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457Stanley Cavell’s account of aesthetic judgment has two components. The first is a feeling: the judge has to see, hear, ‘dig’ something in the object being judged, there has to be an ‘emotion’ that the judge feels and expresses. The second is the ‘discipline of accounting for [the judgment]’, a readiness to argue for one’s aesthetic judgment in the face of disagreement. The discipline of accounting for one’s aesthetic judgments involves what Nick Riggle has called a norm of convergence: the judge…Read more
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606Linguistic Corpora and Ordinary Language: On the Dispute Between Ryle and Austin About the Use of ‘Voluntary’, ‘Involuntary’, ‘Voluntarily’, and ‘Involuntarily’In David Bordonaba-Plou (ed.), Experimental Philosophy of Language: Perspectives, Methods, and Prospects, Springer Verlag. pp. 121-149. 2023.The fact that Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin seem to disagree about the ordinary use of words such as ‘voluntary’, ‘involuntary’, ‘voluntarily’, and ‘involuntarily’ has been taken to cast doubt on the methods of ordinary language philosophy. As Benson Mates puts the worry, ‘if agreement about usage cannot be reached within so restricted a sample as the class of Oxford Professors of Philosophy, what are the prospects when the sample is enlarged?’ (Mates, Inquiry 1:161–171, 1958, p. 165). In this ch…Read more
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468A Quantitative History of Ordinary Language PhilosophySynthese 201 (6). 2023.There is a standard story told about the rise and fall of ordinary language philosophy: it was a widespread, if not dominant, approach to philosophy in Great Britain in the aftermath of World War II up until the early 1960s, but with the development of systematic approaches to the study of language—formal semantic theories on one hand and Gricean pragmatics on the other—ordinary language philosophy more or less disappeared. In this paper we present quantitative evidence to evaluate the standard …Read more
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42Correction to: Pain priors, polyeidism, and predictive power: a preliminary investigation into individual differences in ordinary thought about painTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 44 (1): 101-102. 2021.According to standard philosophical and clinical understandings, pain is an essentially mental phenomenon. In a challenge to this standard conception, a recent burst of empirical work in experimental philosophy, such as that by Justin Sytsma and Kevin Reuter, purports to show that people ordinarily conceive of pain as an essentially bodily phenomenon—specifically, a quality of bodily disturbance. In response to this bodily view, other recent experimental studies have provided evidence that the o…Read more
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268What is hate speech? The case for a corpus approachCriminal Law and Philosophy 18 (2): 397-430. 2024.Contemporary public discourse is saturated with speech that vilifies and incites hatred or violence against vulnerable groups. The term “hate speech” has emerged in legal circles and in ordinary language to refer to these communicative acts. But legal theorists and philosophers disagree over how to define this term. This paper makes the case for, and subsequently develops, the first corpus-based analysis of the ordinary meaning of “hate speech.” We begin by demonstrating that key interpretive an…Read more
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414Is Pain “All in your Mind”? Examining the General Public’s Views of PainReview of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (3): 683-698. 2022.By definition, pain is a sensory and emotional experience that is felt in a particular part of the body. The precise relationship between somatic events at the site where pain is experienced, and central processing giving rise to the mental experience of pain remains the subject of debate, but there is little disagreement in scholarly circles that both aspects of pain are critical to its experience. Recent experimental work, however, suggests a public view that is at odds with this conceptualisa…Read more
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458Socratic QuestionnairesOxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy. 2022.When experimental participants are given the chance to reflect and revise their initial judgments in a dynamic conversational context, do their responses to philosophical scenarios differ from responses to those same scenarios presented in a traditional static survey? In three experiments comparing responses given in conversational contexts with responses to traditional static surveys, we find no consistent evidence that responses differ in these different formats. This aligns with recent findin…Read more
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897'Extremely Racist' and 'Incredibly Sexist': An Empirical Response to the Charge of Conceptual InflationJournal of the American Philosophical Association 9 (1): 72-94. 2023.Critics across the political spectrum have worried that ordinary uses of words like 'racist', 'sexist', and 'homophobic' are becoming conceptually inflated, meaning that these expressions are getting used so widely that they lose their nuance and, thereby, their moral force. However, the charge of conceptual inflation, as well as responses to it, are standardly made without any systematic investigation of how 'racist' and other expressions condemning oppression are actually used in ordinary lang…Read more
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63Pain priors, polyeidism, and predictive power: a preliminary investigation into individual differences in our ordinary thought about painTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 42 (3): 113-135. 2021.According to standard philosophical and clinical understandings, pain is an essentially mental phenomenon (typically, a kind of conscious experience). In a challenge to this standard conception, a recent burst of empirical work in experimental philosophy, such as that by Justin Sytsma and Kevin Reuter, purports to show that people ordinarily conceive of pain as an essentially bodily phenomenon—specifically, a quality of bodily disturbance. In response to this bodily view, other recent experiment…Read more
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975“Nobody would really talk that way!”: the critical project in contemporary ordinary language philosophySynthese 197 (6): 2433-2464. 2018.This paper defends a challenge, inspired by arguments drawn from contemporary ordinary language philosophy and grounded in experimental data, to certain forms of standard philosophical practice. The challenge is inspired by contemporary philosophers who describe themselves as practicing “ordinary language philosophy”. Contemporary ordinary language philosophy can be divided into constructive and critical approaches. The critical approach to contemporary ordinary language philosophy has been forc…Read more
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61Meanings of Pain: Volume 2: Common Types of Pain and LanguageSpringer Verlag. 2019.Experiential evidence shows that pain is associated with common meanings. These include a meaning of threat or danger, which is experienced as immediately distressing or unpleasant; cognitive meanings, which are focused on the long-term consequences of having chronic pain; and existential meanings such as hopelessness, which are more about the person with chronic pain than the pain itself. This interdisciplinary book - the second in the three-volume Meanings of Pain series edited by Dr Simon van…Read more
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681The meaning of pain expressions and pain communicationIn Simon van Rysewyk (ed.), Meanings of Pain, Springer. pp. 261-282. 2017.Both patients and clinicians frequently report problems around communicating and assessing pain. Patients express dissatisfaction with their doctors and doctors often find exchanges with chronic pain patients difficult and frustrating. This chapter thus asks how we could improve pain communication and thereby enhance outcomes for chronic pain patients. We argue that improving matters will require a better appreciation of the complex meaning of pain terms and of the variability and flexibility in…Read more
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578The Myth of the Common Sense Conception of ColorIn Teresa Marques & Åsa Wikforss (eds.), Shifting Concepts: The Philosophy and Psychology of Conceptual Variability, Oxford University Press. pp. 106-127. 2020.Some philosophical theories of the nature of color aim to respect a "common sense" conception of color: aligning with the common sense conception is supposed to speak in favor of a theory and conflicting with it is supposed to speak against a theory. In this paper, we argue that the idea of a "common sense" conception of color that philosophers of color have relied upon is overly simplistic. By drawing on experimental and historical evidence, we show how conceptions of color vary along several d…Read more
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622Stakes, Scales, and SkepticismErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 6 427--487. 2019.There is conflicting experimental evidence about whether the “stakes” or importance of being wrong affect judgments about whether a subject knows a proposition. To date, judgments about stakes effects on knowledge have been investigated using binary paradigms: responses to “low” stakes cases are compared with responses to “high stakes” cases. However, stakes or importance are not binary properties—they are scalar: whether a situation is “high” or “low” stakes is a matter of degree. So far, no ex…Read more
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1123Metalinguistic ProposalsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy (1-2): 1-19. 2019.This paper sets out the felicity conditions for metalinguistic proposals, a type of directive illocutionary act. It discusses the relevance of metalinguistic proposals and other metalinguistic directives for understanding both small- and large-scale linguistic engineering projects, essentially contested concepts, metalinguistic provocations, and the methodology of ordinary language philosophy. Metalinguistic proposals are compared with other types of linguistic interventions, including metalingu…Read more
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968A Corpus Study of "Know": On the Verification of Philosophers' Frequency Claims about LanguageEpisteme 18 (2): 242-268. 2021.We investigate claims about the frequency of "know" made by philosophers. Our investigation has several overlapping aims. First, we aim to show what is required to confirm or disconfirm philosophers’ claims about the comparative frequency of different uses of philosophically interesting expressions. Second, we aim to show how using linguistic corpora as tools for investigating meaning is a productive methodology, in the sense that it yields discoveries about the use of language that philosophers…Read more
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599Review of Avner Baz, The Crisis of Method in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy (review)Mind 128 (511): 963-970. 2018.This is the second book by Baz that aims to show that a big chunk of contemporary philosophy is fundamentally misguided. His first book, When Words Are Called For: A Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy (2012) adopted a therapeutic approach (in the Wittgensteinian style) to problems in contemporary epistemology, arguing that when properly thought through, the way philosophers talk about ‘knowing’ that something is the case ultimately does not make sense. Baz’s goal in his second book is less …Read more
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138Color Comparisons and Interpersonal VariationReview of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (4): 809-826. 2017.An important challenge to color objectivists, who hold that statements concerning color are made true or false by objective facts, is the argument from interpersonal variation in where normal observers locate the unique hues. Recently, an attractive objectivist response to the argument has been proposed that draws on the semantics of gradable adjectives and which does not require defending the idea that there is a single correct location for each of the unique hues Noûs 50: 3–40),. In ), I argue…Read more
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916Must we measure what we mean?Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 60 (8): 785-815. 2017.This paper excavates a debate concerning the claims of ordinary language philosophers that took place during the middle of the last century. The debate centers on the status of statements about ‘what we say’. On one side of the debate, critics of ordinary language philosophy argued that statements about ‘what we say’ should be evaluated as empirical observations about how people do in fact speak, on a par with claims made in the language sciences. By that standard, ordinary language philosophers…Read more
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725Third‐person knowledge ascriptions: A crucial experiment for contextualismMind and Language (2): 1-25. 2018.In the past few years there has been a turn towards evaluating the empirical foundation of epistemic contextualism using formal (rather than armchair) experimental methods. By-and-large, the results of these experiments have not supported the original motivation for epistemic contextualism. That is partly because experiments have only uncovered effects of changing context on knowledge ascriptions in limited experimental circumstances (when contrast is present, for example), and partly because ex…Read more
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692Just What Is It That Makes Travis's Examples So Different, So Appealing?In John Collins & Tamara Dobler (eds.), The Philosophy of Charles Travis: Language, Thought, and Perception, Oxford University Press. 2018.Odd and memorable examples are a distinctive feature of Charles Travis's work: cases involving squash balls, soot-covered kettles, walls that emit poison gas, faces turning puce, ties made of freshly cooked linguine, and people grunting when punched in the solar plexus all figure in his arguments. One of Travis's examples, involving a pair of situations in which the leaves of a Japanese maple tree are painted green, has even spawned its own literature consisting of attempts to explain the contex…Read more
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406Experimenting on ContextualismMind and Language 28 (3): 286-321. 2013.This paper concerns the central method of generating evidence in support of contextualist theories, what we call context shifting experiments. We begin by explaining the standard design of context shifting experiments, which are used in both quantitative surveys and more traditional thought experiments to show how context affects the content of natural language expressions. We discuss some recent experimental studies that have tried and failed to find evidence that confirms contextualist predict…Read more
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771Color Adjectives, Standards, and Thresholds: An Experimental InvestigationLinguistics and Philosophy 40 (3): 1--40. 2017.Are color adjectives ("red", "green", etc.) relative adjectives or absolute adjectives? Existing theories of the meaning of color adjectives attempt to answer that question using informal ("armchair") judgments. The informal judgments of theorists conflict: it has been proposed that color adjectives are absolute with standards anchored at the minimum degree on the scale, that they are absolute but have near-midpoint standards, and that they are relative. In this paper we report two experiments, …Read more
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844Review of Paul Elbourne, Meaning: A Slim Guide to Semantics (review)Philosophy in Review 33 (1): 31-33. 2013.
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767On an Alleged Truth/Falsity Asymmetry in Context Shifting ExperimentsPhilosophical Quarterly 62 (248): 530-545. 2012.Keith DeRose has argued that context shifting experiments should be designed in a specific way in order to accommodate what he calls a ‘truth/falsity asymmetry’. I explain and critique DeRose's reasons for proposing this modification to contextualist methodology, drawing on recent experimental studies of DeRose's bank cases as well as experimental findings about the verification of affirmative and negative statements. While DeRose's arguments for his particular modification to contextualist meth…Read more
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326Contrasting CasesIn James R. Beebe (ed.), Advances in Experimental Epistemology, Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 71-95. 2014.This paper concerns the philosophical significance of a choice about how to design the context shifting experiments used by contextualists and anti-intellectualists: Should contexts be judged jointly, with contrast, or separately, without contrast? Findings in experimental psychology suggest (1) that certain contextual features are more difficult to evaluate when considered separately, and there are reasons to think that one feature--stakes or importance--that interests contextualists and anti-i…Read more
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103Assurance: An Austinian View of Knowledge and Knowledge Claims, by Krista Lawlor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 231 pp. ISBN 10/13: 978–0199657896 hb £36.00 (review)European Journal of Philosophy 24 (1): 298-302. 2016.
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104Review of When Words Are Called For: A Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy (review)Philosophical Quarterly 64 (254): 179-181. 2014.
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1177Experimental Philosophy of LanguageOxford Handbooks Online. 2015.Experimental philosophy of language uses experimental methods developed in the cognitive sciences to investigate topics of interest to philosophers of language. This article describes the methodological background for the development of experimental approaches to topics in philosophy of language, distinguishes negative and positive projects in experimental philosophy of language, and evaluates experimental work on the reference of proper names and natural kind terms. The reliability of expert ju…Read more
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Experimental Philosophy: Contextualism and Invariantism |