1. Books

2. Unpublished Articles

3. Published and Accepted Articles

4. Book Reviews

Books

Truth in Virtue of Meaning: a Defence of the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction, Oxford University Press, 2008







Preface [pdf]
NDPR Review
OUP Webpage






The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Language

to be co-edited with Delia Graff Fara. Under contract with Routledge. More information to follow soon.

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People who have agreed to contribute so far include: Barbara Abbott, Aldo Antonelli, Johan van Bentham, Alexander Bird, Paul Boghossian, David Braun, John P. Burgess, Daniel Buering, James Cargile, Robyn Carston, Paul Dekker, Josh Dever, Michael Devitt, Matti Eklund, Kit Fine, Kai von Fintel, Robert Freidin, Antony Galton, Chris Gauker, Stavroula Glezakos, Mark Greenberg, Anthony Gillies, Paul Hagstrom, Allen Hazen, James Higginbotham, Laurence Horn, Cory Juhl, Chris Kennedy, Jeffrey C. King, Gyula Klima, Steven Kuhn, Rae Langton, Ernie Lepore, Sarah-Jane Leslie, Eric Loomis, Michael Losonsky, Kirk Ludwig, Sally MacConnell-Ginet, John MacFarlane, Robert May, Edouard Machery, Michael McDermott, Larry Moss, Sarah Moss, Allyson Mount, Ram Neta, Bernhard Nickel, Jeff Pelletier, John Perry, Francois Recanati, Mark Richard, Teresa Robertson, Sarah Sawyer, Barry Schein, Mark Schroeder, Gila Sher, Sanford Shieh, David Shier, Scott Soames, Nicholas J.J. Smith, Robert Stainton, Jason Stanley, Steve Stich, Martin Stokhof, Eric Swanson, Zoltán Gendler Szabó, Rich Thomason, Robert R.G. Williams and Seth Yalcin.




New Waves in Philosophical Logic

to be co-edited with Greg Restall, (Palgrave MacMillan) This is a volume featuring work by philosophers of logic who are (more or less) within 10 years of their PhD. More information to follow soon.

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1. Francesco Berto (University of Venice)
2. Daniel Cohnitz (University of Tartu)
3. Catrina Dutilh Novaes (University of Amsterdam)
4. Matti Eklund (Cornell University)
5. Anthony Gillies (University of Michigan)
6. Barteld Kooi (University of Groningen)
7. Hannes Leitgeb (University of Bristol)
8. Francesca Poggiolesi and Greg Restall (Vrije University in Brussels
   and the University of Melbourne)
9. Sherrilyn Rousch, Kelty Allen and Ian Herbert (Berkeley)
10. Gillian Russell (Washington University in St Louis)
11. Wolfgang Schwarz (Australia National University)
12. Brian Weatherson and David Jehle (Rutgers)

Published and Accepted Articles

1. A New Problem for the Linguistic Doctrine of Necessary Truth (draft as of August 2009)

forthcoming in New Waves in Truth, edited by Cory Wright and Nikolaj Pedersen, (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010)

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The traditional Linguistic Doctrine of Necessary Truth attempts to reduce the metaphysical property of necessity to meaning-based properties, like analyticity. The simplest version of such a view identifies being a necessary truth with being expressed by a sentence that is analytically true, and it is well known that this view runs into difficulties in accounting for apparent necessary synthetic truths, such as "Water is H20" and "Mars is not Hesperus". In this paper I present a further problem for the view, arising from the existence of indexical expressions, which allow us to have, among other things, analytic sentences that express necessary propositions relative to some contexts, but contingent propositions relative to others. I argue that the usual attempts to revise the view in the face of the necessary synthetic are not easily extended to deal with this new problem.

2. Analyticity in Externalist Languages (draft as of October 2008)

forthcoming in New Waves in Philosophy of Language New Waves in the Philosophy of Language, edited by Sarah Sawyer, (Palgrave MacMillan, 2009)

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In this paper I am going to present, and argue for, a different way of thinking about the analytic/synthetic distinction (ASD). The account is intended to apply indifferently to both natural and artificial languages, but it is rather complicated and it makes reference to some unfamiliar entities. My strategy in arguing for the account will thus be Russell’s strategy from the famous “On Denoting”: I will present a number puzzles about analyticity, and argue that my view solves them all. The puzzles arise because philosophy of language has come a long way since the height of the debate between Quine and Carnap. For one, we are now very sensitive to a number of phenomena—such as direct reference, semantic externalism and indexicality—which were not as well understood then as they are now. There is some awareness in the post-Quinean literature—particularly in work by Hilary Putnam, Nathan Salmon, Paul Boghossian, and Timothy Williamson—that these phenomena cause new problems for the already beleaguered ASD. [Putnam, 1962] [Kripke, 1980a] [Salmon, 1993] [Boghossian, 1996] [Williamson, 2008] But if the central claim of this paper is correct, then the analytic synthetic distinction—properly understood—is compatible with all these new developments.

3. Epistemic Viciousness in the Martial Arts (draft as of October 2008, written for a popular audience)

forthcoming in Philosophy and the Martial Arts edited by Graham Priest and Damon Young, (Open Court)

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Karateka, and practitioners of the Japanese gendai budo in general, like to extoll the virtues of character that training in a martial art promotes. Yet whatever the moral virtues of the well-trained budoka, the culture of training in many martial arts actually encourages epistemic vices, including both close-mindedness and gullibility, but also unwarranted epistemic deference to seniors and historical sources, lack of curiosity about important related disciplines and lack of intellectual independence.

4. One True Logic? (access to JPL required)

published in the Journal of Philosophical Logic, April 2008

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This is a paper about the constituents of arguments. It argues that several different kinds of truth-bearer may be taken to compose arguments, but that none of the obvious candidates—sentences, propositions, sentence/truth-value pairs etc.—make sense of logic as it is actually practiced. The paper goes on to argue that by answering the question in different ways, we can generate different logics, thus ensuring a kind of logical pluralism that is different from that of J. C. Beall and Greg Restall in their book Logical Pluralism.

5. Knowledge by Indifference with John Doris

published in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 86, number 3, September 2008

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Is it harder to acquire knowledge about things that really matter to us than it is to acquire knowledge about things we don't much care about? Jason Stanley (2005) argues that whether or not the relational predicate "knows that" holds between an agent and a proposition can depend on the practical interests of the agent: the more it matters to a person whether p is the case, the more justification is required before she counts as knowing that p. The evidence for Stanley's thesis includes a number of intuitive judgments about examples. In this paper we provide parallel examples for which Stanley's thesis requires unwelcome knowledge-attributions, and argue that this is possible because his thesis conflicts with familiar and plausible principles about knowledge.

6. The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction

published in Blackwell's Philosophy Compass, vol. 2, August 2007

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An encyclopedia article presenting a brief history of the analytic/synthetic distinction,
10 arguments against the distinction, and 5 challenges which any contemporary theory of analyicity ought to meet.

This article comes with a "teaching and learning guide", available here.

7. In Defence of Hume's Law

forthcoming in the collection Hume, 'Is', and 'Ought': New Essays edited by Charles Pigden (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010)

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An argument defending the view that one cannot derive an ought from an is against the usual (suspect) counterexamples.

8. Barriers to Implication (co-authored with Greg Restall Erdös number: 4!)

forthcoming in the collection Hume, 'Is', and 'Ought': New Essays edited by Charles Pigden (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010)

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The formulation and proof of Hume's Law and several related inference barrier theses.

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Book Reviews

1. Warren Goldfarb's Deductive Logic

in the Australasian Journal of Logic

Review [pdf], BibTeX Citation Details [bib]

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Analyticity, Meaning and Paradox

A short summary of my dissertation (Princeton, 2004)

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Here is a list of talks I have given or will be giving in the near future.

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