My Research Program
Very generally, my research concerns the nature of conceptual and semantic contents: the sorts of things we think or say, or think or say about things. Such things are often referred to, in more mentalistic vocabulary, as ``thoughts" or ``concepts,'' in more linguistic vocabulary, as ``meanings'' (of sentences or predicates), or, in more metaphysical vocabulary, as ``propositions'' or ``properties.'' However one opts to characterize them, my work aims to provide an account of such contents in terms of the norms governing the use of linguistic expressions, and, correspondingly, of our grasp of these contents in terms of our mastery of these norms. There are two main branches of this program. The first involves spelling out such an account in formal detail and developing new formal tools towards that end. The second involves arguing that an account of this sort has far-reaching philosophical consequences, yielding solutions to a whole host of traditional metaphysical and epistemological problems. I see my work as historically grounded, and so I also have historical interests developing certain threads in the history of philosophy that influence my work, especially Wilfrid Sellars and the Madhyamaka tradition in Buddhist philosophy.
Here, you'll find all of my papers (published and unpublished), some talks, as well as my dissertation. If you have any questions about anything, feel free to send me an email!
Very generally, my research concerns the nature of conceptual and semantic contents: the sorts of things we think or say, or think or say about things. Such things are often referred to, in more mentalistic vocabulary, as ``thoughts" or ``concepts,'' in more linguistic vocabulary, as ``meanings'' (of sentences or predicates), or, in more metaphysical vocabulary, as ``propositions'' or ``properties.'' However one opts to characterize them, my work aims to provide an account of such contents in terms of the norms governing the use of linguistic expressions, and, correspondingly, of our grasp of these contents in terms of our mastery of these norms. There are two main branches of this program. The first involves spelling out such an account in formal detail and developing new formal tools towards that end. The second involves arguing that an account of this sort has far-reaching philosophical consequences, yielding solutions to a whole host of traditional metaphysical and epistemological problems. I see my work as historically grounded, and so I also have historical interests developing certain threads in the history of philosophy that influence my work, especially Wilfrid Sellars and the Madhyamaka tradition in Buddhist philosophy.
Here, you'll find all of my papers (published and unpublished), some talks, as well as my dissertation. If you have any questions about anything, feel free to send me an email!
Journal Articles:
An Act-Based Approach to Assertibles and Instantiables. Ergo. Forthcoming.
An "act-based" theory of propositions identifies propositions with types of cognitive or linguistic acts. Existing approaches, however, appeal to properties and relations to make sense of these acts, raising many of the same problems that this sort of theory of propositions is meant to solve. In this paper, I show how, by adopting a normative functionalist theory of content of the sort developed by Robert Brandom, we can arrive an act-based conception of propositions and propositional components, without any appeal to properties and relations. (pdf of penultimate draft)
A General Schema for Bilateral Proof Rules. Journal of Philosophical Logic. 2024.
A standard "unilateral" logical system provides rules for inferring sentences from other sentences. A bilateral system, by contrast, provides rules for inferring both affirmations and denials of sentences from other affirmations and denials. In this paper, I put forward a new sort of bilateral proof system in which all the rules for the classical connectives are determined by a single rule schema. I also prove some things about it, illustrating a new method of simplifying proof-theory by doing it at this schematic level of generality. (link to publication, pdf of penultimate draft)
How to Be a Hyper-Inferentialist. Synthese. 2023.
An inferentialist theory of meaning aims to account for the meanings of sentences in terms of the inferential rules governing their use. A "hyper-inferentialist" theory admits only "narrowly inferential" rules, relating sentences to other sentences. Such a version of inferentialism is widely thought to be a theoretical non-starter. I argue here, however, that not only is hyper-inferentialism theoretically viable, but it is really the only viable form of inferentialism there is. (link to publication, pdf of penultimate draft).
Why Must Incompatibility Be Symmetric? The Philosophical Quarterly. 2023.
Something's being red (all over) is incompatible with its being blue (all over), and just as well, something's being blue is incompatible with its being red. In general, it seems that whenever a is incompatible with b, b is also incompatible with a. Why is this the case? This question might not seem like the sort of question we'd be able to answer, and recent work in the philosophy of logic which appeals to the notion of incompatibility as primitive has assumed just that. In this paper, however, I provide an answer. (link to publication, pdf of penultimate draft)
Considering the Exceptions: On the Failure of Cumulative Transitivity for Indicative Conditionals. Synthese. 2022.
All existing theories of indicative conditionals have it that, if "If A then B" is true and "If A and B, then C" is true, then "If A, then C" must also be true. Here, I provide a class of counterexamples to this principle. 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. (link to publication, pdf of penultimate draft)
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 penultimate draft.)
Book Chapters, Special Issues, and Conference Proceedings:
Generalized Bilateral Harmony. The 2023 Logica Yearbook. Forthcoming.
Bilateral natural deduction systems for classical logic solve the problem of harmony between the introduction and elimination rules but give rise to a further problem of potential disharmony between the positive and negative rules. In this paper, I propose a new criterion of bilateral harmony, framed within a new generalized approach to bilateralism as a whole, developed also in my paper "A General Schema for Bilateral Proof Rules." pdf
Meaning, Coherence, and Consequence: Rethinking the Philosophical Significance of the Sequent Calculus. For a Festschrift for Michael Kremer.
I wrote this paper for Michael Kremer's retirement conference. In it, I consider the potential of the sequent calculus to provide an inferentialist account of the meanings of the logical connectives. I raise a problem regarding multiple conclusions in the classical sequent calculus, and I resolve it by putting forward a new kind of bilateral sequent calculus. Much of what appears here is presented in more detail in my papers "Bringing Bilateralisms Together" and "A General Schema for Bilateral Proof Rules." pdf
Sellars's Two Worlds. To appear in Reading Kant with Sellars, edited by Luz. C Seiberth and Mahdi Ranaee. Routledge.
This is a paper 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. (pdf of penultimate draft)
The Normative/Agentive Correspondence. Journal of Transcendental Philosophy. 2020.
This paper is my attempt to show how Robert Brandom's account of the mind, articulated in normative vocabulary, and the sort of account developed by Irad Kimhi, Sebastian Roedl, and James Conant, articulated principally in terms of agentive modal vocabulary, can be seen as two sides of the same 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. Both won the Florida Philosophical Association's award for the best undergraduate paper, which meant that I got to present them at the Florida Philosophical Association conference and publish them in the Florida Philosophical Review. They eventually became chapters three and four of my undergrad thesis. In the first, 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, 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.
Book Reviews:
Review of Eric Marcus's Belief, Inference, and the Self-Conscious Mind. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 2024
Eric Marcus's, Belief, Inference, and the Self-Conscious Mind, can be understood as attempting to lay the groundwork for what we might call a "depsychologized" conception of human psychology. It's a great book. In this short review, I question one of its core claims: that it's metaphysically impossible to believe a contradiction. link to review
Papers Under Review:
Bringing Bilateralisms Together. Revise and Resubmit at the Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
This paper brings together much of the technical work that I've with the ROLE working group. In it, I consider two distinct versions of "logical bilateralism," which take affirmation and denial to be equally basic in providing an account of the logical connectives. I argue that each has benefits when it comes to inferentialist semantics, and I put foward a new kind of logical system that enables us to have the benefits of both. (pdf of draft)
"Yes," "No," Neither, and Both
In bilateral logic, affirmation and denial are almost always taken to be exhaustive and exclusive: for any sentence, exactly one of these two opposite stances must be correct. What if, however, we relax this imposition of exhaustivity and exclusivity, or drop it entirely? In this paper I show how, if we do, we arrive at bilateral systems of the FDE family of logics (LP, K3, and FDE), and I show that these systems have philosophical consequences for the debate between "subclassical" and "substructural" approaches to paradoxes like the liar. slides, pdf of paper
Supposition: No Problem for Bilateralism. Revise and Resubmit at Bulletin of the Section of Logic.
Nils Kürbis argues that there is no way to make sense of the appeal to supposition in bilateral systems of logic. In this paper, I respond to this objection, first, articulating an interpretation of these systems in which supposition makes perfect sense, and, second, showing how supposition can be done away with entirely. pdf of draft
There is a Logical Negation: "Yes," "No," Both, and Neither
Jc Beall argues that if FDE is logic proper, then there is no logical negation. In this paper, I show that, if we adopt a bilateral approach to FDE (and other subclassical logics) then we can maintain that there is a logical negation, and it's function is just that of classical negation: flipping and flopping between assertion and denial. pdf
Papers In the Works:
The Consequentiality of Explicitation
Luca Incurvati and Julian Schlöder have recently proposed an inferentialist account of meaning, with the core inferential notion being that of committive consequence between speech acts. For instance, denying Q is an consequence of asserting P just in case, if you explicitly assert P, you're implicitly committed to denying Q. According to their logic, however, committive consequence is a closure operator, which, among other things, means that if you make your implicit commitments explicit (explicitly performing the speech acts that you were antecedently only implicitly committed to), this does not result in your coming to be committed to anything new. In short, on their logic, explicitation is inconsequential. In this paper, I argue, from some concrete cases, that we should think that explicitation is consequential. I then show how this idea can be handled formally by adopting a non-transitive logic and a dynamic semantics to go with it. slides
Against Conceptual Svabhāva
According to the Madhyamaka tradition in Indian Buddhist Philosophy, all things are empty of "svabhāva," a term generally translated as "inherent existence" or "own-being." One of the basic arguments meant to establish this claim is an argument against the coherence of inherently existing things standing in causal relations. In this paper, I reconstruct an important objection against this view (put forward in Nagarjuna's Vigrahavyāvartanī) according to which an argument of just the same form can be applied to the thesis of emptiness itself standing in inferential relations to other theses (for instance, ruling out the claim that things have svabhāva). I argue that the Madhyamika should accept this conclusion, and I articulate an account of conceptual emptiness in response. (presented at UChicago Philosophy of Religions Workshop May 2024, long handout, audio recording of talk)
Properties without Problems
Our ordinary ways of talking and speaking seem to commit us to the claim that there are many different ways things are, and many ways that things could be but nothing actually is. In other words, it seems that there are many properties things have, and many uninstantiated properties that nothing has. There's no existing theory of this vast number of properties, however, that avoids the traditional metaphysical and epistemological problems associated with such things. In this paper, provide an account of properties that resolves these problems. On this account, which is metaphysically platonist but epistemologically nomianlist, properties are modal profiles that things might (or might not) have, and we know about them by mastering the rules governing the use of predicates. (draft coming soon)
Bilateral Disharmony
Interviews:
Interview with Figure/Ground (interview, 2022）
This is an interview on Wilfrid Sellars I did with Laureano Ralon for the website figure/ground. The website is now defunct, but you can read the interview here (pdf).
Unpublished Manuscripts and Talks:
Semantic Norms and their Worldly Correspondents (unpublished m.s./talk, 2024）
This is a paper I'll be presenting at the Beijing International Conference on the Philosophy of Normativity. In it, I show how modal normativism can be combined with a kind of modal realism in a way that avoids both skepticism and idealism. pdf
Inferentialism and AI (talk, 2024)
This talk draws on the ideas from my paper "How to Be a Hyperinferentialist" and considers some of the implications for understanding large language models. In particular, I suggest that, insofar as we can of concept possession entirely in terms of mastery of inferential role, such systems could in principle be sapient, possessing genuine conceptual understanding, without being sentient, having conscious awareness. video recording, slides
Some Thoughts on the General Form of a Linguistic Capacity (talk/unpublished ms., 2024)
This is the manuscript of a talk I wrote for a conference on Jim Conant's volume, The Logical Alien. In it, I draw on Jim's work to try to articulate what it means to do transcendental philosophy post linguistic-turn. I then try to spell out a tension between Kant's approach to transcendental philosophy and Wittgenstein's approach to linguistic philosophy, ultimately (and very speculatively) suggesting a turn to Sellars for a more Kantian approach to transcendental philosophy, post-linguistic turn. pdf of talk
Meanings Done Right: An Act-Based Theory of Linguistic Meaning (talk, 2024)
This talk presents the main idea of presented in "An Act-Based Theory of Assertibles and Instantiables," with some broader philosophical context and motivation, situating the view in response to contemporary act-based approaches but also in response to ideas from Frege, Wittgenstein, and Sellars. (long handout, link to audio recording)
On the Self-Undoing of Madhyamaka Philosophy (unpublished m.s., 2023)
The 2nd Century Indian Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna is the widely regarded as the most significant Buddhist philosopher after the Buddha himself. The core doctrine of Nāgārjuna's Madhymamaka (``middle way'') philosophy (insofar as there can be said to be a ``core doctrine'' at all) is that of ``emptiness." Nāgārjuna characterizes emptiness as "the expedient to get rid of all views" which, puzzlingly, includes emptiness itself. In this paper, I try to show how this puzzling "self-undoing" of Madhyamaka philosophy works, taking the vast majority of interpretative views as my target. (pdf)
I'm no longer happy with this paper, as it stands. I will rewrite it at some point in the future, but I plan to work on other stuff in Madhyamaka philosophy before that.
I'm no longer happy with this paper, as it stands. I will rewrite it at some point in the future, but I plan to work on other stuff in Madhyamaka philosophy before that.
Simply Substructural Semantics (talk, 2021)
This is a presentation of some of my work with the R.O.L.E. group. The positive view now has been put forward in "Bringing Bilateralisms Together," but here I pitch this view in response to a problem I raise with representationalist semantic theories when it comes to accounting for defeasible implication and incompatibility relations. pdf
Semantics without Contents (unpublished m.s., 2021)
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, and, I propose a radically different way of doing semantics that doesn't involve any appeal to properties, relations, propositions or anything else to serve as the contents of predicates or sentences. 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)
I now think this paper tries to do too much in one go, and I no longer agree with some of the framing. The ideas from it are now presented in a number of different papers.
I now think this paper tries to do too much in one go, and I no longer agree with some of the framing. The ideas from it are now presented in a number of different papers.
This is a paper I wrote for a conference on the work of Matt Boyle. In it, I try to defend a conceptualist picture of perceptual experience of the sort proposed by John McDowell against Matt's critique, developing the "agentive conception of perceptual experience" also put forward in my paper "The Normative Agentive Correspondence." pdf
Frege and the Logical Notion of Judgment (unpublished m.s., 2019)
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)
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, most notably, "An Act-Based Approach to Assertibles and Instantiables," I've radicalized the basic view put forward here, applying the act-based approach not just to propositions, but properties as well. (pdf)
Dissertation: Meaning and the World. University of Chicago, 2022.
I motivate and develop a use-based semantic theory in opposition to the dominant paradigm in philosophical and linguistic semantics. Drawing inspiration from Wilfrid Sellars, I argue that contemporary semantic theories are faced with a basic problem of explanatory circularity. These theories universally presuppose that worldly knowledge of such things as properties or sets of possible worlds precedes and underlies knowledge of meaning. However, I argue that it is only through learning a language---mastering the rules governing the use of the expressions belonging to that language---that speakers can possibly have knowledge of the worldly entities appealed to by semanticists at the base level of their semantic theories. In response to this fundamental problem, I develop a formal semantic framework in which the meaning of a sentence is understood directly in terms of its role in discourse. In contrast to existing semantic frameworks, this framework does not presuppose speakers' worldly knowledge, and so is actually able to explain it. The result is not just a new kind of semantic theory, but a new conception of the relation between meaning and the world.
Committee: Michael Kremer (co-chair), Malte Willer (co-chair), Robert Brandom, James Conant, and Jason Bridges
long abstract pdf of full dissertation
If you want a hardcopy so you can read it without having to look at a computer screen, you can get one here (I make no profit on this).
I motivate and develop a use-based semantic theory in opposition to the dominant paradigm in philosophical and linguistic semantics. Drawing inspiration from Wilfrid Sellars, I argue that contemporary semantic theories are faced with a basic problem of explanatory circularity. These theories universally presuppose that worldly knowledge of such things as properties or sets of possible worlds precedes and underlies knowledge of meaning. However, I argue that it is only through learning a language---mastering the rules governing the use of the expressions belonging to that language---that speakers can possibly have knowledge of the worldly entities appealed to by semanticists at the base level of their semantic theories. In response to this fundamental problem, I develop a formal semantic framework in which the meaning of a sentence is understood directly in terms of its role in discourse. In contrast to existing semantic frameworks, this framework does not presuppose speakers' worldly knowledge, and so is actually able to explain it. The result is not just a new kind of semantic theory, but a new conception of the relation between meaning and the world.
Committee: Michael Kremer (co-chair), Malte Willer (co-chair), Robert Brandom, James Conant, and Jason Bridges
long abstract pdf of full dissertation
If you want a hardcopy so you can read it without having to look at a computer screen, you can get one here (I make no profit on this).