•  26
    Jessica Keiser’s Non-Ideal Foundations of Language is a serious, sustained attempt to engage in systematic philosophy of language while leaving aside some of th.
  •  54
    Talking About: An Intentionalist Theory of Reference
    Philosophical Quarterly. forthcoming.
    ‘What are you talking about?’ This is, in a sense, the animating question of philosophy of language. Or at least it was at the start of the 20th century. Times change, and interest in this question has perhaps faded. Still, it remains. And now we have a new attempt to answer it, in the form of Elmar Unnsteinnson's Talking About.
  •  42
    The Vagaries of Reference
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9 (n/a). 2022.
    Evans (1973)’s Madagascar case and other cases like it have long been taken to represent a serious challenge for the Causal Theory of Names. The present essay answers this challenge on behalf of the causal theorist. The key is to treat acts of uttering names as events. Like other events, utterances of names sometimes turn out to have features which only become clear in retrospect.
  •  13
    Relevance-Based Knowledge Resistance in Public Conversations
    In Jesper Strömbäck, Åsa Wikforss, Kathrin Glüer, Torun Lindholm & Henrik Oscarsson (eds.), Knowledge Resistance in High-Choice Information Environments, Routledge. pp. 106-127. 2022.
    In addition to ordinary conversations among relatively small numbers of individuals, human societies have public conversations. These are diffuse, ongoing discussions about various topics, which are largely sustained by journalistic activities. They are conversations about news – what is happening now – that members of various groups (such as the residents of a certain country, a certain town, or practitioners of a certain profession) need to know about in their capacity as members of those grou…Read more
  •  203
    Indexicality and The Answering Machine Paradox
    Philosophy Compass 8 (6): 580-592. 2013.
    Answering machines and other types of recording devices present prima facie problems for traditional theories of the meaning of indexicals. The present essay explores a range of semantic and pragmatic responses to these issues. Careful attention to the difficulties posed by recordings promises to help enlighten the boundaries between semantics and pragmatics more broadly
  •  165
    We consider a range of cases—both hypothetical and actual—in which agents apparently know how to \ but fail to believe that the way in which they in fact \ is a way for them to \. These “no-belief” cases present a prima facie problem for Intellectualism about knowledge-how. The problem is this: if knowledge-that entails belief, and if knowing how to \ just is knowing that some w is a way for one to \, then an agent cannot both know how to \ and fail to believe that w, the way that she \s, is a w…Read more
  •  18
    Manipulative Machines
    In Fleur Jongepier & Michael Klenk (eds.), The Philosophy of Online Manipulation, . pp. 91-107. 2022.
    The aim of this chapter is to explore various ways of thinking about the concept of manipulation in order to capture both current and potentially future instances of machine manipulation, manipulation on the part of everything from the Facebook advertising algorithm to super-intelligent AGI. Three views are considered: a conservative one, which slightly tweaks extant influence-based theories of manipulation; a dismissive view according to which it doesn't matter much if machines are literally ma…Read more
  •  179
    Unspeakable names
    Synthese 201 (2): 1-19. 2023.
    There are some names which cannot be spoken and others which cannot be written, at least on certain very natural ways of conceiving of them. Interestingly, this observation proves to be in tension with a wide range of views about what names are. Prima facie, this looks like a problem for predicativists. Ultima facie, it turns out to be equally problematic for Millians. For either sort of theorist, resolving this tension requires embracing a revisionary account of the metaphysics of names. Revisi…Read more
  •  270
    Should moral intuitionism go social?
    Noûs 57 (4): 973-985. 2022.
    In recent work, Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer‐Landau (2020) develop a new social version of moral intuitionism that promises to explain why our moral intuitions are trustworthy. In this paper, we raise several worries for their account and present some general challenges for the broader class of views we call Social Moral Intuitionism. We close by reflecting on Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer‐Landau's comparison between what they call the “perceptual practice” and the “moral intuition practice”, which w…Read more
  •  227
    Tolerating Sense Variation
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1): 182-196. 2023.
    Frege famously claimed that variations in the sense of a proper name can sometimes be ‘tolerated’. In this paper, we offer a novel explanation of this puzzling claim. Frege, we argue, follows Trendelenburg in holding that we think in language—sometimes individually and sometimes together. Variations in sense can be tolerated in just those cases where we are using language to coordinate our actions but are not engaged in thinking together about an issue.
  •  22
    Lying: Language, Knowledge, Ethics, and Politics (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2018.
    Philosophers have been thinking about lying for several thousand years, yet this topic has only recently become a central area of academic interest for philosophers of language, epistemologists, ethicists, and political philosophers. Lying: Language, Knowledge, Ethics, Politics provides the first dedicated collection of philosophical essays on the emerging topic of lying. Adopting an inter-subdisciplinary approach, this volume breaks new methodological ground in exploring the ways that a better …Read more
  •  342
    How to Count Animals, More or Less (review)
    Philosophical Review 130 (4): 601-605. 2021.
  •  43
    Online Communication
    The Philosophers' Magazine 94 90-95. 2021.
    We explore the speech act of amplification and its newfound prominence in online speech environments. Then we point to some puzzles this raises for the strategy of ‘fighting speech with more speech’.
  •  397
    Speaker's reference, semantic reference, sneaky reference
    Mind and Language 37 (5): 856-875. 2022.
    According to what is perhaps the dominant picture of reference, what a referential term refers to in a context is determined by what the speaker intends for her audience to identify as the referent. I argue that this sort of broadly Gricean view entails, counterintuitively, that it is impossible to knowingly use referential terms in ways that one expects or intends to be misunderstood. Then I sketch an alternative which can better account for such opaque uses of language, or what I call “sneaky…Read more
  •  385
    Meta-Metasemantics, or the Quest for the One True Metasemantics
    Philosophical Quarterly 72 (1): 135-154. 2021.
    What determines the meaning of a context-sensitive expression in a context? It is standardly assumed that, for a given expression type, there will be a unitary answer to this question; most of the literature on the subject involves arguments designed to show that one particular metasemantic proposal is superior to a specific set of alternatives. The task of the present essay will be to explore whether this is a warranted assumption, or whether the quest for the one true metasemantics might be a …Read more
  •  97
    A Kantian Response to Futility Worries?
    In Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson & Tyler Doggett (eds.), Food, Ethics, and Society: An Introductory Text with Readings, Oxford University Press. pp. 215-218. 2016.
    Due in no small part to Kant's own seemingly dim views on the value of animals, Kantian ethics has traditionally been understood to be rather unfriendly ground for arguments in favor of vegetarianism. This has started to change recently, which raises the question: do Kantian approaches offer a way of defending vegetarianism that doesn't run afoul of the sorts of futility worries that afflict consequentialist arguments for vegetarianism? I argue that Kantian approaches in fact face an analogous w…Read more
  •  173
    Act Consequentialism and Inefficacy
    In Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson & Tyler Doggett (eds.), Food, Ethics, and Society: An Introductory Text with Readings, Oxford University Press. pp. 210-214. 2016.
    A variety of eating and purchasing practices, in particular vegetarianism, are often motivated via an appeal to their expected good consequences. Lurking in the background, however, is the question: can I really hope to make a difference via my purchases in a social world as complex and wasteful as our own? I review the evidence as it stands and conclude that there are good reasons to suspect that one probably does not make a difference directly via one's purchases. That said, there may be some …Read more
  •  176
    Why we should keep talking about fake news
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (4): 471-487. forthcoming.
    In response to Habgood-Coote (2019) and a growing number of scholars who argue that academics and journalists should stop talking about fake news and abandon the term, we argue that the reasons which have been offered for eschewing the term 'fake news' are not sufficient to justify such abandonment. Prima facie, then, we take ourselves and others to be justified in continuing to talk about fake news.
  •  247
    Who’s Your Ideal Listener?
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 99 (2): 257-270. 2021.
    It is increasingly common for philosophers to rely on the notion of an idealised listener when explaining how the semantic values of context-sensitive expressions are determined. Some have identified the semantic values of such expressions, as used on particular occasions, with whatever an appropriately idealised listener would take them to be. Others have argued that, for something to count as the semantic value, an appropriately idealised listener should be able to recover it. Our aim here is …Read more
  •  383
    Significant variations in the way objects appear across different viewing conditions pose a challenge to the view that they have some true, determinate color. This view would seem to require that we break the symmetry between multiple appearances in favor of a single variant. A wide range of philosophical and non-philosophical writers have held that the symmetry can be broken by appealing to daylight viewing conditions—that the appearances of objects in daylight have a stronger, and perhaps uniq…Read more
  •  77
    New Work on Speech Acts (review)
    Analysis 79 (4): 783-790. 2019.
    New Work on Speech Acts provides exactly what it purports to: a collection of essays on a wide array of topics falling under the general aegis of speech act theory. Just as there is little agreement on what exactly speech act theory is, one finds in this volume a wide variety of topics being addressed, and a wide variety of approaches to these topics. What is constant throughout is the sense that, after several decades in near stasis, speech act theory is quickly re-emerging as a locus for a gre…Read more
  •  515
    The Big Shill
    Ratio 33 (4): 269-280. 2020.
    Shills are people who endorse products and companies for pay, while pretending that their endorsements are ingenuous. Here we argue that there is something objectionable about shilling that is not reducible to its bad consequences, the lack of epistemic conscientiousness it often relies upon, or to the shill’s insincerity. Indeed, we take it as a premise of our inquiry that shilling can sometimes be sincere, and that its wrongfulness is not mitigated by the shill’s sincerity, in cases where the …Read more
  •  975
    What’s New About Fake News?
    with Jessica Pepp and Rachel Sterken
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 16 (2): 67-94. 2019.
    The term "fake news" ascended rapidly to prominence in 2016 and has become a fixture in academic and public discussions, as well as in political mud-slinging. In the flurry of discussion, the term has been applied so broadly as to threaten to render it meaningless. In an effort to rescue our ability to discuss—and combat—the underlying phenomenon that triggered the present use of the term, some philosophers have tried to characterize it more precisely. A common theme in this nascent philosophica…Read more
  •  365
    Discourse and method
    Linguistics and Philosophy 43 (2): 119-138. 2020.
    Stojnić et al. (2013, 2017) argue that the reference of demonstratives is fixed without any contribution from the extra-linguistic context. On their `prominence/coherence' theory, the reference of a demonstrative expression depends only on its context-independent linguistic meaning. Here, we argue that Stojnić et al.’s striking claims can be maintained in only the thinnest technical sense. Instead of eliminating appeals to the extra-linguistic context, we show how the prominence/coherence theo…Read more
  •  386
    This dissertation sets out to answer the question ''What fixes the semantic values of context-sensitive referential terms—like names, demonstratives, and pronouns—in context?'' I argue that it is the speaker's intentions that play this role, as constrained by the conventions governing the use of particular sorts of referential terms. These conventions serve to filter the speaker's intentions for just those which meet these constraints on use, leaving only these filtered-for intentions as semanti…Read more
  •  61
    A Naïve Realist Theory of Colour By Keith Allen (review)
    Analysis 78 (3): 580-583. 2018.
    A Naïve Realist Theory of Colour By AllenKeithOxford University Press, 2016. x + 204 pp.
  •  431
    The Lying Test
    Mind and Language 31 (4): 470-499. 2016.
    As an empirical inquiry into the nature of meaning, semantics must rely on data. Unfortunately, the primary data to which philosophers and linguists have traditionally appealed—judgments on the truth and falsity of sentences—have long been known to vary widely between competent speakers in a number of interesting cases. The present article constitutes an experiment in how to obtain some more consistent data for the enterprise of semantics. Specifically, it argues from some widely accepted Gricea…Read more