My Research Program
My research concerns concepts: what they are, how to formally articulate them, how they relate to the world, and whether AI systems have them. My answers, very roughly, are that concepts are normative inferential roles, they can be articulated with multilateral proof systems, they correspond to modal profiles that things in the world might have, and yes, at least some AI systems have them. That's a bit condensed. See the research overview below for a bit more detail.
On this page, you'll find all of my papers (published and unpublished), some drafts of chapters of books I'm working on, my dissertation, and some talks I've given. If you have any questions about anything, feel free to send me an email!
My research concerns concepts: what they are, how to formally articulate them, how they relate to the world, and whether AI systems have them. My answers, very roughly, are that concepts are normative inferential roles, they can be articulated with multilateral proof systems, they correspond to modal profiles that things in the world might have, and yes, at least some AI systems have them. That's a bit condensed. See the research overview below for a bit more detail.
On this page, you'll find all of my papers (published and unpublished), some drafts of chapters of books I'm working on, my dissertation, and some talks I've given. If you have any questions about anything, feel free to send me an email!
Research Overview
What are concepts? We know that Mars is a sphere, and that it's red. This is factual knowledge, but it also involves conceptual knowledge: we know what it is for something to be a sphere, and what it is for something to be red. That is, we possess the concepts of being spherical and being red. What are such things, and how do we grasp them? My work develops an inferentialist answer to these questions, understanding what concepts are in terms of the inferential rules governing the use of linguistic expressions, and, correspondingly, our grasp of concepts in terms of our mastery of these rules.
How do we articulate concepts? Insofar as concepts are inferential roles, we should be able to systematically articulate them. My work involves using the tools of formal logic and developing new logical tools, especially new kinds of proof systems, towards that end. In particular, much of this work has involved the development and defense of bilateral proof systems. Whereas a standard "unilateral" proof system has rules that relate sentences, the rules of a bilateral proof system relate speech acts, most fundamentally, those consisting in the assertions and denials of sentences. Recently, I have done work on multilateral proof systems, which extend the set of speech acts beyond just two. I also draw on the sorts of formal frameworks developed in the context of dynamic semantics to contextualize these proof systems and formally model the meanings of sentences.
How do concepts relate to the world? We grasp how things in the world are and how they relate to one another through our deployment of concepts. The things in the world, on the other hand, instantiates properties and relations. I develop a holistic account of the correspondence between concepts, articulated in terms of linguistic norms, and worldly properties and relations, articulated as "modal profiles." This approach paves the way for a "critical turn" in analytic metaphysics, enabling "pragmatic transcendental arguments" in which necessary features of the modal structure of the world are understood in terms of necessary features of the normative structure of discourse.
Do AI systems have concepts? My work defends a positive, yet nuanced answer to the question of conceptual understanding in current AI systems. I distinguish between sapience, in the sense of conceptual understanding, and sentience, in the sense of conscious awareness. Drawing on the inferentialist account of content that I develop, I argue that today's LLM-based AI systems can be understood as genuinely possessing conceptual understanding, even without possessing any conscious awareness. That is, they are sapient without being sentient. In defending this claim, I argue that there is no such thing as the "symbol grounding problem," and syntactic competence is in fact sufficient for semantic understanding.
Historical grounding: Though my work primarily aims to move contemporary philosophy forward, I see my project as historically grounded, and so I also have interests developing certain threads in the history of philosophy that influence my work, especially the work of Wilfrid Sellars and the Madhyamaka tradition in Buddhist philosophy.
- Key works: In Defense of Immodesty; How to Be a Hyper-Inferentialist; An Act-Based Approach to Assertibles and Instantiables; Linguistically Turned
How do we articulate concepts? Insofar as concepts are inferential roles, we should be able to systematically articulate them. My work involves using the tools of formal logic and developing new logical tools, especially new kinds of proof systems, towards that end. In particular, much of this work has involved the development and defense of bilateral proof systems. Whereas a standard "unilateral" proof system has rules that relate sentences, the rules of a bilateral proof system relate speech acts, most fundamentally, those consisting in the assertions and denials of sentences. Recently, I have done work on multilateral proof systems, which extend the set of speech acts beyond just two. I also draw on the sorts of formal frameworks developed in the context of dynamic semantics to contextualize these proof systems and formally model the meanings of sentences.
- Key works: Bringing Bilateralisms Together; A General Schema for Bilateral Proof Rules; "Yes," "No," Neither, and Both; The Consequentiality of Explicitation; Articulating Meanings
How do concepts relate to the world? We grasp how things in the world are and how they relate to one another through our deployment of concepts. The things in the world, on the other hand, instantiates properties and relations. I develop a holistic account of the correspondence between concepts, articulated in terms of linguistic norms, and worldly properties and relations, articulated as "modal profiles." This approach paves the way for a "critical turn" in analytic metaphysics, enabling "pragmatic transcendental arguments" in which necessary features of the modal structure of the world are understood in terms of necessary features of the normative structure of discourse.
- Key works: Act-Based Approach to Assertibles and Instantiables; Properties without Problems; Why Must Incompatibility Be Symmetric?; Semantic Norms and their Worldly Correspondents
Do AI systems have concepts? My work defends a positive, yet nuanced answer to the question of conceptual understanding in current AI systems. I distinguish between sapience, in the sense of conceptual understanding, and sentience, in the sense of conscious awareness. Drawing on the inferentialist account of content that I develop, I argue that today's LLM-based AI systems can be understood as genuinely possessing conceptual understanding, even without possessing any conscious awareness. That is, they are sapient without being sentient. In defending this claim, I argue that there is no such thing as the "symbol grounding problem," and syntactic competence is in fact sufficient for semantic understanding.
- Key works: Blind Understanding; Sapience without Sentience; Do LLMs Make Assertions?; There Is No Symbol Grounding Problem
Historical grounding: Though my work primarily aims to move contemporary philosophy forward, I see my project as historically grounded, and so I also have interests developing certain threads in the history of philosophy that influence my work, especially the work of Wilfrid Sellars and the Madhyamaka tradition in Buddhist philosophy.
- Key works: Sellars's Ontological Nominalism; Sellars's Two Worlds; Against Conceptual Svabhava
Books:
Blind Understanding: Inferentialism and the Case for AI Sapience. Springer. Forthcoming (to be released early 2027)
Since the invention of transformer-based Large Language Models, we've been confronted with a fundamental philosophical question: do they really understand what they're saying, or are they blindly manipulating symbols? This book argues that the answer to this question is . . . Yes. Drawing on an inferentialist account of conceptual understanding, I argue for a radical break between sentience, understood as conscious awareness, and sapience, understood as conceptual understanding. Non-linguistic animals like cats possess the former without possessing the latter. We, of course, possess both. LLMs, I argue, possess the latter without possessing the former. Book page
Journal Articles:
Bringing Bilateralisms Together: A Unified Framework for Inferentialists. Australasian Journal of Philosophy. 2026
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 assertion 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 forward a new kind of logical system that enables us to have the benefits of both. link to paper, pdf of penultimate draft
An Act-Based Approach to Assertibles and Instantiables. Ergo. 2026.
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. link to paper, open access pdf
Nominalism as Conceptual Phenomenalism: A Defense and Development of a Reading of Sellars. Journal of Contemporary Chinese Philosophy. Forthcoming.
In a number of papers, I've defended (what has been termed by Brandom) a "conceptual phenomenalist" reading of Sellars, according to which conceptual contents such as properties, relations, and propositions are taken to be merely phenomenal entities, contrasted with the world as it is in itself, which contains only particulars. Chen Liang argues that this view rests on some fundamental misunderstandings of Sellars. In this paper, I clarify the view and defend it in response to Liang's criticisms. I also develop the idea that Sellars's late process ontology is a key to a proper understanding of his nominalism. pdf of penultimate draft
Implication Space Semantics as Bilateral Incompatibility Semantics. Topoi. 2026.
Robert Brandom has described the "implication space" semantics, first put forward in Daniel Kaplan's dissertation, as the "holy grail" of inferentialist semantics, the thing that "inferentialists have always dreamed of." However, when one tries to work through the details of the semantic framework, it is very hard to understand what the semantic clauses actually say. In this paper, I articulate implication space semantics as a bilateral successor to Brandom's earlier "incompatibility semantics." pdf of penultimate draft, link to publication
Sapience without Sentience: An Inferentialist Approach to LLMs. Asian Journal of Philosophy. 2026.
The question of whether LLMs such as ChatGPT "understand what they're saying" has been hotly debated in the AI sphere, though it's rarely clear among participants in these debates just what is meant by this phrase. In this paper, I approach the question of whether LLMs "understand what they're saying" from the perspective of an inferentialist theory of semantic understanding, according to which grasping the meaning of an expression is mastering the inferential rules governing its use. I argue that, on this approach LLMs plausibly do understand what they're saying, and even understand the meaning of essentially experiential terms like "red" and "guilt," but that this doesn't entail that they have experiences of redness or guilt (they clearly don't). That is, I argue that they can be sapient, in the sense of possessing conceptual understanding, without being sentient, possessing conscious awareness. link to publication, pdf of penultimate draft, 9/11/25 video recording
In Defense of Immodesty. International Journal of Philosophical Studies. 2026.
John McDowell argues that our semantic aspirations ought to be "modest" ones; we should not try to give an account of the concepts expressed by the primitive expressions of a language. By this definition, inferentialism of the sort developed by Sellars and Brandom is an immodest theory of meaning, aiming to give such an account. In this paper, I defend inferentialism from McDowell's criticisms. link to publication, pdf of penultimate draft
There is a Logical Negation: "Yes," "No," Both, and Neither. Australasian Journal of Logic. 2026.
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. link to publication, pdf of paper (open access), video recording of talk
"Yes," "No," Neither, and Both. Synthese. 2026.
In bilateral logic, assertion 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. link to publication, pdf of penultimate draft
Supposition: No Problem for Bilateralism. Bulletin of the Section of Logic. 2025.
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. link to publication, pdf of paper (open access)
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.)
The Normative/Agentive Correspondence. Journal of Transcendental Philosophy, special issue: "Themes from the Philosophy of Robert Brandom." 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
Edited Volumes:
Expressivism about Logic. Special Issue of Topoi co-edited with Ulf Hlobil. Accepted and in progress.
Logical expressivism is the view that logical statements are to be understood as, in some way, expressive of our norms or attitudes. This view, which promises to resolve longstanding metaphysical questions concerning the nature of logical facts and epistemological questions concerning our knowledge of them, has been developed in different ways in recent years. This volume will bring together new work on logical expressivism by both established proponents and critics of (different versions of) it, as well as upcoming scholars.
Chapters in Edited Volumes:
Transcendental Linguistics and Picturing. For The Sellarsian Mind C, edited by Jeremy R. Koons. Routledge. Forthcoming.
This is a paper explicating the big-picture of Sellars's philosophy of language, explaining how the various pieces of his conception of language fit together within his overarching ambition to synthesize the Kantian transcendental project with the linguistic turn. pdf of draft
Generalized Bilateral Harmony. The 2023 Logica Yearbook, edited by Igor Sedlár. College Publications. 2025..
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." link to book, pdf of paper
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. In Reading Kant with Sellars, edited by Luz. C Seiberth and Mahdi Ranaee. Routledge. 2025.
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. (link to chapter, pdf of penultimate draft)
Book Reviews:
Review of Belief, Inference, and the Self-Conscious Mind by Eric Marcus. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 2025.
Eric Marcus has written a really interesting book about the nature of belief and inference. While I think there is a lot that is right in the book, I take issue here with one of Marcus's orienting claims: that it is metaphysically impossible to believe both some proposition and its negation. It seems to me that lots of philosophers and logicians do just that (and, in some of my work, I've developed logics that enable one to self-consciously do it). link to review
Papers Under Review:
The Consequentiality of Explicitation. Revise and Resubmit at Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
The notion of committive consequence---that asserting some sentences might commit one to others---is a core semantic notion in the two most prominent alternatives to truth-conditional semantics: dynamic semantics and proof-theoretic semantics. In both traditions, however, it's assuming that making commitments explicit---actually asserting things to which previously was only committed---does not result in one's taking on new implicit commitments. In this paper, I argue, from three different cases, that explicitation is at least sometimes consequential in this way, and I put forward a formal framework drawing from both the dynamic and proof-theoretic tradition that illuminates this phenomenon. pdf of draft, addendum (cut from the paper for reasons for space)
On the Definability of Strong Negation in Bilateral Logics
I show that, in bilateral logics, strong negation, which "toggles" between assertion and denial, is definable from a lot of different binary connectives, either individually or in combination (results found with the aid of GPT-5.6 Sol). arXiv preprint
Tweety's Revenge: A Problem for Theories of Default Reasoning. Revise and Resubmit at Thought.
Focusing on Horty's as a specific target, I raise a problem for the vast majority of theories of default reasoning having to do with the cumulative chaining together of defaults. pdf of draft
Semantic Norms and their Worldly Correspondents. Revise and Resubmit at Erkenntnis
I show how modal normativism can be combined with a kind of modal realism in a way that avoids both skepticism and idealism. pdf of draft (currently undergoing major revisions and expansions).
Papers In the Works:
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. pdf of draft (though currently undergoing substantial revisions), video recording of talk
Does Anything Go? Structural Conservativity on the Pittsburgh and Bochum Plans
The connective tonk, which has the introduction rules of disjunction and the elimination rules of conjunction, is widely thought to be problematic. But what is wrong with it? In this paper, I introduce the notion of structural conservativity to provide an answer to this connective, and articulate the conceptions of two prominent approaches to logic---the "Pittsburgh Plan" and the "Bochum Plan"---in terms of how they relate to the issue of structurally nonconservative connectives. long abstract.
Sellars's Hyper-Inferentialism
In my paper "How to be a Hyper-Inferentialist," I ague that Brandom is a hyper-inferentialist, understanding meaning entirely in terms of "narrowly" inferential relations between sentences and other sentences. In this paper, I argue that Sellars holds this position as well. slides, audio recording of (short) talk, pdf of draft (I'm not happy with the paper, as it stands---currently undergoing major revisions)
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)
Pragmatic Accounts of Consequence with Luca Incurvati
Pragmatic theories of consequence, which understand logical or semantic consequence in terms of pragmatic notions such as commitment are widely thought to face devastating collapse arguments, showing for instance, that it's a consequence of every proposition that we're committed to it. In this paper, we respond to these arguments, drawing on recent work in bilateral logic.
Sellars's Adverbialism about Content for Act-Based Propositions Throughout the History of Philosophy (special issue of Philosophical Topics), edited by Till Hoeppner.
Sellars is widely cited as an adverbialialist about sensory content, understanding the content of sensory states in terms of adverbial modifiers of the verb "to sense" (speaking, for instance, of a state of "sensing redly"). In this paper, I argue that he is an adverbialist about content generally, including propositional content, and his position can be seen as an early and sophisticated version of an "act-based theory of propositional content."
Book Projects In the Works:
Articulating Meanings: An Inferentialist, Proof-Theoretic Approach
In the past few decades, there has been substantial technical work using the tools of formal logic to rigorously development an inferentialist or proof-theoretic approach to meaning. This is a textbook introducing the core formal tools for pursuing this approach to meaning (some familiar to logicians and some new to this work), so as to enable one to do inferentialist semantics oneself. Chapter drafts can be read here.
Linguistically Turned
What makes us unique among creatures on Earth? This book articulates an account of ourselves as the sole possessors of thoughts with determinate conceptual contents in terms of our capacity to engage in rational discourse. Chapter 1 draft
Theses:
The Inferential Basis of Conceptual Content. Postdoctoral Research Report, Wuhan University, 2026.
Turns out postdocs in China have to basically write a dissertation when they finish their postdoc position, so this is what I wrote. It's just four independently published papers: "In Defense of Immodesty," "Bringing Bilateralisms Together," "An Act-Based Approach to Assertibles and Instantiables," and "Sellars's Two Worlds." But I think they go together well in this order, and there's some acknowledgments, an introduction, and a conclusion, so I've put the document here in case you want to look at it. pdf of report
Meaning and the World. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Chicago. 2022.
I defended my University of Chicago Ph.D. dissertation in Summer, 2022. My committee consisted of Michael Kremer and Malte Willer as co-chairs, Robert Brandom, Jim Conant, and Jason Bridges. In it, I argue that standard approaches to semantic theorizing, insofar as they aspire to genuine explanations of semantic competence, face a basic problem of explanatory circularity: they are committed to appealing to certain sorts of metaphysical knowledge in accounting for speakers' knowledge of meaning that can really only be understood as a product of speakers' knowledge of meaning. In response, I develop a use-based semantic theory that enables us to account for the metaphysical knowledge of speakers in terms of their mastery of the rules governing the use of linguistic expressions. pdf of dissertation
Common Ground and Discursive Justification. Undergraduate thesis, New College of Florida, 2014.
My undergraduate thesis at New College of Florida was an attempt to draw on the work of Brandom, Davidson, and Kukla and Lance to argue that traditional epistemological questions about the justification of our beliefs could be answered by looking at how we actually justify our beliefs in our practices of discourse. Obviously, I was very young writing this, and I would write it very differently were I to write it now, but, if you're curious, here it is.
The paper versions of three and four of the thesis both won the Florida Philosophical Association's award for the best undergraduate paper (in 2013 and 2012 respectively), which meant that I got to present them at the Florida Philosophical Association conference and publish them in the Florida Philosophical Review. In the first, "Pointing Out the Skeptic's Mistake" (2014), 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, "Reformulating the Two Aspects of Justification" (2013), 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.
The paper versions of three and four of the thesis both won the Florida Philosophical Association's award for the best undergraduate paper (in 2013 and 2012 respectively), which meant that I got to present them at the Florida Philosophical Association conference and publish them in the Florida Philosophical Review. In the first, "Pointing Out the Skeptic's Mistake" (2014), 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, "Reformulating the Two Aspects of Justification" (2013), 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.
Interviews
Interview with Laureano Ralon Figure and Ground, 2022.
This is an interview I did with Laureano Ralon on the philosophy of Sellars in 2022 for the website Figure and Ground. The site is now defunct, but you can read the transcript here.
Unpublished Manuscripts and Talks:
Minimal Incoherence and Relevant Consequence for Inferentialists (talk, 2026)
This is a talk I gave that "New Directions in Relevant Logic 3" conference at Ruhr University, Bochum in July 2026. In it, I consider how the sort of inferentialist framework developed by Hlobil and Brandom can be modified so that the only consequences the theory endorses are relevant ones. It turns out that a introducing a natural way of tracking relevance into the sort of sequent system they propose ends up yielding a relevant consequence relation whose logical fragment coincides with the non-transitive relevant logic NTR. slides
Sellarsian Sensa without Sellars's Late Dualism (talk, 2026)
This is a talk I gave at the "How Things Hang Together" workshop on the philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars at Zhejiang University in June 2026. In it, I argue that, though Sellars's famous pink icecube thought experiment is one of his main reasons for adopting a process ontology late in his career, if one starts with a process ontology (which, I've argued elsewhere, can be motivated by Sellars's ontological nominalism) the thought experiment loses its force as an argument for a process ontology in which qualia are taken as ontologically fundamental. slides. (this talk is based on the second half of my paper "Nominalism as Conceptual Phenomenalism")
There is No Symbol Grounding Problem: A Hyper-Inferentialist Perspective (talk, 2026)
It's a common thought in the literature on artificial intelligence that a system trained on nothing but linguistic data could not possibly understand the meanings of the descriptive words in that data like "red" and "sugar." Understanding such words, the thought is, requires some sort of sensory grounding. In my paper "Sapience without Sentience" I argue, from an inferentialist perspective, that a system trained on nothing but linguistic data could indeed grasp such meanings. In this talk, I respond to the idea that there is a "symbol grounding problem" that would preclude this possibility, focusing on a version of the problem raised by Jess Anne Heine (expanding the response in my APA comments). video of talk
Comments on Jess Anne Heine's "Understanding is in the Head" (APA symposium comments, 2026)
These are my comments given at the 2026 Central APA symposium session on Jess Anne Heine's paper "Understanding is in the Head (and Grounded in Perception)." In them, I respond to Jess's claim that learning intra-linguistic relations between symbols could never itself suffice to learn the contents expressed by those symbols. pdf of comments, handout
Do LLMs Make Assertions? (talk, 2025）
In my talk Sapience without Sentience I argue that LLMs can in principle be counted as understanding what they're saying. In this talk, I address the more fundamental question of whether they can really even be counted as saying anything at all. The dilemma that is that, on the one hand, it seems like they do say things, but, on the other hand, saying things--making assertions--seems to require taking on a sort of responsibility for what one says, and it seems that LLMs are in principle incapable of bearing any sort of responsibility. In response to this dilemma, I distinguish between practical responsibility for what one does and theoretical responsibility for what one says, and argue that there is a thin notion of theoretical responsibility that can be attributed to current LLMs which is sufficient to regard them as making assertions (albeit ones that don't have the practical weight of our own). recording of talk, slides (most of the content from this talk now appears in Section 5 of my paper "Sapience without Sentience")
Asserting, Denying, Challenging: A Framework and a Puzzle (talk, 2025）
This talk, which I presented at the fifteenth Buenos Aires philosophical logic workshop, introduces a new framework for systems of bilateral logic that, in addition to distinguishing between the opposite discursive moves of assertion and denial, explicitly represents the distinction between making a discursive move and challenging a move. Building on my recent work on subclassical bilateral logics that forgo the usual “coordination principles” linking assertion and denial, I show how this framework enables us to formally clarify the positions of proponents of different subclassical and substructural approaches to paradox. Finally, I use the framework to crystallize and strengthen a familiar kind of revenge paradox that confronts all such approaches. slides
The stuff about making and challenging moves and the revenge paradox presented in this talk can be found in the second half of my paper "There is a Logical Negation," but it's presented here in a somewhat different way.
The stuff about making and challenging moves and the revenge paradox presented in this talk can be found in the second half of my paper "There is a Logical Negation," but it's presented here in a somewhat different way.
title 6
Sapience without Sentience: An Inferentialist Approach to LLMs (talk, 2024, 2025, now a paper)
This talk draws on the ideas from my paper "How to Be a Hyper-inferentialist" 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. 9/11/25 video recording, 3/6/25 video recording, 3/17/25 slides, now a paper!
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, 2023)
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, talk manuscript, 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, most notably, "An Act-Based Approach to Assertibles and Instantiables," "Brining Bilateralisms Together," and "The Consequentiality of Explicitation."
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, most notably, "An Act-Based Approach to Assertibles and Instantiables," "Brining Bilateralisms Together," and "The Consequentiality of Explicitation."
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)