I mainly work on problems that live at the intersection between philosophy and linguistics. My principle research topic is the dynamic perspective on natural language semantics and what it has to say about modality. The reason why this is all interesting is that dynamic semantics can make good sense of content which is not truth-conditional content, and this is a feature I frequently exploit in my stories about tricky issues in epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. In the future, I hope to extend my work on dynamic semantics to noncognitivism in ethics.
To avoid a too steady diet of formal semantics I also spend some considerable time thinking about issues in philosophy of mind (intentionalism, phenomenal concepts) and trying to understand what my teen idols were after (Heidegger, Wittgenstein).
Recent Papers
Realizing What Might Be (doi: 10.1007/s11098-010-9514-3) //(local file)
Philosophical Studies, forthcoming
Schulz has shown that the suppositional view of indicative conditionals leads to a corresponding view of epistemic modals. But his case backfires: the resulting theory of epistemic modals gets the facts wrong, and so we end up with a good argument against the suppositional view. I show how and why a dynamic view of indicative conditionals leads to a better theory of epistemic modals.
New Surprises for the Ramsey Test (doi: 10.1007/s11229-009-9494-z) // (local file)
Synthese, forthcoming
In contemporary discussions of the Ramsey Test for conditionals, it is commonly held that (i) supposing the antecedent of a conditional is adopting a potential state of full belief, and (ii) Modus Ponens is a valid rule of inference. I argue on the basis of Thomason Conditionals (such as ‘If Sally is deceiving, I do not believe it’) and Moore's Paradox that both claims are wrong. I then develop a double-indexed Update Semantics for conditionals which takes these two results into account while doing justice to the key intuitions underlying the Ramsey Test. The semantics is extended to cover some further phenomena, including the recent observation that epistemic modal operators give rise to something very like, but also very unlike, Moore's Paradox.
Der Wahrheitsbegriff in Martin Heideggers Sein und Zeit (local file)
Philosophisches Jahrbuch, 113 (1): 78 - 98, 2006
Heidegger's treatment of the topic of truth in Being and Time is confronted with many criticisms. Of special importance is the thesis that Heidegger is unable to provide a general analysis of the truth of a statement; furthermore, the claim is influential that when being concerned with Dasein's disclosedness Heidegger does not succeed in plausibly dealing with the topic of truth. This paper offers a new approach to Heidegger's conception as presented in Being and Time and defends it against well-known criticisms. It also reveals various positive impulses of this conception for the problem of truth and the philosophy of language.
Drafts
Dynamics of Epistemic Modality (local file)
A dynamic semantics for epistemically modalized sentences is an attractive alternative to the orthodox view that our best theory of meaning ascribes to such sentences truth-conditions relative to what is known. I will demonstrate that a dynamic story about might and must offers elegant explanations of a range of puzzling observations about epistemic modals. The first part of the story provides a unifying treatment of disputes about epistemic modality and disputes about matters of fact while at the same time avoiding relativism or an overly weak pragmatics. The second part of the story extends what has been said to cover some further relevant data, including retraction, the interaction between epistemic modality and tense, and embeddings of epistemically modalized sentences under attitude verbs. An in-depth comparison between the suggestion made in this article and current versions of the orthodoxy is provided.