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201Vanilla Rules: the "No Ice Cream" ConstructionProceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung 27 209-227. 2023.This paper is about what we call Deontically-flavored Nominal Constructions (DNCs) in English, such as "No ice cream" or "Dogs on leash only". DNCs are often perceived as commands and have been argued to be a type of non-canonical imperative, much like root infinitives in German or Russian. We argue instead that DNCs at their core are declaratives that cite a rule but can be used performatively in the right context. We propose that DNCs contain an elided deontic modal, i.e., allowed, whose presenc…Read more
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63Ought and agencySynthese 200 (5): 1-40. 2022.A thorny question surrounding the meaning of ought concerns a felt distinction between deontic uses of ought that seem to evaluate a state of affairs versus those that seem to describe a requirement or obligation to perform an action, as in and, respectively. There ought not be childhood death and disease. You ought to keep that promise. Various accounts have been offered to explain the contrast between “agentive” and “non-agentive” ought sentences. One such account is the Agency-in-the-Prejacen…Read more
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20The Inhuman Condition (review)Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy/Revue canadienne de philosophie continentale 15 (1): 260-263. 2011.
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130On Content Uniformity for Beliefs and DesiresReview of Philosophy and Psychology 12 (2): 279-309. 2020.The view that dominates the literature on intentional attitudes holds that beliefs and desires both have propositional content. A commitment to what I call “content uniformity” underlies this view. According to content uniformity, beliefs and desires are but different psychological modes having a uniform kind of content. Prima facie, the modes don’t place any constraint on the kinds of content the attitude can have. I challenge this consensus by pointing out an asymmetry between belief contents …Read more
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58Some Constraints on Contextualism About ModalsIn Tadeusz Ciecierski & Pawel Grabarczyk (eds.), The Architecture of Context and Context-Sensitivity, Springer. pp. 295-315. 2020.The following paradigm, most closely associated with the work of Angelika Kratzer, dominates the literature on the semantics of modals: MUST is a universal quantifier over a contextually determined set of worlds, where ⌜MUST
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339Future Orientation on an Event-Relative Semantics for ModalsIn Maggie Baird (ed.), NELS 49: Proceedings of the Forty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society: Volume 3, Glsa, Dept. of Linguistics. pp. 149-162. 2019.
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49The Idea of Continental Philosophy (review)Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy/Revue canadienne de philosophie continentale 12 (2): 229-233. 2008.
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34Rudi Visker, The Inhuman Condition: Looking for Difference After Levinas and Heidegger (review)Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy/Revue canadienne de philosophie continentale 15 (1): 260-263. 2011.
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18Kant’s Transcendental Arguments (review)Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy/Revue canadienne de philosophie continentale 13 (2): 195-199. 2009.
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357There is a common assumption in the semantics of modal auxiliaries in natural language; in utterances of MOD φ , where MOD is a modal and φ is the prejacent, context determines the particular flavor of modality expressed by the modal. Such is the standard contextualist semantics of Kratzer and related proposals. This winds up being a problem, because there is a significant class of modals which have constraints on the admissible modal flavor that are not traceable to context. For example, in M…Read more
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Konstanz, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Semantic Theories |
Pragmatics |