Research

This paper asks whether we need to share meanings and thoughts in order to have substantive disagreements. In recent work (particularly due to Plunkett and Sundell, 2013), the consensus has been that speakers need not share meanings or concepts in order to have a substantive disagreement. Indeed, speakers can disagree over pragmatically expressed contents, without sharing any semantically expressed contents. 

Pace cases of pragmatic disagreement, I argue that speakers who engage in substantive disagreements do, more often than not, share meanings and concepts. This is because disagreeing speakers accept and adopt a shared meaning and conception for the purposes of communication. This is reflected within our practices of disagreement. 

In this essay, I argue for the impossibility of defining the artistic technique of "abstraction" through a set of necessary and sufficient conditions.  I instead offer a "cluster" definition, namely, one that provides a set of criteria for the application of the concept, though (I) none of such criteria are individually necessary, (II) the criteria and subsets thereof are jointly sufficient, and (II) the criteria are disjunctively necessary. 

This essay won the Alpine Fellowship Prize in 2024. Here is a link to my (very generalist) talk at the Alpine Fellowship's Symposium. 

This essay argues that questions about whether metaphor has propositional content cannot be answered for metaphor as a linguistic category; rather, as for all uses of language, whether they express propositional content –  other than their literal meaning – is a matter of context and how it interacts with speakers' intentions. I use Camp's (2003) cognitivist account of metaphorical content, Lepore and Stone's (2010; 2015) non-cognitivist account, and linguistic data to motivate my claims. My considerations are also backed by reflections on the epistemology of interpretation and metaphysics of content, later-Davidsonian interpretation theory (Davidson, 1986; 1993), and Davidson's (1986) discussion of the debate between McKay (1968) and Donnellan (1968). 

My MPhil thesis focused on whether meaning is subject to the so-called "guidance constraint" – namely, on whether genuine speakers must be guided in their uses of expressions, such that there is a guiding element that gives reason or motivates their uses. I focused primarily on Ginsborg's (2011, 2012) (partially) reductive "primitive normativity" and Verheggen's (2016) non-reductive "semantic attitudinal normativity". Specifically, I explored whether meaning requires innate representations and/or attitudes, and whether it requires false-belief understanding and Theory of Mind. Finally, I attempted to sketch a (partially) reductive theory that takes perceptual experiences as pre-conditions for meaningful use of language, when embedded in a triangulating community where there are nomic connections between perceptual events, phenomenal qualia, and responsive behaviour.