•  264
    Is the ability to speak a language an acquired skill? Leading proponents of the generative approach to human language—notably Chomsky (2000) and Pinker (2003)—have argued that the thesis that language capacities are skills is hopelessly confused and at odds with a range of empirical evidence, which suggests that human language capacities are grounded in a biologically inherited set of language instincts or a Universal Grammar (UG). In this paper, we argue that resistance to the claim that human …Read more
  •  179
    Climate Change Adaptation and the Back of the Invisible Hand
    Philosophical Transactions B. forthcoming.
    We make the case that scientifically accurate and politically feasible responses to the climate crisis require a complex understanding of human cultural practices of niche construction that moves beyond the adaptive significance of culture. We develop this thesis in two related ways. First, we argue that cumulative cultural practices of niche construction can generate stable equilibria and runaway selection processes that result in long-term existential risks within and across cultural groups. W…Read more
  •  235
    The Evolutionary Foundations of Common Ground
    In Bart Geurts & Richard Moore (eds.), Evolutionary Pragmatics, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    (Penultimate Draft). I consider common ground in its evolutionary context and argue for several claims. First, common ground is widely (though not universally) distributed among social animals. Second, the use of common ground is favored (i.e. is predicted to emerge and subsequently persist) among populations of animals whose members face recurrent interdependent decision-making problems in which the benefit of their courses of action are contingent on the variable choices of their stable social…Read more
  •  229
    Meanings Without Species
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    In this paper, I critically assess Mark Richard’s interesting and important development of the claim that linguistic meanings can be fruitfully analogized with biological species. I argue that linguistic meanings qua cluster of interpretative presuppositions need not and often do not display the population-level independence and reproductive isolation that is characteristic of the biological species concept. After developing these problems in some detail, I close with a discussion of their impli…Read more
  •  671
    Communication before communicative intentions
    Noûs 57 (1): 26-50. 2021.
    This paper explores the significance of intelligent social behavior among non-human animals for philosophical theories of communication. Using the alarm call system of vervet monkeys as a case study, I argue that interpersonal communication (or what I call “minded communication”) can and does take place in the absence of the production and recognition of communicative intentions. More generally, I argue that evolutionary theory provides good reasons for maintaining that minded communication is b…Read more
  •  218
    Truth and Imprecision
    Analytic Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Our ordinary assertions are often imprecise, insofar as the way we represent things as being only approximates how things are in the actual world. The phenomenon of assertoric imprecision raises a challenge to standard accounts of both the norm of assertion and the connection between semantics and the objects of assertion. After clarifying these problems in detail, I develop a framework for resolving them. Specifically, I argue that the phenomenon of assertoric imprecision motivates a rejection …Read more
  •  118
    Social Origins of Language (review)
    Quarterly Review of Biology 93. 2018.
    A review of *The Social Origins of Language* by Robert M. Seyfarth and Dorothy L. Cheney; edited and introduced by Michael L. Platt.
  •  304
    Provincialism in Pragmatics
    Philosophical Perspectives 32 (1): 5-40. 2018.
    The central claim of my paper is that pragmatics has a wider scope of application than has been generally appreciated. In particular, I will argue that many discussions of pragmatics are guilty of a problematic form of provincialism. The provincialism at issue restricts the class of target systems of study to those involving groups of developmentally typical humans (or slightly idealized versions thereof), either explicitly as a matter of principle or implicitly as consequence of how it construe…Read more
  •  46
    On Expression Identity: A critical notice of Robert Fiengo and Robert May, De Lingua Belief (review)
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 18 (4): 569-579. 2010.
    This Article does not have an abstract
  •  571
    Singular Thoughts and Singular Propositions
    Philosophical Studies 154 (2). 2011.
    A singular thought about an object o is one that is directly about o in a characteristic way—grasp of that thought requires having some special epistemic relation to the object o, and the thought is ontologically dependent on o. One account of the nature of singular thought exploits a Russellian Structured Account of Propositions, according to which contents are represented by means of structured n-tuples of objects, properties, and functions. A proposition is singular, according to this framewo…Read more
  •  415
    Coordination, Triangulation, and Language Use
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (1): 80-112. 2016.
    In this paper, I explore two contrasting conceptions of the social character of language. The first takes language to be grounded in social convention. The second, famously developed by Donald Davidson, takes language to be grounded in a social relation called triangulation. I aim both to clarify and to evaluate these two conceptions of language. First, I propose that Davidson’s triangulation-based story can be understood as the result of relaxing core features of conventionalism pertaining to b…Read more
  •  424
    The Problem of Lexical Innovation
    Linguistics and Philosophy 39 (2): 87-118. 2016.
    In a series of papers, Donald Davidson :3–17, 1984, The philosophical grounds of rationality, 1986, Midwest Stud Philos 16:1–12, 1991) developed a powerful argument against the claim that linguistic conventions provide any explanatory purchase on an account of linguistic meaning and communication. This argument, as I shall develop it, turns on cases of what I call lexical innovation: cases in which a speaker uses a sentence containing a novel expression-meaning pair, but nevertheless successfull…Read more