Research

Papers

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Coordination, Content, and Conflation. Australasian Journal of Philosophy (2023).

The subjective appearance of coreference is not perfectly reliable, as is familiar to anyone who has conflated twins. However, I argue that there are some thoughts which get their content wholly determined by the subjective appearance of coreference. These thoughts are formed through broadly "internal" processes like inference and imagination. They are, in a special sense, impervious to conflation. I draw some lessons for the theory of content determination and the problem of error.

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Good Explanations and the Causal Metasemantics of Inductive Concepts. Mind (forthcoming).

A metasemantic theory tells us why a particular concept has the content that it in fact has, e.g., why the concept ORANGUTAN has orangutans as its content, rather than, say, Sumatran orangutans or apes. Many believe that the content of a concept has some important causal explanatory connection to that concept. But a plethora of properties stand in a causal explanatory connection to our concepts without being their contents - this is the Filtering Problem. In this paper, I leverage work from the general philosophy of science on causal explanation to make progress on the Filtering Problem. The working hypothesis is that a concept's content is the property that best explains why that concept was formed. I use the explanatory virtues of proportionality, homogeneity, and distal balance to weed out problematic contents. The picture that emerges is one where much of the work of metasemantics can be accomplished by appealing to general principles in the theory of good explanation rather than the particularities of mental representation itself.

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In progress (email for drafts)​

Conceptual Multiplicity, Elision, and Pliant Distinctions

This essay is about some important concepts we deploy in science and philosophy, and a puzzle about how these concepts function. The puzzle consists in three observations about certain terms that express these concepts, observations that collectively give rise to what I call conceptual multiplicity. The central goal is to provide a model of conceptual multiplicity. On the model I propose, conceptual multiplicity arises from cognizers organizing their concepts in terms of what I call a pliant distinction, i.e., distinctions that we sometimes respect and sometimes ignore. Topics discussed along the way include: the sense in which it's ideal for concepts to be univocal, the mental representation of scientific theories, and the grounds for successful communication between interlocutors who do not draw all the same distinctions. 

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Conceptual Truth and Disambiguation

Are there any conceptual truths? This notion has been discussed in connection to the analytic/synthetic distinction, the scope of a priori knowledge, and the nature of philosophical analysis, but remains controversial. After clarifying what a coherent and substantive notion of conceptual truth might look like, I offer a new argument for the existence of conceptual truths, centered on a phenomenon I call disambiguation. Disambiguation is a special relation that obtains between concepts and produces truths that, in an important sense, are not grounded in facts about the contents of the concepts, but the concepts themselves. After showing how disambiguation gives rise to conceptual truths, I close by scrutinizing the a posteriori necessities and their role in the debate against conceptual truths.

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Concept Acquisition as Cognitive Tool Creation

Concept acquisition in normal cases is more than an arational, brute process: when I encounter a capybara for the first time, what occurs in my head is very different than acquiring a concept via a drug, via being hit on the head, etc. But Fodor argued that rational acquisition would require that concepts be learned, and the notion of concept learning is fundamentally confused. Theorists have typically taken issue with this last claim, the claim that concept learning is an incoherent notion. After first defending the Fodorian from some recent objections and clarifying what’s at sake, this paper charts a different response. The central thesis is that concept acquisition is a kind of creative process. It grants the concerns about “learning a concept” to the Fodorian, but also distinguishes normal cases of concept acquisition from deviant cases via an appeal to creation. The picture is that, rather than atomic concepts being learned on the basis of incoming evidence, they are a representational resource we construct to better engage with the world, tools that we produce in a primitive manner. The rationality of normal cases is thus a species of practical rationality rather than epistemic rationality.
 

On the back-burner

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Underspecificity and Conceptual Change

Not every revision in our representational practices stems from discovery: intuitively, the revision to the practice of treating Pluto as a planet did not involve a discovery about Pluto or planets, but a decision about how we wanted to use our words and concepts going forward. While many theorists have been sympathetic to this practical account of cases like Pluto, there is no general agreement on the formalism for understanding these cases, or the philosophical basis for distinguishing practically-induced revision from epistemically-induced revision. In this paper, I leverage recent work on vagueness and communication - work on underspecificity - to provide a formal foundation for understanding practically-induced revision. I also develop a story as to what grounds the difference between decision and discovery when it comes to conceptual change.

If It Looks Like a Duck
Sometimes we use words like 'duck' to refer, not to real ducks, but toy ducks, painted ducks, people wearing duck costumes, etc. In this paper, I show how this "Toy Duck Usage" does not easily reduce to more familiar linguistic phenomena like metaphor and meaning transfer. I develop the suggestion that sometimes we unknowingly employ toy duck usage - that is, we sometimes conflate the "real" meaning of an expression with the meaning on display in paradigmatic cases of toy duck usage. I claim this unknowing conflation underlies familiar debates about Twin Earth and the meanings of natural kind expressions, suggesting that uses of 'water' that apply to XYZ are fundamentally a form of toy duck usage. I leverage research on dual character concepts, lexical polysemy, and natural kind concepts to argue that all kind concepts - whether they are "natural" or "artifactual" - harbor a dimension according to which explanatory origin is important, and another dimension according to which functional profile is important. Toy duck usage exploits the latter dimension.

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