Research

Papers

Good Explanations and the Causal Metasemantics of Inductive Concepts. Mind (2025).

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.

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.

In progress (email for drafts)

Elision, Disambiguation, and Pliant Distinctions

Sometimes we think of two things as if they are one, as when we conflate twins. Orthodoxy says that this is always representationally problematic. I argue that sometimes, however, you should think of two things as one, even when you know they are two. I call these cases of pliant distinction. I begin by distinguishing pliant distinctions, which are only sometimes to be respected, from categorical distinctions, which are always to be respected. I develop a semantic and logical profile for detecting pliancy, and use this to argue that pliant distinctions are ubiquitous in philosophy and science. I close by rationalizing pliancy, drawing on ideas in information theory and cognitive psychology. (Handout link)

Concept Acquisition, Epistemic Rationality, and Inconsistency

What are the rational and psychological determinants of drawing a distinction? When we draw a distinction, we coin two new concepts where before we only had one. Thus, our question is a special instance of the more general question of why we ever coin new concepts. Surprisingly, some theorists have argued that there can be no epistemically rational basis for acquiring a concept. Their key observation is that all orthodox models of belief revision - whether old induction-hypothesis testing formalisms or contemporary Bayesian approaches - require that the agent already start off representing the thing to be potentially learned. I offer a novel approach to rationalizing acquisition in cases of distinction-drawing. The key idea is that we are often prompted to draw distinctions on the basis of inconsistencies in our beliefs, and these inconsistencies rationalize the concept coining partly by epistemic considerations. Nevertheless, not every inconsistency justifies concept introduction (sometimes we just need to ditch one of our inconsistent beliefs). The additional ingredient is a practical one concerning whether it would be helpful to have another representational resource or not. The picture we end up with treats concept acquisition as a sui generis activity at the juncture of epistemic and practical rationality.

On the back-burner

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.

The Distinction We Never Want to Draw
Many theorists have discussed the relationship between explanatorily robust properties like H2O and their functional shadows like the "watery stuff", especially how these properties relate semantically to expressions/concepts like 'water'. I argue that ordinary thought and talk elides this distinction in the same way that it tends to elide the distinction between weight and mass. I engage with the literatures on psychological essentialism, privative adjectives, dual character concepts, and content externalism. I wind up defending a view that is externalist without excluding XYZ from the intension of `water', and explains the psychological data without committing to essentialism.

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.