•  116
    What is it to share the same concept? The question is an important one since sharing the same concept explains our ability to non-accidentally coordinate on the same topic over time and between individuals. Moreover, concept identity grounds key logical relations among thought contents such as samesaying, contradiction, validity, and entailment. Finally, an account of concept identity is crucial to explaining and justifying epistemic efforts to better understand the precise contents of our thoug…Read more
  •  76
    A characteristic form of philosophical inquiry seeks to answer ‘what is x?’ questions. In this paper, we ask how philosophers do and should adjudicate debates about the correct answer to such questions. We argue that philosophers do and should rely on a distinctive type of pragmatic and meta-representational reasoning – a form of rationalizing self-interpretation – in answering ‘what is x?’ questions. We start by placing our methodological discussion within a broader theoretical framework. We po…Read more
  •  22
    Meanings as species in communication and inquiry
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Can mere conceptual competence explain the apriori? Many contemporary theorists believe that conceptual competence grounds apriori conceptual truths – and that this fact helps explain how thinkers can have apriori justification for accepting these truths and reasoning in accord with them. In this chapter, I'll examine several contemporary defenses of the conceptual approach to apriority in order to clarify their core commitments about the nature of concepts. The common thread, I'll argue, is a p…Read more
  •  204
    The Limits of Metalinguistic Negotiation: The Role of Shared Meanings in Normative Debate
    with François Schroeter and Kevin Toh
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 52 (2): 180-196. 2022.
    According to philosophical orthodoxy, the parties to moral or legal disputes genuinely disagree only if their uses of key normative terms in the dispute express the same meaning. Recently, however, this orthodoxy has been challenged. According to an influential alternative view, genuine moral and legal disagreements should be understood as metalinguistic negotiations over which meaning a given term should have. In this paper, we argue that the shared meaning view is motivated by much deeper cons…Read more
  • Introduction
    In Karen Jones & François Schroeter (eds.), The Many Moral Rationalisms, Oxford Univerisity Press. 2018.
  • Reasons and justifiability
    In Karen Jones & François Schroeter (eds.), The Many Moral Rationalisms, Oxford Univerisity Press. 2018.
    Traditional normative realists are committed to the idea that different individuals manage to pick out on the very same property with terms like ‘morally right’, despite variations in their understanding and use of the term. How is this possible? In this chapter, we sketch a metasemantic account that promises to vindicate traditional normative realism within a broadly rationalist framework. We will first introduce a metasemantic principle that ties reference determination to what is justifiable…Read more
  •  338
    ABSTRACTWhat does it take for lawyers and others to think or talk about the same legal topic—e.g., defamation, culpability? We argue that people are able to think or talk about the same topic not when they possess a matching substantive understanding of the topic, as traditional metasemantics says, but instead when their thoughts or utterances are related to each other in certain ways. And what determines the content of thoughts and utterances is what would best serve the core purposes of the re…Read more
  •  57
    Inscrutability and Its Discontents
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (5): 566-579. 2020.
    Our main focus in this paper is Herman Cappelen’s claim, defended in Fixing Language, that reference is radically inscrutable. We argue that Cappelen’s inscrutability thesis should be rejected. We also highlight how rejecting inscrutability undermines Cappelen’s most radical conclusions about conceptual engineering. In addition, we raise a worry about his positive account of topic continuity through inquiry and debate.
  •  39
    Mind-making, Affective Regulation, and Resistance
    Tandf: Australasian Philosophical Review 3 (1): 86-89. 2019.
    Volume 3, Issue 1, March 2019, Page 86-89.
  •  103
    Beyond Concepts
    Analysis 79 (2): 363-377. 2019.
    Ruth Garrett Millikan’s new book, Beyond Concepts,1 is a tour de force that integrates and refines the distinctive naturalistic accounts of mental representatio.
  •  296
    Semantic Deference versus Semantic Coordination
    American Philosophical Quarterly 53 (2): 193-210. 2016.
    It's widely accepted that social facts about an individual's linguistic community can affect both the reference of her words and the concepts those words express. Theorists sympathetic to the internalist tradition have sought to accommodate these social dependence phenomena without altering their core theoretical commitments by positing deferential reference-fixing criteria. In this paper, we sketch a different explanation of social dependence phenomena, according to which all concepts are indiv…Read more
  •  76
    Keeping track of what’s right
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 48 (3-4): 489-509. 2018.
    In this paper, we argue that ordinary judgments about core normative topics purport to attribute stable, objective properties and relations. Our strategy is first to analyze the structures and practices characteristic of paradigmatically representational concepts such as concepts of objects and natural kinds. We identify three broad features that ground the representational purport of these concepts. We then argue that core normative concepts exhibit these same features.
  •  119
    The Generalized Integration Challenge is the task of providing, for a given domain of discourse, a simultaneously acceptable metaphysics, epistemology and metasemantics and showing them to be so. In this paper, we focus on a metaethical position for which seems particularly acute: the brand of normative realism which takes normative properties to be mind-independent and causally inert. The problem is that these metaphysical commitments seem to make normative knowledge impossible. We suggest that…Read more
  •  11
    Making Sense: The Epistemology of Semantic Externalism
    Dissertation, University of Michigan. 1999.
    Twenty years ago, Hilary Putnam first proclaimed that meaning ain't in the head. Since then, semantic externalism---the thesis that a subject's intrinsic states, described independently of her physical and social environment, do not fully determine the semantic properties of her words or concepts---has become the new philosophical orthodoxy. Despite this popularity, I believe the underlying motivations for semantic externalism and its philosophical significance have been widely misunderstood. Se…Read more
  •  572
    Metasemantics and Metaethics
    In Tristram McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, Routledge. pp. 519-535. 2017.
  •  138
    In Constructing the World, Chalmers seeks to articulate and defend an important epistemic accessibility thesis, the Scrutability of Truth, which is crucial to Chalmers’ rationalist approach to meaning and modality. Chapters 3 and 4 of the book are devoted to persuading us that the move from weaker to stronger forms of Scrutability is intuitively plausible. In these comments, I want to question this move. The plausibility of strong forms of Scrutability hinges on controversial views about epistem…Read more
  •  903
    Frank Jackson often writes as if his descriptivist account of public language meanings were just plain common sense. How else are we to explain how different speakers manage to communicate using a public language? And how else can we explain how individuals arrive at confident judgments about the reference of their words in hypothetical scenarios? Our aim in this paper is to show just how controversial the psychological assumptions behind in Jackson’s semantic theory really are. First, we explai…Read more
  •  190
    Bootstrapping our way to samesaying
    Synthese 189 (1): 177-197. 2012.
    This paper articulates two constraints on an acceptable account of meaning: (i) accessibility: sameness of meaning affords an immediate appearance of de jure co-reference, (ii) flexibility: sameness of meaning tolerates open-ended variation in speakers' substantive understanding of the reference. Traditional accounts of meaning have trouble simultaneously satisfying both constraints. I suggest that relationally individuated meanings provide a promising way of avoiding this tension. On relational…Read more
  •  582
    Two-dimensional semantics
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2010.
    Two-dimensional (2D) semantics is a formal framework that is used to characterize the meaning of certain linguistic expressions and the entailment relations among sentences containing them. 2D semantics has also been applied to thought contents. In contrast with standard possible worlds semantics, 2D semantics assigns extensions and truth-values to expressions relative to two possible world parameters, rather than just one. So a 2D semantic framework provides finer-grained semantic values than t…Read more
  •  178
    Normative realism: co-reference without convergence?
    Philosophers' Imprint 13. 2013.
    This paper examines whether realists can explain co-reference without appealing to subjects’ ideal convergence in judgment. This question is particularly pressing in the normative domain, since deep disagreement about the applicability of normative predicates suggests that different speakers may not pick out the same property when they use normative terms. Normative realists, we believe, have not been sufficiently aware of the difficulties involved in providing a theory of reference-determinatio…Read more
  •  126
    Gruesome diagonals
    Philosophers' Imprint 3 1-23. 2003.
    Frank Jackson and David Chalmers have suggested that the diagonal intensions defined by their two-dimensional framework can play the two key roles of Fregean senses: they provide a priori accessible extension conditions for a representation and they provide the identity conditions for meanings and thought contents. In this paper, I clarify the nature of the psychological abilities that are needed to underwrite the first role. I then argue that these psychological abilities are not sufficiently s…Read more
  •  148
    Are Concepts Creatures of Darkness?
    Analytic Philosophy 54 (2): 277-292. 2013.
    In Our Knowledge of the Internal World, Robert Stalnaker presents a sophisticated new defense of a radically externalist and contextualist approach to mental content. Stalnaker holds that unstructured propositions—sets of possible worlds—can provide a complete account of mental content, including Fregean cognitive significance phenomena. So there is no theoretical job for concepts to fulfill. Stalnaker sees concepts as ‘creatures of darkness’ that encourage theoretical confusion. Concepts are a …Read more
  •  1
    Schroeter, François: Moralité et Émotions
    Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie Und Theologie 57 (1): 164-173. 2010.
  •  99
    Jazz Redux: a reply to Möller
    Philosophical Studies 170 (2): 303-316. 2014.
    This paper is a response to Niklas Möller’s (Philosophical Studies, 2013) recent criticism of our relational (Jazz) model of meaning of thin evaluative terms. Möller’s criticism rests on a confusion about the role of coordinating intentions in Jazz. This paper clarifies what’s distinctive and controversial about the Jazz proposal and explains why Jazz, unlike traditional accounts of meaning, is not committed to analycities
  •  471
    Considering empty worlds as actual
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 83 (3): 331-347. 2005.
    This paper argues that David Chalmer's new epistemic interpretation of 2-D semantics faces the very same type of objection he takes to defeat earlier contextualist interpretation of the 2-D framework
  •  256
    Two‐Dimensional Semantics and Sameness of Meaning
    Philosophy Compass 8 (1): 84-99. 2013.
    In recent years, two-dimensional (2D) semantics has been used to develop a broadly descriptivist approach to meaning that seeks to accommodate externalists’ counterexamples to traditional descriptivism. The 2D possible worlds framework can be used to capture a speaker’s implicit dispositions to identify the reference of her words on the basis of empirical information about her actual environment. Proponents of 2D semantics argue that this aspect of linguistic understanding plays the core theoret…Read more
  •  109
    Reasons as right-makers
    Philosophical Explorations 12 (3): 279-296. 2009.
    This paper sketches a right-maker account of normative practical reasons along functionalist lines. The approach is contrasted with other similar accounts, in particular John Broome's analysis of reasons as explanations of oughts
  •  405
    Is Gibbard a Realist?
    with Francois Schroeder
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 1 (2): 1-18. 2005.
    In Thinking How to Live, Allan Gibbard claims that expressivists can vindicate realism about moral discourse. This paper argues that Gibbard’s expressivism does not provide such a vindication.
  •  103
    A slim semantics for thin moral terms?
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81 (2). 2003.
    This paper is a critique of Ralph Wedgwood's recent attempt to use the framework of conceptual role semantics in metaethics. Wedgwood's central idea is that the action-guiding role of moral terms suffices to determine genuine properties as their semantic values. We argue that Wedgwood cannot get so much for so little. We explore two interpretations of Wedgwood's account of what it takes to be competent with a thin moral term. On the first interpretation, the account does not warrant the assignme…Read more
  •  379
    The limits of conceptual analysis
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 85 (4): 425-453. 2004.
    It would be nice if good old a priori conceptual analysis were possible. For many years conceptual analysis was out of fashion, in large part because of the excessive ambitions of verificationist theories of meaning._ _However, those days are over._ _A priori conceptual analysis is once again part of the philosophical mainstream._ _This renewed popularity, moreover, is well-founded. Modern philosophical analysts have exploited developments in philosophical semantics to formulate analyses which a…Read more