University of Texas at Austin
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2021
APA Central Division
CV
Sheffield, South Yorkshire, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language
Philosophy of Mind
  •  277
    What’s your Opinion? Negation and ‘Weak’ Attitude Verbs
    Philosophical Quarterly 73 (4): 1141-1161. 2023.
    Attitude verbs like ‘believe’ and ‘want’ exhibit neg-raising: an ascription of the form a doesn’t believe that p tends to convey that a disbelieves—i.e., believes the negation of—p. In ‘Belief is Weak’, Hawthore et al. observe that neg-raising does not occur with verbs like ‘know’ or ‘need’. According to them, an ascription of the form a believes that p is true just in case a is in a belief state that makes p more likely than not, and so—excepting cases of complete indifference—a will either bel…Read more
  •  168
    Directing Thought
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    I argue that directing is a more fundamental kind of speech act than asserting, in the sense that the conditions under which an act counts as an assertion are sufficient for that act to count as a directive. I show how this follows from a particular way of conceiving intentionalism about speech acts, on which acts of assertion are attempts at changing a common body of information – or conversational common ground – maintained by conversational participants’ practical attitude of acceptance. I su…Read more
  •  374
    Genericity and Inductive Inference
    Philosophy of Science 1-18. forthcoming.
    We are often justified in acting on the basis of evidential confirmation. I argue that such evidence supports belief in non-quantificational generic generalizations, rather than universally quantified generalizations. I show how this account supports, rather than undermines, a Bayesian account of confirmation. Induction from confirming instances of a generalization to belief in the corresponding generic is part of a reasoning instinct that is typically (but not always) correct, and allows us to …Read more
  •  455
    Meaning and responsibility
    Mind and Language 38 (3): 809-827. 2023.
    In performing an act of assertion we are sometimes responsible for more than the content of the literal meaning of the words we have used, sometimes less. A recently popular research program seeks to explain certain of the commitments we make in speech in terms of responsiveness to the conversational subject matter. We raise some issues for this view with the aim of providing a more general account of linguistic commitment: one that is grounded in a more general action‐theoretic notion of respon…Read more
  •  744
    Is that a Threat?
    Erkenntnis 86 (5): 1161-1183. 2021.
    I introduce game-theoretic models for threats to the discussion of threats in speech act theory. I first distinguish three categories of verbal threats: conditional threats, categorical threats, and covert threats. I establish that all categories of threats can be characterized in terms of an underlying conditional structure. I argue that the aim—or illocutionary point—of a threat is to change the conditions under which an agent makes decisions in a game. Threats are moves in a game that instant…Read more
  •  661
    Pragmatic Particularism
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105 (1): 62-78. 2021.
    For the Intentionalist, utterance content is wholly determined by a speaker’s meaning-intentions; the sentence uttered serves merely to facilitate the audience’s recovering these intentions. We argue that Intentionalists ought to be Particularists, holding that the only “principles” of meaning recovery needed are those governing inferences to the best explanation; “principles” that are both defeasible and, in a sense to be elaborated, variable. We discuss some ways in which some theorists have …Read more
  •  320
    A Hole in the Box and a Pain in the Mouth
    Philosophical Quarterly 71 (4). 2021.
    The following argument is widely assumed to be invalid: there is a pain in my finger; my finger is in my mouth; therefore, there is a pain in my mouth. The apparent invalidity of this argument has recently been used to motivate the conclusion that pains are not spatial entities. We argue that this is a mistake. We do so by drawing attention to the metaphysics of pains and holes and provide a framework for their location which both vindicates the argument's validity and explains why it appears in…Read more
  •  620
    Illocutionary harm
    Philosophical Studies 178 (5): 1631-1646. 2021.
    A number of philosophers have become interested in the ways that individuals are subject to harm as the performers of illocutionary acts. This paper offers an account of the underlying structure of such harms: I argue that speakers are the subjects of illocutionary harm when there is interference in the entitlement structure of their linguistic activities. This interference comes in two forms: denial and incapacitation. In cases of denial, a speaker is prevented from achieving the outcomes to wh…Read more
  •  680
    This paper might change your mind
    with Josh Dever
    Noûs 55 (4): 863-890. 2020.
    Linguistic intervention in rational decision making is standardly captured in terms of information change. But the standard view gives us no way to model interventions involving expressions that only have an attentional effects on conversational contexts. How are expressions with non‐informational content – like epistemic modals – used to intervene in rational decision making? We show how to model rational decision change without information change: replace a standard conception of value (on whi…Read more
  •  401
    Acts of desire
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 64 (9): 955-972. 2021.
    ABSTRACT Act-based theories of content hold that propositions are identical to acts of predication that we perform in thought and talk. To undergo an occurrent thought with a particular content is just to perform the act of predication that individuates that content. But identifying the content of a thought with the performance of an act of predication makes it difficult to explain the intentionality of bouletic mental activity, like wanting and desiring. In this paper, I argue that this difficu…Read more
  •  559
    The Nyāya Argument for Disjunctivism
    History of Philosophy Quarterly 36 (1): 1-18. 2019.
    The Nyāya school of classical Indian epistemology defended (by today’s standards) a radical version of epistemic externalism. They also gave arguments from their epistemological positions to an early version of disjunctivism about perceptual experience. In this paper I assess the value of such an argument, concluding that a modified version of the Nyāya argument may be defensible.
  •  334
    The Swapping Constraint
    Minds and Machines 28 (3): 605-622. 2018.
    Triviality arguments against the computational theory of mind claim that computational implementation is trivial and thus does not serve as an adequate metaphysical basis for mental states. It is common to take computational implementation to consist in a mapping from physical states to abstract computational states. In this paper, I propose a novel constraint on the kinds of physical states that can implement computational states, which helps to specify what it is for two physical states to non…Read more
  •  872
    Phenomenal dispositions
    Synthese 197 (9): 3969-3980. 2020.
    In this paper, I argue against a dispositional account of the intentionality of belief states that has been endorsed by proponents of phenomenal intentionality. Specifically, I argue that the best characterization of a dispositional account of intentionality is one that takes beliefs to be dispositions to undergo occurrent judgments. I argue that there are cases where an agent believes that p, but fails to have a disposition to judge that p.
  •  656
    Acquaintance and first-person attitude reports
    Analysis 79 (2): 251-259. 2019.
    It is often assumed that singular thought requires that an agent be epistemically acquainted with the object the thought is about. However, it can sometimes truthfully be said of someone that they have a belief about an object, despite not being interestingly epistemically acquainted with that object. In defense of an epistemic acquaintance constraint on singular thought, it is thus often claimed that belief ascriptions are context sensitive and do not always track the contents of an agent’s men…Read more