Research
My research has centered around metasemantics and metaontology: I’m interested in how determinate linguistic and mental content is achieved (for humans and AI), as well as methodology in metaphysics and its continuity with science. I also work on topics at the intersection of philosophy of technology and philosophy of disability, as well as questions about practical rationality, including questions about transformative experience and the rationality of time biases.
PUBLICations
“Value-based Interpretationism: Reference Magnetism without Natural Properties”
Simple interpretationist accounts of linguistic content face an indeterminacy problem: there are too many interpretations of our language that will count as correct. The thesis that some terms are more reference magnetic is part of a strategy to constrain the number of interpretations that count as “correct” for a linguistic community. This idea allows the interpretationist to claim that the correct interpretation, or semantic theory, is the one that assigns to our terms more eligible referents, usually understood as Lewisian natural properties. In this paper, I propose and defend a version of interpretationism that replaces this reliance on natural properties with an alternative constraint. My view resolves some seemingly intractable problems for interpretationist accounts and has the virtue of avoiding commitment to natural properties.
“The Substantivity of the Question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’” in Erkenntnis
Many have argued that the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” (henceforth: the Question) is defective in some way. While much of the literature on the Question rightly attends to questions about the nature and limits of explanation, little attention has been paid to how new work in metaontology, an area concerned with characterizing substantive metaphysical inquiry and its limits, might shed light on the matter. In this paper I discuss how best to understand the Question in light of the now common metaontological commitment to quantifiers that vary in metaphysical naturalness. I show that proponents of this view have arguments at their disposal that appear to challenge the metaphysical substantivity of the Question, but argue that these arguments can and should be resisted. I also show that the arguments do not pose a challenge to the Question if it is construed in a way that makes reference to many quantifiers. Rendering the Question with multiple quantifiers not only allows one to grant the prima facie substantivity of the Question, but allows us to express it in a way that is mode-of-being-neutral and ontology-neutral—an independently desirable aim.
“Why Future-bias Isn't Rationally Evaluable” in Res Philosophica
Future-bias is preferring some lesser future good to a greater past good because it is in the future, or preferring some greater past pain to some lesser future pain because it is in the past. Most of us think that this bias is rational. In this paper, I argue that no agents have future-biased preferences that are rationally evaluable, that is, evaluable as rational or irrational. Given certain plausible assumptions about representing preferences, either we must find a new definition of future-bias that avoids the difficulties I raise, or we must conclude that future-biased preferences are not subject to rational evaluation.
“Charity and Common Ground in Conflict” in Acta Analytica
Important challenges for the view that ontological disputes are substantive come from Carnap-inspired deflationists motivated by considerations of language and interpretation. Eli Hirsch (2002, 2009), arguing that most ontological disputes are merely verbal, offers the most prominent recent example. In the sizable literature generated on these kinds of arguments, most replies focus on what conclusions about ontological disputes can be drawn from the principle of charity. In this paper, I offer a novel challenge to Hirsch-style arguments. I argue that these arguments have unacceptable consequences beyond the ontology room: the best accounts of natural language semantic phenomena—most importantly, presupposition—cannot be maintained if we accept the use of the principle of charity found in these arguments.
Works in Progress or under review
Metasemantics and Large Language Models
The Large Language Model (LLM) chatGPT took the world by storm in late 2022, raising hopes as well as fears with its impressive ability to give human-like answers to questions and prompts. But even before chatGPT impressed us all, chatbots like Google’s LaMDA were stirring public discussion about whether these LLMs really understand what they are saying in the way that humans do, particularly after one (now former) Google engineer claimed it was sentient. In the face of bold claims of sentience, others have suggested that not only are they not sentient, but it would also be preposterous to think they have any understanding of their linguistic inputs and outputs. In this paper I aim to clarify the sense in which LLMs like chatGPT understanding the meanings of inputs and produce meaningful outputs—in short have semantic understanding, and the sense in which they do not.
Examining the Positive Value of Online Speech for Social Movements: A Closer Look at the Role of Social Media in the Contemporary Disability Rights Movement
Online conversations leave much to be desired. The form of online conversations is shaped by social media platforms hosting them in ways that tend to “gamify” discourse, changing the aims of conversation for the worse (Nguyen 2021). They contribute to a rise in echo chambers, polarization, the popularity of conspiracy theories, and extreme online shaming. However, there are some distinct advantages of online conversations. Notably, online conversations have played a role in the rise and popularity of recent social movements. Some familiar examples are tied to the social media hashtags #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and #CripTheVote and the online conversations that surround them. Recent discussion of social media in the philosophical literature has shed some light on how exactly Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms change our conversations for the worse in ways that contribute to the larger problematic phenomena just mentioned. In this paper, I (1) explore how some notable features both explain the deleterious effects of online conversation and explain (in part) the success of some recent social movements; (2) discuss how this leads to the present nature of online conversation and its effect on the world we live in; and (3) highlight how online conversation has played an especially powerful role in the recent disability rights social movement, and how it differs in important ways from other recent social movements heavily shaped by social media. The fact that the needs of disabled people differ so greatly, that face-to-face conversation and organizing is limited by lack of accessibility, and that disabled people deal with significant barriers to the economic freedom needed to devote time and resources to activism all make advocating for social change that benefits disabled people particularly difficult; this state of affairs is worsened when combined with the labyrinthine policies that govern and gatekeep resources necessary for disabled people to live and thrive. Social media platforms have been helpful for disability rights activism on all of these fronts.
Caregiving and Disability in Romantic Relationships: Reflections on Transformative experience and Hermeneutical Injustice
There are many reasons that people decide against entering romantic relationships with disabled people. Many of these reasons will involve ableist assumptions about disability and what it would be like to date someone with a disability, especially if caregiving is likely to be a part of the relationship. Making the dating world more inclusive is not as simple as disabusing people of ableist assumptions, however, especially for people with mobility impairments who require care. In this paper, I argue that caregiving in the context of a romantic relationship is a transformative experience, which complicates these dating choices. However, we can and often do rationally choose experiences that have a transformative experience as a part, and I argue that committing oneself to another person typically involves choosing a host of transformative experiences. Thinking through cases like this sheds light on the hermeneutical injustice disabled people face, including in regard to their romantic lives, as well as whether and how we can rationally choose romantic partnerships generally.
“Metaphysical Structure and Ontological Disputes”
Metaontological realism—the thesis that ontological disputes are generally substantive and that there are mind-independent truths about which positions in these disputes are correct—is a presupposition of most contemporary work in metaphysics. Yet the last two decades have seen more opponents of metaontological realism articulating their suspicions and attempting to show that something is wrong with it. In this paper, I develop a framework for explicating and defending metaontological realism. The framework has a number of strengths: (1) It does not require us to appeal to primitive notions of metaphysical structure. (2) It avoids epistemic and methodological difficulties that plague other views. (3) It leads naturally to an appealing account of when theories are metaphysically equivalent. (4) It is neutral about heavy-weight notions like fundamentality. (5) It gives us the resources to take a conciliatory approach to the ontological theses defended by some metaphysicians and ordinary beliefs and assertions without running into the objections Korman (2015) raises for metaontological frameworks appealing to primitive metaphysical structure.