I investigate these questions by analysing cases of so-called metalinguistic negotiation, namely, pragmatic negotiation over which intension and extension of a term should be adopted. I argue that the literature has often neglected the normative aspects of language: specifically, how language can encode perspectives and ideologies.
I contend that my consdierations favour a non-truth-conditional, expressive account of meaning.
Some papers I wrote...
(title redacted for peer review)
Paper on how disagreements about langugage should be understood as disagreements about perspectives.
This paper argues that the metalinguistic analysis of disagreements is inadequate. I then propose an alternative metasemantic account.
I argue that the concept “woman” should be understood as a “conception”, i.e., a stereotype or exemplar, and thus does not have necessary and sufficient conditions. For individuals to share a conception of “woman”, the features they each represent a “woman” as having must sufficiently overlap. In coordinating over communicative intentions, speakers fix the meaning of “woman” to those features they agree on. Speakers are then able to negotiate whether the term and conception “woman” should include any features they disagree about. Importantly, this disagreement does not concern which conception or meaning ought to be used, but rather what a “woman” is.
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).
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.