimony, Recovery and Plausible Deniability...") argue against the devastating effects Peet argues context-sensitivity has upon our capacity to acquire knowledge from testimony. And there are two papers which sketch a general theory of how we cope with contextual ignorance: the "Communicating in Contextual Ignorance" paper, and the speech reports paper: they both make use of Kit Fine's notion of content-parthood to explain how we can have partial understanding of what's being said, given partial knowledge of the context in which it's being said. The paper on Kuhnian incommensurability ("Kuhn on Incommensurability...") argues that miscommunication which arises because of incommensurability can play a positive role in scientific progress, by shaping how scientific communities divide up in sub-communities of scientists who are capable of doing science with one another, even if not with members of the other sub-communities. The paper on identity display ("Identity Display...") describes how interlocutors can be motivated to interpret each other against each other's intentions.
(2) Politics of Speech
Two papers are about speech that silences speech (specifically: pornographic speech). The "How to silence..." paper is an attempt to show how pornography can in principle stop speakers from expressing the contents they wish to express--in contrast with most accounts of pornography's silencing propensity, which focus on its capacity to stop speakers from getting their acts to have the intended force (as opposed to content). The "A liberal anti-porn feminism?" paper argues that the liberal defence of proposed anti-pornography ordinances in the U.S. (according to which pornography silences women's speech, and so needs restricting in order to protect women's freedom of speech) doesn't succeed, because the dichotomy between women and pornographers is a false one.
(3) Context-sensitivity
Several papers concern how we should understand context-sensitivity. In "A (contingent) content parthood analysis..." I defend the view that indirect speech reports report parts of the contents of the utterances they report. If this is right, it would allow us to report what someone has said even if we don't know the entirety of what they said, owing, for instance, to ignorance of some of the details of the context in which they were speaking. In "Entailments are cancellable" I re-iterate something that Grice acknowledged about the cancellability test for implicature, but which seems to have been forgotten: namely, that if you have context sensitive expressions in the sentence to be tested, then its content can be shifted by cancellation. Cancellation wouldn't then show that the cancelled proposition was not entailed by the sentence prior to cancellation. In "Off-target responses" I explain why incomplete formalizations of the kind of context-sensitivity documented by Charles Travis fail to show this kind of context-sensitivity does not exist and/or is not widespread. In "Communicating by doing something else" I explain how the embedding of the use of a context-sensitive expression in a broader activity can serve to make clear how the speaker ought to use the expression (i.e. with what content) if she is to best serve that activity. Thus, if she uses the expression as she should, then, if her interpreters can reasonably assume she is rational, then she can make clear how she is using the expression by openly using the expression in such an embedding activity. I explore this way of making the content of context-sensitive expressions clear to others in the papers that respond to Peet (viz. "Testimony, Recovery, and Plausible Deniability..." and "Testimonial Knowledge and Context-Sensitivity..."), and in my papers on disagreement (viz. "Elaboration..." and "Using 'not tasty'..."). The "Metasemantic moral encroachment" paper is an ex-phi paper, that tests whether speakers change their judgements about the truth-conditions of sentences when the moral consequences of a sentence having a given truth-condition in a given context are negative.
(4) Disagreement
Two papers ("Elaboration..." and "Using 'not tasty'...") engage with the debate between relativists and contextualists over the semantics of predicates of personal taste. The "Elaboration..." paper argues that some of the behaviour thought to be distinctive of predicates of personal taste can be exhibited by other context-sensitive expressions like "tall". The "Using 'not tasty'..." paper argues in the other direction: it identifies a context in which uses of "not tasty" are just as objective as typical uses of "is red". A third paper ("Identity Display") describes a hitherto unconsidered motive (i.e. one besides what has come to be known as "metalinguistic negotiation") interlocutors may have to express and pursue a metalinguistic disagreement.
(5) Some epistemology
One paper provides a defence of infallibilism about knowledge by showing how a common reason for rejecting the thesis can be diminished if we acknowledge that our evidence more commonly entails what we believe than it might at first seem. For instance, "She told me that p" can entail the truth of "p" on certain uses of "told". Two other papers ("Testimony, Recovery and Plausible deniability" and "Testimonial Knowledge and Context-Sensitivity...") concern the intersection of linguistic context-sensitivity with the epistemology of testimony.
(6) Adapted preferences in the university
The paper "Cheap and Expensive Credit Points..." is not directly philosophy: it is about university management. But it does handle a philosophical issue: namely, how student preferences for workloads are shaped by the institutional design within which they work. This is important to acknowledge when trying to use student judgements of workload in designing courses. Sometimes when students want lower workloads, the response isn't to lower the workload for a given course, but instead to change an institutional design that generates such student preferences.