Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
PhD, 2011
Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Areas of Interest
Epistemology
Meta-Ethics
  •  791
    The Identity of a Material Thing and its Matter
    Philosophical Quarterly 64 (256): 387-406. 2014.
    I have both a smaller and a larger aim. The smaller aim is polemical. Kit Fine believes that a material thing—a Romanesque statue, for example, or an open door—can be distinguished from its constituent matter—a piece of alloy, say, or a hunk of plastic—without recourse to modal or temporal considerations. The statue is Romanesque; the piece of alloy is not Romanesque. The door is open; the hunk of plastic is not open. I argue that these considerations, when combined with a proper understanding o…Read more
  •  725
    Is anything just plain good?
    Philosophical Studies 172 (6): 1485-1508. 2015.
    Geach and Thomson have argued that nothing is just plain good, because ‘good’ is, logically, an attributive adjective. The upshot, according to Geach and Thomson, is that consequentialism is unacceptable, since its very formulation requires a predicative use of ‘good’. Reactions to the argument have, for the most part, been uniform. Authors have converged on two challenging objections . First, although the logical tests that Geach and Thomson invoke clearly illustrate that ‘good’, as commonly us…Read more
  •  698
    Frege Cases and Bad Psychological Laws
    with Aidan Gray
    Mind 130 (520): 1253-1280. 2021.
    We draw attention to a series of implicit assumptions that have structured the debate about Frege’s Puzzle. Once these assumptions are made explicit, we rely on them to show that if one focuses exclusively on the issues raised by Frege cases, then one obtains a powerful consideration against a fine-grained conception of propositional-attitude content. In light of this consideration, a form of Russellianism about content becomes viable.
  •  406
    Context, Content, and Epistemic Transparency
    Mind 119 (476): 1067-1086. 2010.
    We motivate the idea that presupposition is a transparent attitude. We then explain why epistemic opacity is not a serious problem for Robert Stalnaker's theory of content and conversation. We conclude with critical remarks about John Hawthorne and Ofra Magidor's alternative theory.
  •  389
    ‘Not’ Again! Another Essay on the Metaphysics of Material Objects
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 (3): 711-737. 2017.
  •  387
    Semantic deflationism deflated
    Synthese 196 (6): 2435-2454. 2019.
    Deflationism is the view that certain metaphysical debates are defective, leaving it open whether the defect is best explained in semantic, conceptual, or epistemic terms. Local semantic deflationism is the thesis that familiar metaphysical debates, which appear to be about the existence and identity of material objects, are merely verbal. It’s a form of local deflationism because it restricts itself to one particular area of metaphysics. It’s a form of semantic deflationism because the defect i…Read more
  •  385
    The Onus in 'Ought'
    Analysis 83 (1): 13-21. 2023.
    We present a puzzle about deontic modals. An adequate resolution requires abandoning the standard theory. What to replace it with isn’t clear. We consider two possibilities.
  •  385
    A Little Puzzle about a Piece and a Puddle
    In Karen Bennett & Dean Zimmerman (eds.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, volume 12, Oxford University Press. pp. 231-261. 2020.
    A new puzzle about material constitution is presented and its implications are discussed. The moral of the story is that familiar intuitions supporting a neo-Aristotelian view of the material world are contradictory. To accommodate these intuitions is to embrace inconsistency. Therefore, neo-Aristotelianism is worse off for its intuitive appeal. Furthermore, the puzzle is used to argue for an account of ordinary modal thought and language that’s reconstructive, or ameliorative.
  •  362
    Metalinguistic negation and metaphysical affirmation
    Philosophical Studies 167 (3): 497-517. 2014.
    In a series of articles, Kit Fine presents some highly compelling objections to monism, the doctrine that spatially coincident objects are identical. His objections rely on Leibniz’s Law and linguistic environments that appear to be immune to the standard charge of non-transparency and substitution failure. In this paper, I respond to Fine’s objections on behalf of the monist. Following Benjamin Schnieder, I observe that arguments from Leibniz’s Law are valid only if they involve descriptive, ra…Read more
  •  330
    An Antinomy about Anaphora
    Linguistic Inquiry 42 (3): 509-517. 2011.
  •  314
    Flaws of Formal Relationism
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 2 (4): 367-376. 2013.
    Formal relationism in the philosophy of mind is the thesis that folk psychological states should be individuated, at least partially, in terms of the purely formal inference-licensing relations between underlying mental representations. It's supposed to provide a Russellian alternative to a Fregean theory of propositional attitudes. I argue that there's an inconsistency between the motivation for formal relationism and the use to which it's put in defense of Russellian propositions. Furthermore,…Read more
  •  295
    Weak generics
    Analysis 82 (3): 405-409. 2022.
    Some generic sentences seem to be true despite the fact that almost all the members of the relevant kind are exceptions. It’s controversial whether generics of this type express relatively weak generalizations or relatively strong ones. If the latter, then we’re systematically mistaken about their truth, but they make no trouble for our semantic theorizing. In this brief note, I present several arguments for the former: sentences of the relevant type are weak generics.
  •  272
    Fixing Reference By Imogen Dickie (review)
    Analysis 77 (3): 659-662. 2017.
  •  266
    On Goodness, by David Conan Wolfsdorf (review)
    Mind 131 (521): 326-337. 2022.
    On Goodness, by WolfsdorfDavid Conan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xxii + 314.
  •  196
    What is the relationship between the claim that generics articulate psychologically primitive generalizations and the claim that they exhibit a unique form of context sensitivity? This paper maintains that the two claims are compatible. It develops and defends an overlooked form of contextualism grounded in the idiosyncrasies of System 1 thought.