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Problems and mysteries of the many languages of thoughtCognitive Science 46 (12). 2022.“What is the structure of thought?” is as central a question as any in cognitive science. A classic answer to this question has appealed to a Language of Thought (LoT). We point to emerging research from disparate branches of the field that supports the LoT hypothesis, but also uncovers diversity in LoTs across cognitive systems, stages of development, and species. Our letter formulates open research questions for cognitive science concerning the varieties of rules and representations that under…Read more
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Review of Context and Coherence: The Logic and Grammar of Prominence, by Una Stojnić (review)Philosophical Review. forthcoming.
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Imperative Inference and Practical RationalityPhilosophical Studies (4): 1065-1090. 2021.Some arguments include imperative clauses. For example: ‘Buy me a drink; you can’t buy me that drink unless you go to the bar; so, go to the bar!’ How should we build a logic that predicts which of these arguments are good? Because imperatives aren’t truth apt and so don’t stand in relations of truth preservation, this technical question gives rise to a foundational one: What would be the subject matter of this logic? I argue that declaratives are used to produce beliefs, imperatives are used to…Read more
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Semantics without semantic contentMind and Language 37 (3): 304-328. 2020.I argue that semantics is the study of the proprietary database of a centrally inaccessible and informationally encapsulated input–output system. This system’s role is to encode and decode partial and defeasible evidence of what speakers are saying. Since information about nonlinguistic context is therefore outside the purview of semantic processing, a sentence’s semantic value is not its content but a partial and defeasible constraint on what it can be used to say. I show how to translate this …Read more
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We talk to people, not contextsPhilosophical Studies 177 (9): 2713-2733. 2020.According to a popular family of theories, assertions and other communicative acts should be understood as attempts to change the context of a conversation. Contexts, on this view, are publicly shared bodies of information that evolve over the course of a conversation and that play a range of semantic and pragmatic roles. I argue that this view is mistaken: performing a communicative act requires aiming to change the mind of one’s addressee, but not necessarily the context. Although changing the…Read more
Areas of Specialization
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Areas of Interest
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