-
8Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy of Language (edited book)Routledge. 2021.This Handbook brings together philosophical work on how language shapes, and is shaped by, social and political factors. Its 24 chapters were written exclusively for this volume by an international team of leading researchers, and together they provide a broad expert introduction to the major issues currently under discussion in this area. The volume is divided into four parts: Part I: Methodological and Foundational Issues Part II: Non-ideal Semantics and Pragmatics Part III: Linguistic Harms P…Read more
-
185Epistemicism without metalinguistic safetyIn Abrol Fairweather & Carlos Montemayor (eds.), Linguistic Luck: Safeguards and Threats to Linguistic Communication, Oxford University Press. 2023.Epistemicists claim that vague predicates have precise but unknow- able cutoffs. I argue against against the standard, Williamsonian, answer, that appeals to metalinguistic safety: we can know that p even if our true belief that p is metalinguistically lucky. I then propose that epistemicists should be diagonalized epistemicists and show how this alternative formulation of the view avoids the chal- lenge. However, in an M. Night Shyamalan-style twist, I then argue we should not be diagonalized e…Read more
-
44The Meaning of "If"Oxford University Press. 2022.Despite its small stature, "if" occupies a central place both in everyday language and the philosophical lexicon. In allowing us to talk about hypothetical situations, "if" raises a host of thorny philosophical puzzles about language and logic. Addressing them requires tools from linguistics, logic, probability theory, and metaphysics. Justin Khoo uses these tools to navigate a maze of interconnected issues about conditionals, some of which include: the nature of linguistic communication, the re…Read more
-
87Context and Coherence: The Logic and Grammar of Prominence, by Una StojnićMind 132 (528): 1210-1224. 2022.According to long-standing orthodoxy in contemporary analytic philosophy of language, the content of a sentence (that is, the information it encodes and what on.
-
125No fact of the middleNoûs 56 (4): 1000-1022. 2021.A middle fact is a true proposition about what would have happened had A been true (where A is in fact false), whose truth isn't entailed by any non-counterfactual facts. I argue that there are no middle facts; if there were, we wouldn't know them, and our ignorance of them would result in ignorance about whether regret is fitting in cases where we clearly know it is. But there's a problem. Consider an unflipped fair coin which is such that no non-counterfactual fact determines that it would hav…Read more
-
192Hermeneutical InjusticeIn Justin Khoo & Rachel Sterken (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy of Language, Routledge. 2021.
-
451Against PreservationAnalysis 79 (3): 424-436. 2019.Bradley offers a quick and convincing argument that no Boolean semantic theory for conditionals can validate a very natural principle concerning the relationship between credences and conditionals. We argue that Bradley’s principle, Preservation, is, in fact, invalid; its appeal arises from the validity of a nearby, but distinct, principle, which we call Local Preservation, and which Boolean semantic theories can non-trivially validate.
-
1452Disjunctive antecedent conditionalsSynthese 198 (8): 7401-7430. 2018.Disjunctive antecedent conditionals —conditionals of the form if A or B, C—sometimes seem to entail both of their simplifications and sometimes seem not to. I argue that this behavior reveals a genuine ambiguity in DACs. Along the way, I discuss a new observation about the role of focal stress in distinguishing the two interpretations of DACs. I propose a new theory, according to which the surface form of a DAC underdetermines its logical form: on one possible logical form, if A or B, C does ent…Read more
-
981New Horizons for a Theory of Epistemic ModalsAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (2): 309-324. 2018.ABSTRACTRecent debate over the semantics and pragmatics of epistemic modals has focused on intuitions about cross-contextual truth-value assessments. In this paper, we advocate a different approach to evaluating theories of epistemic modals. Our strategy focuses on judgments of the incompatibility of two different epistemic possibility claims, or two different truth value assessments of a single epistemic possibility claim. We subject the predictions of existing theories to empirical scrutiny, a…Read more
-
2048Moral Disagreement and Moral SemanticsNoûs 109-143. 2016.When speakers utter conflicting moral sentences, it seems clear that they disagree. It has often been suggested that the fact that the speakers disagree gives us evidence for a claim about the semantics of the sentences they are uttering. Specifically, it has been suggested that the existence of the disagreement gives us reason to infer that there must be an incompatibility between the contents of these sentences. This inference then plays a key role in a now-standard argument against certain th…Read more
-
575Quasi IndexicalsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 100 (1): 26-53. 2018.I argue that not all context dependent expressions are alike. Pure (or ordinary) indexicals behave more or less as Kaplan thought. But quasi indexicals behave in some ways like indexicals and in other ways not like indexicals. A quasi indexical sentence φ allows for cases in which one party utters φ and the other its negation, and neither party’s claim has to be false. In this sense, quasi indexicals are like pure indexicals (think: “I am a doctor”/“I am not a doctor” as uttered by different ind…Read more
-
501Code Words in Political DiscoursePhilosophical Topics 45 (2): 33-64. 2017.I argue that code words like “inner city” do not semantically encode hidden or implicit meanings, and offer an account of how they nonetheless manage to bring about the surprising effects discussed in Mendelberg 2001, White 2007, and Stanley 2015 (among others).
-
874Triviality Results and the Relationship between Logical and Natural LanguagesMind 128 (510): 485-526. 2019.Inquiry into the meaning of logical terms in natural language (‘and’, ‘or’, ‘not’, ‘if’) has generally proceeded along two dimensions. On the one hand, semantic theories aim to predict native speaker intuitions about the natural language sentences involving those logical terms. On the other hand, logical theories explore the formal properties of the translations of those terms into formal languages. Sometimes, these two lines of inquiry appear to be in tension: for instance, our best logical inv…Read more
-
917Conditionals, indeterminacy, and trivialityPhilosophical Perspectives 27 (1): 260-287. 2013.This paper discusses and relates two puzzles for indicative conditionals: a puzzle about indeterminacy and a puzzle about triviality. Both puzzles arise because of Ramsey's Observation, which states that the probability of a conditional is equal to the conditional probability of its consequent given its antecedent. The puzzle of indeterminacy is the problem of reconciling this fact about conditionals with the fact that they seem to lack truth values at worlds where their antecedents are false. T…Read more
-
117A note on Gibbard’s proofPhilosophical Studies 166 (S1): 153-164. 2013.A proof by Allan Gibbard (Ifs: Conditionals, beliefs, decision, chance, time. Reidel, Dordrecht, 1981) seems to demonstrate that if indicative conditionals have truth conditions, they cannot be stronger than material implication. Angelika Kratzer's theory that conditionals do not denote two-place operators purports to escape this result [see Kratzer (Chic Linguist Soc 22(2):1–15, 1986, 2012)]. In this note, I raise some trouble for Kratzer’s proposed method of escape and then show that her seman…Read more
-
170The Disagreement Challenge to ContextualismIn Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Contextualism, Routledge. 2017.I articulate the challenge disagreement poses for epistemic contextualism, and then discuss several possible replies on behalf of the contextualist.
-
1015Modal DisagreementsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 58 (5): 511-534. 2015.It is often assumed that when one party felicitously rejects an assertion made by an- other party, the first party thinks that the proposition asserted by the second is false. This assumption underlies various disagreement arguments used to challenge contex- tualism about some class of expressions. As such, many contextualists have resisted these arguments on the grounds that the disagreements in question may not be over the proposition literally asserted. The result appears to be a dialectical …Read more
-
79Austere Realism: Contextual Semantics Meets Minimal Ontology, by Terence Horgan and Matjaž PotrčMind 124 (496): 1292-1299. 2015.Review of Horgan and Potrc (2008). I discuss both their linguistic and ontological theses.
-
87Operators or restrictors? A reply to GilliesSemantics and Pragmatics 4 1-25. 2011.According to operator theories, "if" denotes a two-place operator. According to restrictor theories, "if" doesn't contribute an operator of its own but instead merely restricts the domain of some co-occurring quantifier. The standard arguments (Lewis 1975, Kratzer 1986) for restrictor theories have it that operator theories (but not restrictor theories) struggle to predict the truth conditions of quantified conditionals like (1) a. If John didn't work at home, he usually worked in his office. b.…Read more
-
79Conditionals and questions: A reply to KorzukhinLinguistics and Philosophy 39 (1): 51-55. 2016.I respond to Theodore Korzhukin's criticism of my paper, "Probabilities of conditionals in context"
-
296Backtracking Counterfactuals RevisitedMind 126 (503): 841-910. 2017.I discuss three observations about backtracking counterfactuals not predicted by existing theories, and then motivate a theory of counterfactuals that does predict them. On my theory, counterfactuals quantify over a suitably restricted set of historical possibilities from some contextually relevant past time. I motivate each feature of the theory relevant to predicting our three observations about backtracking counterfactuals. The paper concludes with replies to three potential objections.
-
226Probabilities of conditionals in contextLinguistics and Philosophy 39 (1): 1-43. 2016.The Ramseyan thesis that the probability of an indicative conditional is equal to the corresponding conditional probability of its consequent given its antecedent is both widely confirmed and subject to attested counterexamples (e.g., McGee 2000, Kaufmann 2004). This raises several puzzling questions. For instance, why are there interpretations of conditionals that violate this Ramseyan thesis in certain contexts, and why are they otherwise very rare? In this pa…Read more
-
184On Indicative And Subjunctive ConditionalsPhilosophers' Imprint 15. 2015.At the center of the literature on conditionals lies the division between indicative and subjunctive conditionals, and Ernest Adams’ famous minimal pair: If Oswald didn’t shoot Kennedy, someone else did. If Oswald hadn’t shot Kennedy, someone else would have. While a lot of attention is paid to figuring out what these different kinds of conditionals mean, significantly less attention has been paid to the question of why their grammatical differences give rise to their semantic differences. In th…Read more
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Metaphysics |
Areas of Interest
Meta-Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |