Previously Published Papers

Metaphysics, Verbal Disputes and the Limits of Charity

(forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research)

While research in analytic metaphysics has been flourishing in recent decades, some philosophers worry that there is something defective about them. One vocal critic is Eli Hirsch, who advances the “neo-Carnapian” view that at least some apparent debates in metaphysics are non-substantive; according to Hirsch, such debates are merely verbal, because each side of the debate is best interpreted as making claims with which the other side agrees. Here I argue that (i) Hirsch needs to maintain that both sides of the debate are making claims that are not merely true but rationally unrevisable (in a sense I define); however (ii) the principles of interpretive charity on which Hirsch relies don’t support any such strong thesis. I conclude that considerations of interpretive charity cannot deflate debates in metaphysics in the way that Hirsch’s neo-Carnapian position maintains.

Understanding and Philosophical Methodology

co-written with Magdalena Balcerak Jackson

(forthcoming in Philosophical Studies)

According to Conceptualism, philosophy is an independent discipline that can be pursued from the armchair because philosophy seeks truths that can be discovered purely on the basis of our understanding of expressions and the concepts they express. In his recent book, The Philosophy of Philosophy, Timothy Williamson argues that while philosophy can indeed be pursued from the armchair, we should reject any form of Conceptualism. In this paper, we show that Williamson’s arguments against Conceptualism are not successful, and we sketch a way to understand understanding that shows that there is a clear sense in which we can indeed come to know the answers to (many) philosophical questions purely on the basis of understanding.

Understanding and Semantic Structure: Reply to Timothy Williamson

(2009, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society v. 109, pp. 337-343)

In his essay, “Conceptual Truth” in this journal (and elsewhere) Timothy Williamson argues that there are no truths or entailments that are constitutive of understanding the sentences involved. In this reply I provide several examples of entailment patterns that are intuitively constitutive of understanding in just the way Williamson rejects, and I argue that Williamson’s argument does nothing to show otherwise. Williamson bolsters his conclusion by appeal to a certain theory about the nature of understanding. I argue that his theory fails to consider the role that the structure of a sentence plays in determining its meaning. The cases I present suggest that this role imposes greater cognitive requirements on understanding than Williamson can acknowledge.

Truth vs. Pretense in Discourse about Motion (or, Why the Sun Really Does Rise)

(2007, Noûs v. 41, pp. 298-17)

This essay concerns motion ascriptions, ordinary utterances of sentences like ‘The car is moving’. Physics has taught us that motion must always be understood as relative to some specified frame of reference, and yet motion ascriptions typically do not include explicit mention of any frame. This leads many to see our ordinary talk about motion as a case of non-obvious pretense: we pretend that there really is absolute motion and rest, and simply ignore that our utterances are not literally true. This is a view I reject. I argue that the pretense theory does a very poor job of explaining our ordinary talk about motion, and that a much better explanation is given by the hypothesis that motion ascriptions are context-sensitive. An utterance of ‘The car is moving’ expresses a proposition to the effect that the car is moving relative to some contextually specified reference frame. One reason why the semantics of motion ascriptions matters has to do with debates in ontology: fictionalists about e.g. numbers or universals often point to our ordinary talk about motion as a paradigm case of non-obvious pretense when motivating their view; if the arguments of this paper are correct then fictionalists can derive no comfort in this area.

Beyond Logical Form

(2007, Philosophical Studies v. 132, pp. 347-380)

This essay concerns the distinction between structural and lexical entailments, illustrated by (1) and (2) respectively:

(1) Snowball is a black cat; therefore Snowball is a cat.

(2) Moe is a bachelor; therefore Moe is male.

One standard way to try to explain the difference between (1) and (2) is to suggest that ‘Snowball is a black cat’ is “really just” a conjunction, and therefore that (1) is valid solely as a matter of logic, while the validity of (2) also depends on the meanings of ‘bachelor’ and ‘male’. The view underlying this suggestion is what I call the Logicist Thesis for Structural Entailment: that an entailment is structural just in case it is valid in virtue of logical form. Though it is not often explicitly articulated, the Logicist Thesis is often taken for granted in discussions in semantics and the philosophy of language. However, in this essay I argue that we should reject it. I focus on attempts to vindicate the Logicist Thesis within the context of a broadly Davidsonian theory of logical form. However, I argue that the problems faced by such attempts are not specific to the Davidsonian framework, and therefore that we have quite general reasons to be skeptical of the Logicist Thesis.

Logical Form: Classical Conception and Recent Challenges

(2006, Philosophy Compass v. 1/3, pp. 303-316)

The term “logical form” has been called on to serve a wide range of purposes in philosophy. In this essay, I focus on one conception of logical form that has occupied a central place in the philosophy of language, and in particular in the philosophical study of linguistic meaning. This is what I call the classical conception of logical form. The classical conception has (either explicitly or implicitly) shaped a great deal of important philosophical work in semantic theory. But it has come under fire in recent decades, and in this essay I discuss two of the recent challenges that I take to be most interesting and significant.

Works in Progress

The Limits of Frege-Analyticity

An assumption that is often taken for granted in debates about the analytic/synthetic distinction is that a sentence is analytic just in case it is Frege-analytic—i.e. just in case it can be transformed into a logical truth by the substitution of synonyms for synonyms. I argue that this assumption is undermined by structural analyticities, such as ‘If Ray painted the fence white then ray painted the fence’. The failure of the assumption has consequences for both sides of the debate about analyticity. On the skeptics’ side, arguments against analyticity that are based on worries about synonymy—such as Quine’s in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”—succeed at best only against Frege-analyticity, not against analyticity in general. On the believers’ side, the failure of the assumption causes problems for attempts, such as the one by Paul Boghossian, to ground a priori knowledge of analytic truths in our grasp of the meanings of the logical constants.

Semantic Natural Kinds

I develop a theory about what it is for a group of expressions to belong to a single semantic category, and illustrate the proposal by application to the semantics of manner adverbs. While I suspect that something like the theory developed here is often operative in the work of semanticists, one is hard-pressed to find explicit articulations of it. Moreover, the theory has significant consequences that are too often overlooked, especially concerning the relationship between semantic categories and inference patterns. For example, Kent Johnson argues that facts about inference patterns show that semantic categories overlap — a claim which, if true, would threaten the systematicity of natural languages. The theory developed here shows why this argument rests on a confusion about the relationship between inference patterns and semantic categories. A second consequence is that the theory forces us to reconsider the distinction between inferences that depend on the meanings of particular words (e.g. ‘Moe is a bachelor; so Moe is male’) and those that are supposedly valid purely in virtue of their form (e.g. ‘Lisa ran quickly; so Lisa ran’).