Research Projects
Works in Progress
Vagueness
In my dissertation, I employ assessment-sensitive semantics to develop novel semantics for vague language and trace the consequences of this through meta-semantics and pragmatics. The first chapter draws on recent treatments of future contingents to argue that the truth of a vague utterance is a function of the truth value it receives according to precisifications that are possible at the context of assessment. Vague statements are thus as indeterminate as the future of semantic developments, making sense of the idea that borderline cases can “go either way”. In the second chapter, I show how congenial meta-semantics can be obtained by modifying Lewis’s signalling games in order to transform them into problems akin to so-called “multi-armed bandit” problems, where strategic play calls for temporarily diversifying one’s actions. In the last two chapters I resolve a tension between assessment-sensitive semantics and leading pragmatic theories by rejecting constitutive rule accounts of assertion. I argue that constitutive rules are implausibly demanding, that they pose separate problems for hedged assertions, and that the virtues of such theories may be retained by constitutive norm accounts that are compatible with assessment-sensitive semantics.
Publications
“A Causal Account of the Physical”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy (2025)
In this paper 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 extension of “physical” in terms of a causal network with a certain structure allows us to make good on common physicalist commitments while also avoiding the triviality worries that plague physics-based definitions of the physical.
Artificial Intelligence
Elsewhere, I explore how developments in LLM architecture and training techniques may offer new ways of thinking about traditional problems in philosophy of language.
In one such project I argue that the importance of sentence vectors in leading LLMs serves as a counter example to Lepore and Ludwig’s argument against the utility of “meanings as entities”. From this I attempt to derive conclusions about the nature of linguistic understanding and the role of propositions in explaining this.
In another project, I connect certain techniques in self-supervised learning to semantic externalist's’ invocation of community experts and argue that this defuses Chomsky’s allegation of methodological dualism.