•  147
    Contrafactives and Learnability
    In Marco Degano, Tom Roberts, Giorgio Sbardolini & Marieke Schouwstra (eds.), Proceedings of the 23rd Amsterdam Colloquium, . pp. 298-305. 2022.
    Richard Holton has drawn attention to a new semantic universal, according to which (almost) no natural language has contrafactive attitude verbs. This semantic universal is part of an asymmetry between factive and contrafactive attitude verbs. Whilst factives are abundant, contrafactives are scarce. We propose that this asymmetry is partly due to a difference in learnability. The meaning of contrafactives is significantly harder to learn than that of factives. We tested our hypothesis by conduct…Read more
  •  5
    Contrafactives and Learnability: An Experiment with Propositional Constants
    In Daisuke Bekki, Koji Mineshima & Eric McCready (eds.), Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics, Springer. pp. 67-82. 2023.
    Holton has drawn attention to a new semantic universal, according to which no natural language has contrafactive attitude verbs. Because factives are universal across natural languages, Holton’s universal is part of a major asymmetry between factive and contrafactive attitude verbs. We previously proposed that this asymmetry arises partly because the meaning of contrafactives is significantly harder to learn than that of factives. Here we extend our work by describing an additional computational…Read more
  •  25
    Choosing for Changing Selves (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 71 (3): 675-678. 2021.
    Choosing for Changing Selves. By Pettigrew, Richard.
  •  283
    Organisations as Computing Systems
    Journal of Social Ontology 6 (2): 211-236. 2020.
    Organisations are computing systems. The university’s sports centre is a computing system for managing sports teams and facilities. The tenure committee is a computing system for assigning tenure status. Despite an increasing number of publications in group ontology, the computational nature of organisations has not been recognised. The present paper is the first in this debate to propose a theory of organisations as groups structured for computing. I begin by describing the current situation in…Read more
  •  40
    Ontology, neural networks, and the social sciences
    Synthese 199 (1-2): 4775-4794. 2020.
    The ontology of social objects and facts remains a field of continued controversy. This situation complicates the life of social scientists who seek to make predictive models of social phenomena. For the purposes of modelling a social phenomenon, we would like to avoid having to make any controversial ontological commitments. The overwhelming majority of models in the social sciences, including statistical models, are built upon ontological assumptions that can be questioned. Recently, however, …Read more
  •  18
    Social-Computation-Supporting Kinds
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (7): 862-877. 2020.
    Social kinds are heterogeneous. As a consequence of this diversity, some authors have sought to identify and analyse different kinds of social kinds. One distinct kind of social kinds, however, has not yet received sufficient attention. I propose that there exists a class of social-computation-supporting kinds, or SCS-kinds for short. These SCS-kinds are united by the function of enabling computations implemented by social groups. Examples of such SCS-kinds arereimbursement form,US dollar bill,c…Read more
  •  72
    Group Membership and Parthood
    Journal of Social Ontology 4 (2): 121-135. 2018.
    Despite having faced severe criticism in the past, mereological approaches to group ontology, which argue that groups are wholes and that groups members are parts, have recently managed a comeback. Authors such as Katherine Ritchie and Paul Sheehy have applied neo-Aristotelian mereology to groups, and Katherine Hawley has defended mereological approaches against the standard objections in the literature. The present paper develops the mereological approaches to group ontology further and propose…Read more
  •  111
    Two theories of group agency
    Philosophical Studies 177 (7): 1901-1918. 2020.
    Two theories dominate the current debate on group agency: functionalism, as endorsed by Bryce Huebner and Brian Epstein, and interpretivism, as defended by Deborah Tollefsen, and Christian List and Philip Pettit. In this paper, I will give a new argument to favour functionalism over interpretivism. I discuss a class of cases which the former, but not the latter, can accommodate. Two features characterise this class: First, distinct groups coincide, that is numerically distinct groups share all t…Read more
  •  38
    Decision theory with a human face (review)
    Philosophical Psychology 32 (3): 432-435. 2019.