•  4669
    What is it to be a woman? What is it to be a man? We start by laying out desiderata for an analysis of 'woman' and 'man': descriptively, it should link these gender categories to sex biology without reducing them to sex biology, and politically, it should help us explain and combat traditional sexism while also allowing us to make sense of the activist view that gendering should be consensual. Using a Putnam-style 'Twin Earth' example, we argue that none of the existing analyses in the feminist…Read more
  •  2452
    (Added April 2023: This draft is superseded by Briggs, R.A., & George, B.R. (2023). 'What Even Is Gender?'. Routledge. DOI 10.4324/9781003053330, and in particular by the first three chapters thereof. While this much earlier draft remains available for archival purposes, you are encouraged to read and cite the 2023 book and to use its terminology.) This paper presents a new taxonomy of sex/gender concepts based on the idea of starting with a few basic components of the sex/gender system, and exh…Read more
  •  174
    Knowing‐'wh', Mention‐Some Readings, and Non‐Reducibility
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 2 (2): 166-177. 2013.
    This article presents a new criticisms of reductive approaches to knowledge-‘wh’ (i.e., those approaches on which whether one stands in the knowledge-‘wh’ relation to a question is determined by whether one stands in the knowledge-‘that’ relation to some answer(s) to the question). It argues in particular that the truth of a knowledge-‘wh’ attribution like ‘Janna knows where she can buy an Italian newspaper’ depends not only on what Janna knows about the availability of Italian newspapers, but o…Read more
  •  100
    The Oxford handbook of business ethics (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2010.
    This handbook is a comprehensive treatment of business ethics from a philosophical approach.
  •  63
    Profiting with Honor: Cicero’s Vision of Leadership (review)
    Journal of Business Ethics 97 (1). 2010.
    This article attempts to uncover the relevance of Cicero's thought to present-day management through an analysis of his last philosophical study, On Duties. Applying a methodology grounded in Socratic skepticism, Cicero synthesizes the Stoics and Aristotle to create his own moral theory. From this theory, we derive a Ciceronian set of recommended traits that make up a model business leader. Central to this model is the recognition that there are two lodestars in life, the beneficial and the hono…Read more
  •  60
    Puberty-Blocking Treatment and the Rights of Bad Candidates
    American Journal of Bioethics 19 (2): 80-82. 2019.
  •  60
    Battin et al examined data on deaths from physician-assisted suicide in Oregon and on PAS and voluntary euthanasia in The Netherlands. This paper reviews the methodology used in their examination and questions the conclusions drawn from it—namely, that there is for the most part ‘no evidence of heightened risk’ to vulnerable people from the legalisation of PAS or VE. This critique focuses on the evidence about PAS in Oregon. It suggests that vulnerability to PAS cannot be categorised simply by r…Read more
  •  59
    Representation Is Never Perfect, But Are Parents Even Representatives?
    with Elle Benjamin and Bethany E. Ziss
    American Journal of Bioethics 20 (4): 51-53. 2020.
    Volume 20, Issue 4, May 2020, Page 51-53.
  •  56
    On the existence of a strong minimal pair
    with Mingzhong Cai, Steffen Lempp, and Theodore A. Slaman
    Journal of Mathematical Logic 15 (1): 1550003. 2015.
    We show that there is a strong minimal pair in the computably enumerable Turing degrees, i.e. a pair of nonzero c.e. degrees a and b such that a∩b = 0 and for any nonzero c.e. degree x ≤ a, b ∪ x ≥ a.
  •  42
    Some remarks on certain trivalent accounts of presupposition projection
    Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics 24 (1-2): 86-117. 2014.
    This paper discusses some formal properties of trivalent approaches to presupposition projection, and in particular of the middle Kleene system of Peters (1977) and Krahmer (1998). After exploring the relationship between trivalent truth-functional accounts and dynamic accounts in the tradition of Heim (1983), I show how the middle Kleene trivalent account can be formulated in a way which shows that it meets the explanatory challenge of Schlenker (2006, 2008a,b), and provide some results relatin…Read more
  •  41
    The notions of finite and infinite second-order characterizability of cardinal and ordinal numbers are developed. Several known results for the case of finite characterizability are extended to infinite characterizability, and investigations of the second-order theory of ordinals lead to some observations about the Fraenkel-Carnap question for well-orders and about the relationship between ordinal characterizability and ordinal arithmetic. The broader significance of cardinal characterizability …Read more
  •  38
    Can we Agree About agree?
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (1): 243-264. 2016.
    This squib attempts to constrain semantic theories of agree wh constructions by broadening the data set and collecting naive speakers’ intuitions. Overall, our data suggest relatively permissive truth-conditions for these constructions. They also suggest a previously undiscussed presupposition for agree wh and also indicate that agree wh is not straightforwardly reducible to agree that. Although some accounts suggest differences in truth conditions among different asymmetrical agree with constru…Read more
  •  37
    “Difficult” Patients or Difficult Relationships?
    American Journal of Bioethics 12 (5): 8-9. 2012.
    The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 5, Page 8-9, May 2012
  •  37
    Which judgments show weak exhaustivity? (And which don't?)
    Natural Language Semantics 21 (4): 401-427. 2013.
    This paper considers two of the most prominent kinds of evidence that have been used to argue that certain embedded questions receive weakly exhaustive interpretations. The first kind is exemplified by judgments of consistency for declarative sentences that attribute knowledge of a wh-question and ignorance of the negation of that question to the same person, and the second concerns asymmetries between the role of positive and negative information in validating question-embedding surprise ascrip…Read more
  •  36
    After the Suicide Attempt: Offering Patients Another Chance
    with Rebecca L. Volpe and Michael J. Green
    American Journal of Bioethics 13 (3). 2013.
    No abstract
  •  34
    Within bioethics as well as in broader clinical practice, support for transgender and gender‐questioning adolescent access to pubertal suppression has often relied heavily on the desire to prevent risky, self‐destructive, and suicidal behavior. We argue that framing justifications for access to puberty suppression in this way can actually be harmful to both individual patients as well as to the broader trans population. This justification for access to care makes such access precarious, limits i…Read more
  •  30
    Question Embedding and the Semantics of Answers
    Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. 2011.
  •  27
    The Fraenkel-Carnap Question for Limited Higher-Order Languages
    with George Weaver and B. George
    Bulletin of the Section of Logic 39 (1/2): 1-9. 2010.
  •  17
    Hermeneutical Backlash
    Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 7 (4). 2021.
    In this paper we use the contemporary example of trans youth panics to introduce the notion of hermeneutical backlash, in which defenders of an established, unjust hermeneutical regime actively work to undermine and discredit hermeneutical liberation. We argue that the strategies and tropes of the trans youth panic illustrate a general propaganda vulnerability of epistemic liberation movements, and so are troubling for reasons that go beyond their application to trans youth. This exploration of …Read more
  •  16
    Profiting with Honor: Cicero’s Vision of Leadership
    Journal of Business Ethics 97 (1): 21-33. 2010.
    This article attempts to uncover the relevance of Cicero’s thought to present-day management through an analysis of his last philosophical study, On Duties. Applying a methodology grounded in Socratic skepticism, Cicero synthesizes the Stoics and Aristotle to create his own moral theory. From this theory, we derive a Ciceronian set of recommended traits that make up a model business leader. Central to this model is the recognition that there are two lodestars in life, the beneficial and the hono…Read more
  •  13
    Global Health Care Delivery: A Pandora’s Box of Ethical Issues
    Ethics in Biology, Engineering and Medicine 2 (1): 71-76. 2011.
  •  13
    As study of knowledge, epistemology attempts at identifying its necessary and sufficient conditions and defining its sources, structure and limits. From this pointof view, until present, there are no applied approaches to the Romanian archaeology. Consequently, my present paper presents an attempt to explore the structural characteristics of the knowledge creation process through the analysis of the results of a series of interviews conducted on Romanian archaeologists. The interviews followed a…Read more
  •  12
    Public Philosophy and Trans Activism
    with Veronica Ivy
    In Lee McIntyre, Nancy McHugh & Ian Olasov (eds.), A Companion to Public Philosophy, Wiley. 2022.
    This chapter explores how what is dismissed as “trans activism” is often public philosophy. It considers how so‐called “public philosophy” on trans issues often does a substantially worse job of living up to the name. The chapter discusses how the dichotomy between “trans activism” and “public philosophy” provides a pretext for marginalizing trans voices. To draw on Black feminist philosophical thought, lived experience is a criterion for knowledge of the needs of marginalized people. Like other…Read more
  •  12
    Algorithmic Randomness and Measures of Complexity
    Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 19 (3): 318-350. 2013.
    We survey recent advances on the interface between computability theory and algorithmic randomness, with special attention on measures of relative complexity. We focus on reducibilities that measure the initial segment complexity of reals and the power of reals to compress strings, when they are used as oracles. The results are put into context and several connections are made with various central issues in modern algorithmic randomness and computability.
  •  11
    Does Humour Influence Perceptions of the Ethicality of Female-Disparaging Advertising?
    with Vassiliki Grougiou and Danae Manika
    Journal of Business Ethics 164 (1): 1-16. 2020.
    This article responds to calls for further research on ethical issues in advertising. The study examines whether advertising strategies which use female-disparaging themes are perceived as ethical, and what effect this has on ad and brand attitudes. It also examines whether or not humour assuages ethical evaluations of female-disparaging ads. The findings from an experimental research design, which included 336 British respondents, show that non-disparaging and non-humorous ads are considered to…Read more
  •  10
    The Blinding Effects of Team Identification on Sports Corruption: Cross-Cultural Evidence from Sub-Saharan African Countries
    with Anastasia Stathopoulou and Tommy Kweku Quansah
    Journal of Business Ethics 179 (2): 511-529. 2021.
    Although the world of sports has witnessed numerous corruption scandals, the effects of perceived corruption in sports have not been sufficiently investigated in the literature. The aim of this paper is to examine how sports team identification weakens people’s perceptions of corruption in sports, and how it dampens corruption’s negative effects on spectator behavior. The study also examines how prevalent social norms regarding corruption in a country strengthen or weaken these effects. A survey…Read more