profile picture

Michelle Liu

Monash University
 More details
University of Oxford
DPhil, 2019
Homepage
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind
Aesthetics
Philosophy of Language
Areas of Interest
Experimental Philosophy
Metaphysics
  • Pain and spatial inclusion: evidence from Mandarin
    Michelle Liu and Colin Klein
    Analysis 80 (2): 262-272. 2020.
    The surface grammar of reports such as ‘I have a pain in my leg’ suggests that pains are objects which are spatially located in parts of the body. We show that the parallel construction is not available in Mandarin. Further, four philosophically important grammatical features of such reports cannot be reproduced. This suggests that arguments and puzzles surrounding such reports may be tracking artefacts of English, rather than philosophically significant features of the world.
  • Polysemy and Philosophy
    Michelle Liu
    Philosophy Compass 20 (5). 2025.
    Polysemy is the linguistic phenomenon where a word has more than one sense. Polysemy is important to philosophy. This article considers four related strands of discussion in philosophy in which polysemy plays a crucial role: (i) Chomsky's argument against externalist semantics; (ii) copredication and zeugma; (iii) semantic accounts of philosophically significant terms; and (iv) metaphysical debates.
  • Cross-Domain Descriptions: The Sensory and the Psychological
    Michelle Liu
    Philosophical Quarterly 73 (4): 950-964. 2023.
    Cross-domain descriptions are descriptions of features pertaining to one domain in terms of vocabulary primarily associated with another domain. Notably, we routinely describe psychological features in terms of the sensory domain and vice versa. Sorrow is said to be ‘bitter’ and fear ‘cold’. Music can be described as ‘happy’, ‘sad’, ‘mournful’, and so on. Such descriptions are rife in both everyday discourse and literary writings. What is it about psychological features that invites descriptions…Read more
  • X-Phi and the challenge from ad hoc concepts
    Michelle Liu
    Synthese 201 (5): 1-25. 2023.
    Ad hoc concepts feature prominently in lexical pragmatics. A speaker can use a word or phrase to communicate an ad hoc concept that is different from the lexically encoded concept and the hearer can construct the intended ad hoc concept pragmatically during utterance comprehension. I argue that some philosophical concepts have origins as ad hoc concepts, and such concepts pose a challenge for experimental philosophy regarding these concepts. To illustrate this, I consider philosophers’ ‘what-it’…Read more