Published:
Sellars's Ontological Nominalism. European Journal of Philosophy. 2021.
In Fall 2019, I was a visitor at Pittsburgh, working with Robert Brandom, and I sat in on Brandom's course on Wilfrid Sellars. One of Brandom's main claims in the course was that Sellars's ontological nominalism was unintelligible. I thought there was more to be said for it, so I decided to write this paper, arguing that Sellars's ontological nominalism is not only intelligible but that the theory of conceptual content that Brandom develops is actually just what is needed for us to make proper sense of it. (link to publication, pdf of final draft.)
This is my attempt to bridge the gap between Robert Brandom's account of the mind, articulated in normative vocabulary, and the sort of account offered by some of his closest critics such as John McDowell, James Conant, and Sebastian Rödl, articulated in principally agentive modal vocabulary. On the account I propose, these two sorts of accounts are really two perspectival sides of the same multi-perspectival coin. (link to publication, open access pdf)
Pointing out the Skeptic's Mistake and Reformulating the Two Aspects of Justification. Florida Philosophical Review. 2014, 2013.
These are two papers I wrote as an undergrad, which became chapters three and four of my undergrad thesis. In the first, which I still rather like, I defend Donald Davidson's transcendental argument against Cartesian skepticism by giving it a Moorean spin, drawing on work by Quill Kukla and Mark Lance. In the second, which I wish I wrote differently (I'd read the version in chapter four of the thesis, if you're curious), I develop an account of justification, drawing from W.V.O. Quine's work on observation sentences, where justification has two aspects, one connecting to belief qua state and one connecting to belief qua bearer of content, that fit together like the two sides of a seesaw.
Under Review:
This paper reframes some of the core ideas of my dissertation. In it, raise a worry about the explanatory role that properties and relations play in contemporary semantic theories, serving as the contents of predicates: the most plausible account of the properties to which contemporary semantic theories appeal is to think of them in terms of the rules governing the use of predicates, and so they can play no role in explaining these rules, as contemporary semantic theories suppose they do. In response to this worry, I propose a radically different way of doing semantics, one that doesn't involve any appeal to properties to serve as the contents of predicates, so as to explain these very contents. According to this semantic theory, which I "discursive role semantics," we think of the meanings of predicates and sentences directly in terms of what one does in uttering them, without appealing to any things one says. (pdf)
In working with the ROLE group, I stumbled upon some natural language counterexamples to the structural principle of Cumulative Transitivity, which says that if a set of sentences Γ implies a sentence A, and Γ along with A implies B, then Γ implies B. Here, I consider these cases as counterexamples to the conditionalized version of this principle, which is validated by all existing theories of indicative conditionals. After spelling out how these cases pose a problem to existing theories of conditionals, I propose a new dynamic strict account of conditionals that accommodates them. (pdf)
In attempting to familiarize myself with Begriffsschrift notation, I ended up writing this paper. I argue here that there is a tension in Frege's mature philosophy concerning the place of the judgement stroke in his logical notation, but there were seeds of a very different conception of logic in his early writing--what James Conant calls a "Kantian conception of logic"--where the judgment stroke is not at all out of place. (pdf)
In the Works:
Sellars's Two Worlds. To appear in Reading Kant with Sellars, edited by Luz C. Seiberth and Mahdi Ranaee.
This is a paper I'm working on for a forthcoming anthology on Sellars and Kant. In it, I situate Sellars's Kantian picture in the context of the debate over "two worlds" vs. "two aspects" readings of transcendental idealism, arguing that Sellars has a two worlds conception of transcendental idealism, but he resolves the problems that traditionally plague such conceptions through his distinctive naturalistic spin on Kant. (abstract)
Simply Substructural Semantics
This paper developed out of my work with the ROLE group. In it, I show that relations of semantic implication and incompatibility in natural language not only don't conform to the structural principles Monotonicity and Transitivity, as would be expected by a way of thinking about these relations in terms of closeness of possible worlds (following Lewis and Stalnaker), but also fail to conform to Cumulative Transitivity, and these failures are not at all easy to make sense of in a truth-conditional framework. A framework of discursive role semantics, however, is able to simply and elegantly deal with these failures by starting with relations of implication and incompatibility that are simply not presumed to conform to these structural rules. (slides)
Nāgārjuna, Wittgenstein, and the Self-Undoing of Philosophy
Many commentators have likened certain puzzling passages of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK), the major work of the 2nd century Indian Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna, to equally puzzling metaphilosophical remarks in Wittgenstein's Tractatus. These remarks in both cases occur at the end of the work, and, if they're read literally, they seem to amount to an "undoing" of the philosophical theses propounded in the body of the work. In this paper, I draw on a line of Wittgenstein interpretation put forward by James Conant and Cora Diamond to offer a "resolute reading" of Nāgārjuna's MMK according to which the true doctrine of emptiness really is one that undoes itself. The general idea of "self-undoing" philosophical systems considered here is explored further (indeed, perhaps to far) in my book Talking in Circles.
Conference Papers, Abandoned Projects, and Other Things:
This is a paper I wrote for a conference on the work of Mathew Boyle in Leipzig. In it, I respond to Boyle's criticism of John McDowell's conceptualist account of perceptual content, proposing and developing the agentive conception of perceptual experience that I also put forward in "The Normative/Agentive Correspondence" in response to his criticisms. (pdf)
This was my "preliminary essay" for my Ph.D. program at University of Chicago. In it, I present a new argument for the act-based conception of propositions, arguing that propositions do not represent things as being certain ways, as is widely taken to be the case; rather, we represent things as being certain ways, and propositions are our acts of doing so. In subsequent work, I've radicalized the basic view put forward here, applying the act-based approach not just to propositions, but properties as well. (pdf)