• Social Robots: A fictional dualism model
    Rowman and Littlefield. 2023.
  •  6
    In the future, it is likely that we will form strong bonds of attachment and even develop love for social robots. Some of these loving relations will be, from the human’s perspective, as significant as a loving relationship that they might have had with another human. This means that, from the perspective of the loving human, the mindless destruction of their robot partner could be as devastating as the murder of another’s human partner. Yet, the loving partner of a robot has no recourse to lega…Read more
  •  19
    The ethics of ex-bots
    AI and Society 1-2. forthcoming.
    Imagine if, when broken-hearted by their romantic partner leaving them, a person could continue the relationship with a chatbot or avatar version of them. This might seem like a far-fetched scenario but a little thought reveals that, first, this is a product that could plausibly make its way to the market and, second, it would be harmful for both parties of the former relationship and plausibly abusive for the person who has been ‘bot-ed’ without their consent.
  •  24
    Avatars as Proxies
    Minds and Machines 33 (3): 525-539. 2023.
    Avatars will represent us online, in virtual worlds, and in technologically supported hybrid environments. We and our avatars will stand not in an identity relation but in a proxy relation, an arrangement that is significant not least because our proxies’ actions can be counted as our own. However, this proxy relation between humans and avatars is not well understood and its consequences under-explored. In this paper I explore the relation and its potential ethical consequences.
  •  39
    Eternalism as Therapy: Mourning the Death of Michael Besso
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 102 (3): 504-514. 2021.
    It is often assumed that an eternalist and a presentist will have the same emotional response to life's events because, regardless of one's metaphysical beliefs, we all have the same phenomenological experience of time passing and it is this experience that is relevant to emotional response. I question the assumption that beliefs about the metaphysics of time can have little impact on one's emotional responses and establish the position that scientific and metaphysical beliefs can offer succour.
  •  14
    Why Indirect Harms do not Support Social Robot Rights
    Minds and Machines 32 (4): 735-749. 2022.
    There is growing evidence to support the claim that we react differently to robots than we do to other objects. In particular, we react differently to robots with which we have some form of social interaction. In this paper I critically assess the claim that, due to our tendency to become emotionally attached to social robots, permitting their harm may be damaging for society and as such we should consider introducing legislation to grant social robots rights and protect them from harm. I conclu…Read more
  •  23
    A fictional dualism model of social robots
    Ethics and Information Technology 23 (3): 465-472. 2021.
    In this paper I propose a Fictional Dualism model of social robots. The model helps us to understand the human emotional reaction to social robots and also acts as a guide for us in determining the significance of that emotional reaction, enabling us to better define the moral and legislative rights of social robots within our society. I propose a distinctive position that allows us to accept that robots are tools, that our emotional reaction to them can be important to their usefulness, and tha…Read more
  •  125
    Nostalgia reconsidered
    Ratio 33 (3): 184-190. 2020.
    Nostalgia is standardly assumed to be directed towards the past, to involve some salient feeling of the irretrievability of the past, and to be directed towards the memory of an event. In this paper I argue that none of these standard assumptions hold. I use a time‐traveller example to demonstrate that nostalgia is not essentially past‐directed. Once nostalgia is prised from the objective past, we can examine the other purported conditions, making space for the conclusion that the felt irretriev…Read more
  •  141
    Contextualism and the Principle of Tolerance
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 90 (1): 289-306. 2014.
    When we bring together certain plausible and compatible principles guiding the use of vague predicates the inclination to accept that vague predicates are tolerant is significantly weakened. As the principle of tolerance is a troublesome, paradox inducing principle, a theory giving a satisfactory account of the nature of vague predicates and accounting for the appeal of the sorites paradox, without recourse to the principle of tolerance is a worthy addition to the vagueness debate. The theory of…Read more
  •  1
    Vagueness and Practical Interests
    In Paul Egre & Nathan Klinedinst (eds.), Vagueness and Language Use, Palgrave Macmillan. 2011.
    In this paper we focus mainly on a kind of contextualism theory of vagueness according to which the context dependence has its source in the variation of our practical interests. We largely focus on Fara's version of the theory but our observations work at different levels of generality, some relevant only to the specifics of Fara's theory others relevant to all contextualist theories of a certain type.
  •  44
    The Role of the Sentence-Tokened
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 93 (3): 419-428. 2016.
    The purpose of this paper is to define the sentence-tokened—a product of utterance distinct from the act of utterance—and highlight the role that it can play in communication. In particular, the author will suggest that this entity is plausibly at the root of John MacFarlane’s motivating intuitions for the view that truth is assessment-sensitive. Here the author argues that the truth-value intuitions that MacFarlane uses to motivate his view can be accommodated within the Kaplanian semantic fram…Read more
  •  188
    Indexicals and utterance production
    with Dylan Dodd
    Philosophical Studies 150 (3): 331-348. 2010.
    We distinguish, among other things, between the agent of the context, the speaker of the agent's utterance, the mechanism the agent uses to produce her utterance, and the tokening of the sentence uttered. Armed with these distinctions, we tackle the the ‘answer-machine’, ‘post-it note’ and other allegedly problematic cases, arguing that they can be handled without departing significantly from Kaplan's semantical framework for indexicals. In particular, we argue that these cases don't require ado…Read more
  •  193
    The Utility of Content-Relativism
    Dialectica 68 (4): 563-579. 2014.
    Content- relativism is a semantic theory that states that the content of an uttered sentence can vary according to some feature of an assessment context. This paper has two objectives. The first is to determine which features a motivational case for content- relativism would display – what would a good case for content- relativism look like? The second is to consider cases that appear to have the required features and evaluate their prospects as motivational cases. I identify two varieties of mo…Read more
  •  49
    When David Kaplan put forward his theory of sentence truth incorporating demonstratives, initially proposed in ‘Dthat’ and later developed in ‘Demonstratives’ and ‘Afterthoughts’, it was, to his mind, simply a matter of book-keeping, a job that had been pushed aside as a complication when a truth conditional semantics had been proposed. The challenges considered in this thesis are challenges to the effect that Kaplan’s theory of sentence truth is, for one reason or another, inadequate. My overar…Read more
  •  102
    Future Contingents, Indeterminacy and Context
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 96 (2): 408-422. 2015.
    In Facing the Future, Belnap et al. reject bivalence and propose double time reference semantics to give a pragmatic response to the following assertion problem: how can we make sense of assertions about future events made at a time when the outcomes of those events are not yet determined? John MacFarlane employs the same semantics, now bolstered with a relative-truth predicate, to accommodate the following apparently conflicting intuitions regarding the truth-value of an uttered future continge…Read more
  •  77
    The No-Proposition View of Vagueness
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 93 (2): 179-195. 2016.
    This paper proposes a novel method of identifying the nature of vague sentences and a novel solution to the sorites paradox. The theory is motivated by patterns of use that language users display when using vague predicates. Identifying a coherent cause of this behaviour provides us with a theory of vague sentences that is behaviour- rather than paradox-led. The theory also provides a solution to the sorites paradox and is therefore more explanatory than other available theories of vagueness.