Publications

I will use work from contemporary linguistics to argue that ‘good’ is ambiguous, and that it has a moral disambiguation that attributes a fixed degree of goodness. This implies that things can count as ‘good’ simpliciter, independent of context. Not only does this result provide support for the traditional view, but it also vindicates some aspects of the more recent view.

In attempting to explain category mistakes, existing accounts in the philosophical literature commonly claim that occurrences of such sentences are associated with a defect or phenomenology unique to the class of category mistakes. I review relevant experimental results on category mistakes, before arguing that they present advocates of accounts of category mistakes with a dilemma: either the uniqueness claims should be rejected, or the experimental technique in question cannot be used to test existing accounts of category mistakes in the manner that philosophers might hope.

We offer a series of formal results in support of the thesis that disquotational truth is a device to simulate higher-order resources in a first-order setting. More specifically, we show that any theory formulated in a higher-order language can be naturally and conservatively interpreted in a first-order theory with a disquotational truth or truth-of predicate.

The paper proposes a strategy for understanding metaphysical grounding in deflationary terms and, more generally, proposes a form of methodological deflationism with respect to the notions of ground.

Based on work in natural language, I argue that ‘true’ is not a genuinely gradable expression. I also provide an explanation of the apparent evidence for gradability. Hence there is no reason to think that there is a truth property that comes in degrees.

There has been increasing recognition of the appeal of contextualist solutions to the Liar paradox. The article investigates two prominent contextualist accounts as to their potential to adequately motivate contextualism.

We use the linguistic notion of focus to explain the puzzling behaviour of slurring expressions when embedded.

Hofstadter [1979, 2007] offered a novel Gödelian proposal which purported to reconcile the apparently contradictory theses that (1) we can talk, in a non-trivial way, of mental causation being a real phenomenon and that (2) mental activity is ultimately grounded in low-level rule-governed neural processes. In this paper, we critically investigate Hofstadter’s analogical appeals to Gödel’s [1931] First Incompleteness Theorem, whose “diagonal” proof supposedly contains the key ideas required for understanding both consciousness and mental causation.

We argue that Reinhardt’s program has greater chances of success than suggested in the relevant literature.

Is it possible to provide a semantic theory for first-order languages in which the quantifiers are absolutely unrestricted? It has been argued that such a semantics can and indeed must be given in a plural or higher-order metalanguage. I argue that it is possible to provide such a semantic theory in a first-order metalanguage as well.

I raise a problem for Hofweber’s nominalist theory of properties. In its stead, I formulate a theory of properties in analogy to Horwich’s minimalist theory of truth. Although this theory relies on the existence of abstract objects, I argue that nevertheless it is appropriate to call the theory deflationary.

Minimalism about truth is one of the main contenders for our best theory of truth, but minimalists face the charge of being unable to properly state their theory. This paper shows how to properly state the theory by appealing to propositional functions that are given by definite descriptions

I argue that a full understanding of how relativism is conceived within theories of natural language shows that neither of the purported connections can be maintained. There is no reason why a solution to the Liar paradox needs to accept relativism.

The aim of this volume is to open up new perspectives and to raise new research questions about a unified approach to truth, modalities, and propositional attitudes.

I try to develop a minimalist view of (natural) numbers in strong analogy to the minimalist view of truth. The idea is that number terms serve a mere quasi-logical function, comparable to the role of the truth predicate. This allows us to explain the applicability and objectivity of arithmetic.

We develop a semantics for truth and belief that combines ideas from contextualist theories of attitude reports and Awareness semantics for non-idealized belief.

There has been recent interest in the idea that speakers who appear to be having a verbal dispute may in fact be engaged in a metalinguistic negotiation: they are communicating information about how they believe an expression should be used. I propose an independently motivated account where individuals reconstruct metalinguistic propositions by means of a pragmatic, Gricean reasoning process.

This chapter argues against the widely accepted view that compositional and Tarskian theories of truth are substantial or otherwise unacceptable to deflationists.

We determine the modal logic of fixed-point models of truth and their axiomatizations by Solomon Feferman via Solovay-style completeness results

Book review of ‘Semantic Singularities: Paradoxes of Reference, Predication and Truth’ by Keith Simmons

Introduction to edited volume.