• Umeå University
    Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies
    Associate Professor
  • Cardiff University
    School of English, Communication and Philosophy
    Senior Lecturer
University of California, Berkeley
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2016
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
  •  784
    No context, no content, no problem
    Mind and Language 36 (2): 189-220. 2020.
    Recently, philosophers have offered compelling reasons to think that demonstratives are best represented as variables, sensitive not to the context of utterance, but to a variable assignment. Variablists typically explain familiar intuitions about demonstratives—intuitions that suggest that what is said by way of a demonstrative sentence varies systematically over contexts—by claiming that contexts initialize a particular assignment of values to variables. I argue that we do not need to link con…Read more
  •  745
    Multiculturalism, Autonomy, and Language Preservation
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 6. 2019.
    In this paper, I show how a novel treatment of speech acts can be combined with a well-known liberal argument for multiculturalism in a way that will justify claims about the preservation, protection, or accommodation of minority languages. The key to the paper is the claim that every language makes a distinctive range of speech acts possible, acts that cannot be realized by means of any other language. As a result, when a language disappears, so does a class of speech acts. If we accept that ou…Read more
  •  689
    Sociolinguistic variation, slurs, and speech acts
    Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    In this paper, I argue that the ‘social meanings’ associated with sociolinguistic variation put pressure on the standard philosophical conception of language, according to which the foremost thing we do with words is exchange information. Drawing on parallels with the explanatory challenge posed by slurs and pejoratives, I argue that the best way to understand social meanings is to think of them in speech act theoretic terms. I develop a distinctive form of pluralism about the performances reali…Read more
  •  630
    Language Loss and Illocutionary Silencing
    Mind 129 (515): 831-865. 2020.
    The twenty-first century will witness an unprecedented decline in the diversity of the world’s languages. While most philosophers will likely agree that this decline is lamentable, the question of what exactly is lost with a language has not been systematically explored in the philosophical literature. In this paper, I address this lacuna by arguing that language loss constitutes a problematic form of illocutionary silencing. When a language disappears, past and present speakers lose the ability…Read more
  •  618
    Standard semantic theories predict that non-deictic readings for complex demonstratives should be much more widely available than they in fact are. If such readings are the result of a lexical ambiguity, as Kaplan (1977) and others suggest, we should expect them to be available wherever a definite description can be used. The same prediction follows from ‘hidden argument’ theories like the ones described by King (2001) and Elbourne (2005). Wolter (2006), however, has shown that complex demonstra…Read more
  •  392
    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
  •  388
    Demonstratives without rigidity or ambiguity
    Linguistics and Philosophy 37 (5): 409-436. 2014.
    Most philosophers recognize that applying the standard semantics for complex demonstratives to non-deictic instances results in truth conditions that are anomalous, at best. This fact has generated little concern, however, since most philosophers treat non-deictic demonstratives as marginal cases, and believe that they should be analyzed using a distinct semantic mechanism. In this paper, I argue that non-deictic demonstratives cannot be written off; they are widespread in English and foreign la…Read more
  •  369
    Really Complex Demonstratives: A Dilemma
    Erkenntnis 87 (4): 1-24. 2022.
    I have two aims for the present paper, one narrow and one broad. The narrow aim is to show that a class of data originally described by Lynsey Wolter empirically undermine the leading treatments of complex demonstratives that have been described in the literature. The broader aim of the paper is to show that Wolter demonstratives, as I will call the constructions I focus on, are a threat not just to existing treatments, but to any possible theory that retains the uncontroversial assumptions that…Read more
  •  368
    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
  •  250
    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
  •  63
    Sociolinguistic Variation, Speech Acts, and Discursive Injustice
    Philosophical Quarterly 73 (4): 1024-1045. 2022.
    Despite its status at the heart of a closely related field, philosophers have so far mostly overlooked a phenomenon sociolinguists call ‘social meaning’. My aim in this paper will be to show that by properly acknowledging the significance of social meanings, we can identify an important new set of forms that discursive injustice takes. I begin by surveying some data from variationist sociolinguistics that reveal how subtle differences in the way a particular content is expressed allow us to perf…Read more
  •  39
    Poetic Injustice
    Episteme 1-15. forthcoming.
    When J.R. Cash (Johnny Cash) sings that he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, audiences impressed by the singer's skillful creation and depiction of a nihilistic lyrical subject clap and cheer. When Terrell Doyley (Skengdo) and Joshua Malinga (A.M.) sang broadly similar lyrics at a concert in 2018, London's Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service took them to be describing violent acts they had participated in and violent intentions they harbored, and the lyrics were used as…Read more
  •  22
    Extinct Languages
    The Philosophers' Magazine 94 84-89. 2021.
  •  18
  •  5
    Complex demonstratives, hidden arguments, and presupposition
    Synthese 198 (4): 2865-2900. 2019.
    Standard semantic theories predict that non-deictic readings for complex demonstratives should be much more widely available than they in fact are. If such readings are the result of a lexical ambiguity, as Kaplan (in: Almog, Perry, Wettstein (eds) Themes from Kaplan, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977) and others suggest, we should expect them to be available wherever a definite description can be used. The same prediction follows from ‘hidden argument’ theories like the ones described by Ki…Read more