Research Projects
Vagueness
In my dissertation, Vagueness and the Virtues of Deferring Decisions, I develop and defend a novel application of assessment-sensitive semantics to vague language theory while also offering a richer explanation of how and why vague language gets used the way it does. Starting with the concept of assertion, I argue against constitutive rule accounts of assertion in favour of a more-flexible standard for evaluating assertions. This more forgiving picture of language use opens the door to semantics and meta-semantics that are otherwise off the table. For instance, I show how this allows us to modify the set-up of Lewis’s coordination problems, so that the strategic processes which guide individuals to establish conventions should be understood as “multi-armed bandit” problems. I then argue that this allows us to think of vague language as resulting from a quasi-deliberate form of semantic indecision, which effectively postpones the semantic decision in order to strike the right balance between “earning and learning”. Building off of this meta-semantic account, I then argue that the truth of vague assertions is a future contingent and thus that the semantics of vagueness reduce to the semantics of future contingents. I then show how employing a modified form of MacFarlane’s assessment-sensitive semantics for future contingents allows us to make good on the idea that borderline cases of vague predicates can “go either way”.
Physicalism
In my paper, [title redacted while under review], I try to make progress on the so-called “condition question” of physicalism by advancing a causal account of what it means for an entity to be physical. I show how understanding the physical as the extension of a causal network with a certain structure allows us to get the extension of “physical” correct while also avoiding the triviality worries that plague physics-based definitions of the physical.
Yosemite, 2022
Muir Woods, 2024
Truth in Semantics
Though truth is often taken as a primitive term in semantic theories, and though the apparent undefinability of truth has prompted some to characterize truth in terms of such theories, Dummett argues that, on pain of circularity, one cannot have it both ways. Recent responses to this argument have tried to distinguishing between problematic and unproblematic varieties of circularity, but I argue that these responses lose sight of the motivation for truth-theoretic semantics and the purported connection between semantic theories and speakers’ practical knowledge. I thus try to reframe the motivation for truth-theoretic semantics, and to do so in way that avoids challenges raised by the competence of LLMs.