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DesirePhilosophers' Imprint 22 (n/a). 2022.In this paper, we present two puzzles involving desire reports concerning series of events. What does a person want to happen in the first event – is it the event with the highest expected return, or the event that is the initial part of the best series? We show that existing approaches fail to resolve the puzzles around this question and develop a novel account of our own. Our semantics is built around three ideas. First, we propose that desire ascriptions are evaluated relative to a contextual…Read more
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On preferringLinguistics and Philosophy 45 (6): 1315-1344. 2022.
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Embedded AttitudesJournal of Semantics 36 (3): 377-406. 2019.This paper presents a puzzle involving embedded attitude reports. We resolve the puzzle by arguing that attitude verbs take restricted readings: in some environments the denotation of attitude verbs can be restricted by a given proposition. For example, when these verbs are embedded in the consequent of a conditional, they can be restricted by the proposition expressed by the conditional’s antecedent. We formulate and motivate two conditions on the availability of verb restrictions: a constraint…Read more
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Wishing, Decision Theory, and Two-Dimensional ContentJournal of Philosophy 120 (2): 61-93. 2023.This paper is about two requirements on wish reports whose interaction motivates a novel semantics for these ascriptions. The first requirement concerns the ambiguities that arise when determiner phrases, such as definite descriptions, interact with ‘wish’. More specifically, several theorists have recently argued that attitude ascriptions featuring counterfactual attitude verbs license interpretations on which the determiner phrase is interpreted relative to the subject’s beliefs. The second re…Read more
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Wanting what’s not bestPhilosophical Studies 179 (4): 1275-1296. 2021.
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A Problem for the Ideal Worlds Account of DesireAnalysis 82 (1): 7-15. 2022.The Ideal Worlds Account of Desire says that S wants p just in case all of S’s most highly preferred doxastic possibilities make p true. The account predicts that a desire report ⌜S wants p⌝ should be true so long as there is some doxastic p-possibility that is most preferred. But we present a novel argument showing that this prediction is incorrect. More positively, we take our examples to support alternative analyses of desire, and close by briefly considering what our cases suggest about the …Read more
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A New HopeJournal of Philosophy 119 (1): 5-32. 2022.The analysis of desire ascriptions has been a central topic of research for philosophers of language and mind. This work has mostly focused on providing a theory of want reports, that is, sentences of the form ‘S wants p’. In this paper, we turn from want reports to a closely related but relatively understudied construction, namely hope reports, that is, sentences of the form ‘S hopes p’. We present two contrasts involving hope reports and show that existing approaches to desire fail to explain …Read more
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |