Research Projects
Vagueness
In my dissertation I develop and defend what I call the semantic prediction theory of vagueness. Drawing on a teleo-semantic picture of language, I suggest that vagueness serves the function of deliberately postponing semantic decisions and I use this account to argue that vague words possess assessment-sensitive semantics. I show how understanding vagueness in this way can help us make sense of the roles it plays in our cognitive and communicative lives while mitigating some of the metaphysical issues faced by other indeterminist theories of vagueness.
Physicalism
In my paper, [title redacted while under review], I try to make progress on the so-called “condition question” of physicalism by advancing a causal account of what it means for an entity to be physical. I show how understanding the physical as the extension of a causal network with a certain structure allows us to get the extension of “physical” correct while also avoiding the triviality worries that plague physics-based definitions of the physical.
Thought Experiments
Thought-experiments, intuition pumps, and hypothetical scenarios all play a large part in contemporary philosophy yet how exactly they’re supposed to work remains unclear. I argue that prominent accounts of thought-experiments fail to apply to propositions involving open-texture concepts, and that this spells trouble for their applicability to philosophical theses.