I started off working on some core topics in the philosophy of language, like reference and indexicality. Then I turned to thinking about lying, deception, and obfuscation. More recently I've been thinking about how the devices we're now so often glued to have changed the ways in which we can do things with words. Along the way, I've also done work on fake news, shilling, speech acts, moral realism, abilities, colors, Frege, and the ethics of eating animals. For a more extensive overview of my work circa 2017, please see the interview I did in 3:16 Magazine.
Published and Forthcoming Papers
On Retweeting, with Jessica Pepp and Rachel Sterken, forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Applied Philosophy of Language (eds. Luvell Anderson and Ernie Lepore), Oxford University Press [abstract].
If a retweet is not an endorsement, what is it? And what is wrong with retweeting offensive or misleading tweets? What sort of responsibility do people have for their retweets? Retweets, we argue, lack any default illocutionary force. That, in turn, both points towards a particularist answer to the wrongness question and underwrites the potential appeal of a project of re-engineering the retweet such that it does have a default illocutionary force, at least for certain users.
On Amplification, with Jessica Pepp and Rachel Sterken, forthcoming in Conversations Online (eds. Patrick Connolly, Sandy Goldberg, and Jennifer Saul), Oxford University Press [abstract].
Online speech is structured rather differently than offline speech. One important aspect of this, we argue, is that online speech environments are amplificatory. That is, these speech environments are designed to make the speech act of amplification easy, make amplification of others’ speech a predictable side-effect of one’s own, or both. In this essay, we first clarify what the speech act of amplification amounts to. Then we investigate the design choices of our present online speech environments which serve to promote amplification, and how these lay what we call the ‘amplification trap’ when it comes to responding to bad speech. Finally, we consider some ways that online environments could be re-designed in order to mitigate the amplification trap.
Unspeakable Names, forthcoming in Synthese [abstract].
There are some names which cannot be spoken and others which cannot be written, at least on certain very natural ways of conceiving of them. Interestingly, this observation proves to be in tension with a range of natural views about what names are. Prima facie, this looks like a problem for predicativists. Ultima facie, it turns out to be equally problematic for Millians. For either sort of theorist, resolving this tension requires embracing a revisionary account of the metaphysics of names. Revisionary Millianism, I argue, offers some important advantages over its predicativist competitor.
Reference Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2024 Edition. [abstract].
The reference on reference.
Should Moral Intuitionism go Social?, with Marvin Backes and Matti Eklund, Noûs 57(4): 973-985 [abstract].
In recent work, Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer-Landau (2020) develop a new social version of moral intuitionism that promises to explain why our moral intuitions are trustworthy. In this brief note, we raise several worries for their account and present some general challenges for the broader class of views we call Social Moral Intuitionism. We close by reflecting on Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer-Landau’s comparison between what they call the ‘perceptual practice’ and the ‘moral intuition practice’, which we take to raise some difficult normative and meta-normative questions for theorists of all stripes.
The Vagaries of Reference, Ergo 9(52): 1433-1448 [abstract].
Evans (1973)’s Madagascar case and other cases like it have long been taken to represent a serious challenge for the Causal Theory of Names. The present essay answers this challenge on behalf of the causal theorist. The key is to treat acts of uttering names as events. Like other events, utterances of names sometimes turn out to have features which only become clear in retrospect.
Tolerating Sense Variation, with Mark Textor, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101(1): 182-196 [abstract].
Frege famously claimed that variations in the sense of a proper name can sometimes be ‘tolerated’. In this paper, we offer a novel explanation of this puzzling claim. Frege, we argue, follows Trendelenburg in holding that we think in language—sometimes individually and sometimes together. Variations in sense can be tolerated in just those cases where we are using language to coordinate our actions, but we are not engaged in thinking together about an issue.
Speaker's Reference, Semantic Reference, Sneaky Reference, Mind & Language 37(5): 856-875, 2022 [abstract].
According to what is perhaps the dominant picture of reference, what a referential term refers to in a context is determined by what the speaker intends for her audience to identify as the referent. I argue that this sort of broadly Gricean view entails, counterintuitively, that it is impossible to knowingly use referential terms in ways that one expects or intends to be misunderstood. After exploring several possible responses—each of which ultimately proves unsatisfactory—I sketch an alternative which can better account for such opaque uses of language, or what I call ‘sneaky reference’. I close by reflecting on the ramifications of these arguments for the theory of meaning more broadly, as opposed to just the theory of reference.
Manipulative Machines, with Jessica Pepp, Rachel Sterken, and Matthew McKeever, in The Philosophy of Online Manipulation (eds. Fleur Jongepier and Michael Klenk), Routledge: 97-107, 2022 [abstract].
We explore three ways of trying to make sense of the seemingly reasonable claim that manipulation by machines could pose an existential threat to humankind.
Relevance-Based Knowledge Resistance, with Jessica Pepp and Rachel Sterken, in Knowledge Resistance in High-Choice Information Environments (eds. Åsa Wikforss and Jesper Strömbäck), Routledge: 106-127, 2022 [abstract].
In addition to ordinary conversations among relatively small numbers of individuals, human societies have public conversations. These are diffuse, ongoing discussions about various topics, which are largely sustained by journalistic activities. They are conversations about news—what is happening now—that members of various groups (such as the residents of a certain country, a certain town, or practitioners of a certain profession) need to know about in their capacity as members of those groups, and about how to react to the news. Our topic in this chapter is a type of resistance to evidence that can arise at the level of these public conversations, rather than at the level of individual agents. We call it ‘relevance-based resistance to evidence.’ A public conversation exhibits this kind of evidence resistance when it becomes overly focused on topics that members of the group that the conversation concerns do not in fact need to know about qua members of the group—topics which are, in a word, irrelevant. We argue that the risks of such relevance-based knowledge resistance are significantly amplified by certain structural features of online discourse.
On Salience-Based Theories of Demonstratives, with Ethan Nowak, Salience: A Philosophical Inquiry (ed. Sophie Archer), Routledge: 70-88, 2022 [abstract].
In this paper, we examine a number of ways in which the notion of salience has been or might be used to fix the reference of demonstrative expressions. Although we find the idea generally attractive, we conclude that the prospects for a theory of demonstrative reference based on salience are not, in fact, very good. We conclude by considering how certain aspects of these salience-based views might be productively integrated into alternative theories of demonstrative reference—and, indeed, theories of meaning more broadly.
Meta-metasemantics, or The Quest for the One True Metasemantics, with Ethan Nowak, Philosophical Quarterly 72(1): 135-154, 2022 [abstract].
What determines the meaning of a context-sensitive expression in a context? It is standardly assumed that, for a given expression type, there will be a unitary answer to this question; most of the literature on the subject involves arguments designed to show that one particular metasemantic proposal is superior to a specific set of alternatives. The task of the present essay will be to explore whether this is a warranted assumption, or whether the quest for the one true metasemantics might be a Quixotic one. We argue that there are good reasons—much better than are commonly appreciated—for thinking the latter, but that there remains significant scope for metasemantic theorizing. We conclude by outlining our preferred option, metasemantic pluralism.
Why We Should Keep Talking About Fake News, with Jessica Pepp and Rachel Sterken, Inquiry 65(4): 471-487, 2022 [abstract].
In response to Habgood-Coote (2019. “Stop Talking about Fake News!” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (9–10): 1033–1065.) and a growing number of scholars who argue that academics and journalists should stop talking about fake news and abandon the term, we argue that the reasons which have been offered for eschewing the term ‘fake news’ are not sufficient to justify such abandonment. Prima facie, then, we take ourselvesœ and others to be justified in continuing to talk about fake news.
Who's Your Ideal Listener?, with Ethan Nowak, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 99(2): 257-270, 2021 [abstract].
It is increasingly common for philosophers to rely on the notion of an idealized listener when explaining how the semantic values of context-sensitive expressions are determined. Some have identified the semantic values of such expressions, as used on particular occasions, with whatever an appropriately idealized listener would take them to be. Others have argued that, for something to count as the semantic value, an appropriately idealized listener should be able to recover it. Our aim here is to explore the range of ways that such idealization might be worked out, and then to argue that none of these results in a very plausible theory. We conclude by reflecting on what this negative result reveals about the nature of meaning and responsibility.
Online Communication, with Jessica Pepp and Rachel Sterken, The Philosopher's Magazine 94(3): 90-95, 2021 [abstract].
We explore the speech act of amplification and its newfound prominence in online speech environments. Then we point to some puzzles this raises for the strategy of ‘fighting speech with more speech’.
Lying, Deception, and Epistemic Advantage, with Andreas Stokke, in The Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy of Language (eds. Justin Khoo and Rachel Sterken), Routledge: 109-124, 2021 [abstract].
According to the traditional account of lying, lying requires an intention to deceive. Recently, however, this thesis has been called into question—primarily via an appeal to bald-faced lies. Here, we canvass several strategies for saving something along the lines of the traditional account, arguing that each facees substantial difficulties. More importantly, each of these strategies forces us to reject what we take to be a core claim about the nature of deception: intending to deceive entails intending to gain an epistemic advantage over one's interlocutor. We argue for the plausibility of this thesis, and suggest that the wrongness of lying, to the extent that it is wrong, may have something to do with unjustly seeking to gain either an epistemic advantage over one's interlocutor, or else a slightly more general notion of positional advantage.
Daylight Savings: What an Answer to the Perceptual Variation Problem Cannot Be, with Jonathan Cohen, Philosophical Studies 178(3): 833-843, 2021 [abstract].
Significant variations in the way objects appear across different viewing conditions poses a challenge to our ability to represent their colors in any univocal way. Doing so would seem to require that we break the symmetry between multiple appearances in favor of a single variant. A wide range of philosophical and non-philosophical writers have held that the symmetry can be broken by appealing to daylight viewing conditions—that the appearances of objects in daylight have a stronger, and perhaps unique, claim to reveal their true colors. In this note we argue that, whatever else its merits, this appeal to daylight is not a satisfactory answer to the problem posed by perceptual variation.
The Big Shill, with Robert Simpson, Ratio 33(4): 269-280, 2020 [abstract].
Shills are people who endorse products and companies for pay, while pretending that their endorsements are ingenuous. Here we argue that there is something objectionable about shilling that is not reducible to its bad consequences, the lack of epistemic conscientiousness it often relies upon, or to the shill’s insincerity. Indeed, we take it as a premise of our inquiry that shilling can sometimes be sincere, and that its wrongfulness is not mitigated by the shill’s sincerity, in cases where the shill is sincere. Our proposal is that the shill’s defining characteristic is their knowingly engaging in a kind of speech that obscures a certain aspect of its social status—most commonly, by pretending to speak on their own personal behalf, while in fact speaking as an employee—and that this sort of behaviour is objectionable irrespective of any other features of the shill’s conduct. This sort of obfuscation undermines a socially beneficial communicative custom, in which we conscientiously mark the distinction between personal speech and speech-for-hire.
Discourse and Method, with Ethan Nowak, Linguistics & Philosophy 43(2): 119-138, 2020 [abstract].
Stojnic et al. have recently argued that lingustic meaning can fix the reference of demonstratives without any sort of appeal to context. We argue that this claim can only be sustained in the thinnest technical sense. Contrary to what Stojnic et al. advertize, this technical shift fails to side-step any of the difficult philosophical problems which arise regarding how demonstrative reference is established. We explore the prospects for a more radical shift in theoretical perspective, one which would allow us to side-step some of these issues.
What's New About Fake News?, with Jessica Pepp and Rachel Sterken, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 16(2): 62-94, 2019 [abstract].
The term ‘fake news’ ascended rapidly to prominence in 2016 and has become a fixture in academic and public discussions, as well as in political mud-slinging. In the flurry of discussion, the term has been applied so broadly as to threaten to render it meaningless. In an effort to rescue our ability to discuss—and combat—the underlying phenomenon that triggered the present use of the term, some philosophers have tried to characterize it more precisely. A common theme in this nascent philosophical discussion is that contemporary fake news is not a new kind of phenomenon, but just the latest iteration of a broader kind of phenomenon that has played out in different ways across the history of human information-dissemination technologies. While we agree with this, we argue that newer sorts of fake news reveal substantial flaws in earlier understandings of this notion. In particular, we argue that no deceptive intentions are necessary for fake news to arise; rather, fake news arises when stories which were not produced via standard journalistic practice are treated as though they had been. Importantly, this revisionary understanding of fake news allows us to accommodate and understand the way that fake news is plausibly generated and spread in a contemporary setting, as much by non-human actors as by ordinary human beings.
Lying, Testimony, and Epistemic Vigilance, in The Oxford Handbook of Lying (ed. Jörg Meibauer), Oxford University Press: 214-228, 2018 [abstract].
Knowledge, it is commonly assumed, can be and often is transmitted via testimony. How exactly this takes place, however, is a matter of controversy. One common thought that, in order to obtain knowledge via testimony, listeners need to live up to some minimum standard of epistemic conduct. This raises the question of just what this minimum standard might be. Some philosophers have recently attempted to make progress on this question by turning to the psychological literature on mechanisms of 'epistemic vigilance', or the methods that people routinely use to track the quality of the testimony they are hearing, to filter out liars and the uninformed. The present chapter briefly canvasses the state of this inquiry and lays out several challenges for it. It concludes with a broader challenge to the thought that there really is some minimal standard that listeners must live up to in order to acquire knowledge via testimony.
The Lies We Tell Each Other Together, in Lying: Language, Knowledge, Ethics, Politics (eds. Eliot Michaelson and Andreas Stokke), Oxford University Press: 183-205, 2018 [abstract].
A great deal of attention has recently been lavished on the question of what exactly is required for an utterance to count as a lie. At the center of this debate stand bald-faced lies, which have proven to be surprisingly difficult to account for on any otherwise-plausible definition of lying. Here, I focus on a closely related, yet curiously under-explored, set of cases: lies that we construct together, as friends, families, colleagues, and communities. These cases exhibit a different type of moral and linguistic complexity than the standardly discussed cases of bald-faced lying. In particular, I argue that such cases put distinct pressure on the enduring thesis that what is morally distinctive of lying is that it threatens to undermine the potential for communication. Along the way, we will also see how these cases put pressure on standard theories of conversational dynamics.
Ethics for Fish, with Andrew Reisner, in The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics (eds. Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson, and Tyler Doggett), Oxford University Press: 189-206, 2018 [abstract].
In this chapter we discuss some of the central ethical issues specific to eating and harvesting fish. We survey recent research on fish intelligence and cognition and discuss possible considerations that are distinctive to questions about the ethics of eating fish as opposed to terrestrial and avian mammals. We conclude that those features that are distinctive to the harvesting and consumption of fish, including means of capture and the central role that fishing plays in many communities, do not suggest that eating fish is less morally problematic than eating terrestrial of avian animals.
The Lying Test, Mind & Language 31(4): 470-499, 2016 [abstract].
As an empirical inquiry into the nature of meaning, semantics must rely on data. Unfortunately, the primary data to which philosophers and linguists have traditionally appealed—judgments on the truth and falsity of sentences—have long been known to vary widely between competent speakers in a number of interesting cases. The present essay constitutes an experiment in how to obtain some more consistent data for the enterprise of semantics. Specifically, it argues from some widely accepted Gricean premises to the conclusion that judgments on lying are semantically relevant. It then endeavors to show how, assuming the relevance of such judgments, we can use them to generate a useful, widely acceptable test for semantic content.
Doing Without Believing, with Michael Brownstein, Synthese 193(9): 2815-2836, 2016 [abstract].
We consider a range of cases—both hypothetical and actual—in which agents apparently know how to Φ but fail to believe that the way in which they in fact Φ is a way for them to Φ. These "no-belief" cases present a prima facie problem for Intellectualism about knowledge-how. The problem is this: if knowledge-that entails belief, and if knowing how to Φ just is knowing that some w is a way for one to Φ, then an agent cannot both know how to Φ and fail to believe that w, the way that she Φs, is a way for her to Φ. We discuss a variety of ways in which Intellectualists might respond to this challenge and argue that, ultimately, this debate converges with another, seemingly distinct debate in contemporary epistemology: how to attribute belief in cases of conflict between an agent’s avowals and her behavior. No-belief cases, we argue, reveal how Intellectualism depends on the plausibility of positing something like "implicit beliefs"—which conflict with an agent’s avowed beliefs—in many cases of apparent knowledge-how. While there may be good reason to posit implicit beliefs elsewhere, we suggest that there are at least some grounds for thinking that these reasons fail to carry over to no-belief cases, thus applying new pressure to Intellectualism.
Act Consequentialism and Inefficacy, in Food, Ethics, and Society (eds. Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson, and Tyler Doggett), Oxford University Press: 210-214, 2016 [abstract].
A variety of eating and purchasing practices, in particular vegetarianism, are often motivated via an appeal to their expected good consequences. Lurking in the background, however, is the question: can I really hope to make a difference via my purchases in a social world as complex and wasteful as our own? I review the evidence as it stands and conclude that there are good reasons to suspect that one probably does not make a difference directly via one's purchases. That said, there may be some related, though less direct, reasons to be vegetarian.
A Kantian Response to Futility Worries?, in Food, Ethics, and Society (eds. Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson, and Tyler Doggett), Oxford University Press: 215-218, 2016 [abstract].
Due in no small part to Kant's own seemingly dim views on the value of animals, Kantian ethics has traditionally been understood to be rather unfriendly ground for arguments in favor of vegetarianism. This has started to change recently, which raises the question: do Kantian approaches offer a way of defending vegetarianism that doesn't run afoul of the sorts of futility worries that afflict consequentialist arguments for vegetarianism? I argue that Kantian approaches in fact face an analogous worry, due to their need to explain why eating meat ought to be understood as a disrespectful act simpliciter, rather than only in certain circumstances.
Shifty Characters, Philosophical Studies 167(3): 519-540, 2014 [abstract].
Answering machines and other recording technologies present a challenge for Kaplanian theories of indexicals. I argue that the best way to respond to this 'answering machine problem' is to conceive of the meanings of indexicals as sensitive not just to context, but also to channels of communication. Non-standard communicative channels are, in effect, posited to 'shift' the character of indexicals, making them pick out values that differ from what these terms would denote in ordinary face-to-face conversation.
Indexicality and the Answering Machine Paradox, with Jonathan Cohen, Philosophy Compass 8(6): 580-592, 2013 [abstract].
Answering machines and other types of recording devices present prima facie problems for traditional theories of indexicals. In this essay, we present a range of different ways, both semantic and pragmatic, of accounting for these data. We argue that both the successes and failures of these various theories offer some insight into the nature semantic inquiry more generally.
Justice for Unicorns, Proceedings of the Aristotelean Society 112(3): 351-360, 2012 [abstract].
Dworkin has recently argued that 'metaethical skepticism' (or anti-realism about ethics) is an inherently unstable position, since it entails an inconsistent set of first-order moral claims. I argue that Dworkin's argument must rely on one of several suppressed premises, all of which the skeptic should deny. This helps to explain why anti-realism about ethical properties is more robust than one might have initially supposed.
Edited Volume
Lying: Language, Knowledge, Ethics, and Politics, co-edited with Andreas Stokke, Oxford University Press, 336pp, 2018.
Book Reviews
Introductions
Introduction to Lying: Language, Knowledge, Ethics, and Politics, with Andreas Stokke, in Lying: Language, Knowledge, Ethics, and Politics, Oxford University Press: 1-21, 2018.
Dissertation
This and That: A Theory of Reference for Names, Demonstratives, and Things in Between, UCLA [abstract].
This dissertation sets out to answer the question ''What fixes the semantic values of context-sensitive referential terms—like names, demonstratives, and pronouns—in context?'' I argue that it is the speaker's intentions that play this role, as constrained by the conventions governing the use of particular sorts of referential terms. These conventions serve to filter the speaker's intentions for just those which meet these constraints on use, leaving only these filtered-for intentions as semantically relevant. By considering a wide range of cases, including many involving confused and deceptive speakers, I argue that this 'constraint theory' provides a better account of linguistic reference than does any extant alternative, whether intentionalist or non-intentionalist. Along the way, I argue that semantics cannot depend on the reactions of idealized listeners, that speaker meaning is far less clear, and helpful, a notion than it is standardly taken to be, and that speakers needn't aim to be cooperative in order to fix the meaning of their terms in context.
Works in Progress
I have drafts kicking around on promising, consenting, insincerity, deference, domain restriction, color, meaning, and a few other things. If you'd like to see any of these, please feel free to email me.