•  1
    Advice for Noncognitivists
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (262): 174-207. 2016.
    Metaethical noncognitivists have trouble arriving at a respectable semantic theory for moral language. The goal of this article is to make substantial progress toward demonstrating that these problems may be overcome. Replacing the predominant expressivist semantic agenda in metaethics with a dynamic perspective on meaning and communication allows noncognitivists to provide a satisfying analysis of negation and other constructions that have been argued to be problematic for metaethical noncognit…Read more
  •  10
    Dynamic semantics versus dynamic propositionalism
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Una Stojnić's Context and Coherence: The Logic and Grammar of Prominence offers a series of interesting criticisms of the classical dynamic paradigm in natural language semantics and offers a sophisticated alternative outlook, one that does recognize a dynamic, context change inducing dimension of meaning but at the same preserves the idea that (declarative) utterances express propositions in context. The purpose of this note is to set the record straight: existing dynamic analyses of modals and…Read more
  •  50
    Assertion, expression, experience
    with Christopher Kennedy
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (7): 821-857. 2022.
    ABSTRACT It has been frequently observed in the literature that assertions of plain sentences containing predicates like fun and frightening give rise to an acquaintance inference: they imply that the speaker has first-hand knowledge of the item under consideration. The goal of this paper is to develop and defend a broadly expressivist explanation of this phenomenon: acquaintance inferences arise because plain sentences containing subjective predicates are designed to express distinguished kinds…Read more
  •  37
    Subjective predicates have two interpretive and distributional characteristics that have resisted a comprehensive analysis. First, the use of a subjective predicate to describe an object is in general felicitous only when the speaker has a particular kind of familiarity with relevant features of the object; characterizing an object as _tasty,_ for example, implies that the speaker has experience of its taste. Second, subjective predicates differ from objective predicates in their distribution un…Read more
  •  609
    Two puzzles about ability can
    Linguistics and Philosophy 44 (3): 551-586. 2020.
    The received wisdom on ability modals is that they differ from their epistemic and deontic cousins in what inferences they license and better receive a universal or conditional analysis instead of an existential one. The goal of this paper is to sharpen the empirical picture about the semantics of ability modals, and to propose an analysis that explains what makes the can of ability so special but that also preserves the crucial idea that all uses of can share a common lexical semantics. The res…Read more
  • Proceedings of Deon 2016 (edited book)
    with A. Tamminga O. Roy
    College Publications. 2016.
  •  65
    Lessons from Sobel sequences
    Semantics and Pragmatics 10 (4): 1-57. 2017.
    Folklore has it that Sobel sequences favor a variably strict analysis of conditionals over its plainly strict alternative. While recent discussions for or against the lore have focussed on Sobel sequences involving counterfactuals, this paper draws attention to the fact that indicative Sobel sequences are just as felicitous as are their counterfactual cousins. The fact, or so I shall argue here, disrupts the folklore: given minimal assumptions about the semantics and pragmatics of indicative con…Read more
  •  338
    Advice for Noncognitivists
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (S1). 2017.
    Metaethical noncognitivists have trouble arriving at a respectable semantic theory for moral language. The goal of this article is to make substantial progress toward demonstrating that these problems may be overcome. Replacing the predominant expressivist semantic agenda in metaethics with a dynamic perspective on meaning and communication allows noncognitivists to provide a satisfying analysis of negation and other constructions that have been argued to be problematic for metaethical noncognit…Read more
  •  75
    Simplifying with Free Choice
    Topoi 37 (3): 379-392. 2018.
    This paper offers a unified semantic explanation of two observations that prove to be problematic for classical analyses of modals, conditionals, and disjunctions: the fact that disjunctions scoping under possibility modals give rise to the free choice effect and the fact that counterfactuals license simplification of disjunctive antecedents. It shows that the data are well explained by a dynamic semantic analysis of modals and conditionals that uses ideas from the inquisitive semantic tradition…Read more
  •  503
    A Remark on Iffy Oughts
    Journal of Philosophy 109 (7): 449-461. 2012.
    Every adequate semantics for conditionals and deontic ought must offer a solution to the miners paradox about conditional obligations. Kolodny and MacFarlane have recently argued that such a semantics must reject the validity of modus ponens. I demonstrate that rejecting the validity of modus ponens is inessential for an adequate solution to the paradox.
  •  39
    Epistemic Modality (review)
    Philosophical Review 122 (4): 641-647. 2013.
  •  346
    An Update on Epistemic Modals
    Journal of Philosophical Logic 44 (6). 2015.
    Epistemic modals are a prominent topic in the literature on natural language semantics, with wide-ranging implications for issues in philosophy of language and philosophical logic. Considerations about the role that epistemic "might" and "must" play in discourse and reasoning have led to the development of several important alternatives to classical possible worlds semantics for natural language modal expressions. This is an opinionated overview of what I take to be some of the most exciting iss…Read more
  •  568
    New surprises for the Ramsey Test
    Synthese 176 (2). 2010.
    In contemporary discussions of the Ramsey Test for conditionals, it is commonly held that (i) supposing the antecedent of a conditional is adopting a potential state of full belief, and (ii) Modus Ponens is a valid rule of inference. I argue on the basis of Thomason Conditionals (such as ' If Sally is deceiving, I do not believe it') and Moore's Paradox that both claims are wrong. I then develop a double-indexed Update Semantics for conditionals which takes these two results into account while d…Read more
  •  900
    Dynamics of Epistemic Modality
    Philosophical Review 122 (1): 45-92. 2013.
    A dynamic semantics for epistemically modalized sentences is an attractive alternative to the orthodox view that our best theory of meaning ascribes to such sentences truth-conditions relative to what is known. This essay demonstrates that a dynamic theory about might and must offers elegant explanations of a range of puzzling observations about epistemic modals. The first part of the story offers a unifying treatment of disputes about epistemic modality and disputes about matters of fact while …Read more
  •  112
    Realizing what might be
    Philosophical Studies 153 (3). 2011.
    Schulz has shown that the suppositional view of indicative conditionals leads to a corresponding view of epistemic modals. But his case backfires: the resulting theory of epistemic modals gets the facts wrong, and so we end up with a good argument against the suppositional view. I show how and why a dynamic view of indicative conditionals leads to a better theory of epistemic modals
  •  84
    Deontic Logic and Normative Systems (edited book)
    College Publications. 2016.
    The biennial DEON conferences are designed to promote interdisciplinary cooperation amongst scholars interested in linking the formal-logical study of normative concepts and normative systems with computer science, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, organization theory and law. In addition to these general themes, DEON 2016 encouraged a special focus on the topic "Reasons, Argumentation and Justification."
  •  552
    Dynamic Thoughts on Ifs and Oughts
    Philosophers' Imprint 14 1-30. 2014.
    A dynamic semantics for iffy oughts offers an attractive alternative to the folklore that Chisholm's paradox enforces an unhappy choice between the intuitive inference rules of factual and deontic detachment. The first part of the story told here shows how a dynamic theory about ifs and oughts gives rise to a nonmonotonic perspective on deontic discourse and reasoning that elegantly removes the air of paradox from Chisholm's puzzle without sacrificing any of the two detachment principles. The se…Read more