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I'm a philosopher of language, mind, and aesthetics gradually working my way into most other areas of philosophy. I am especially interested in forms of thought and
talk that don't fit the standard philosophical model,
on which minds are rational calculators operating with
a rule-governed, truth-centered logical system, and
language as a transparent tool for cooperative agents
to share information by expressing their thoughts. I
try to understand how human cognition and speech can
be at once systematic, abstract, and
truth-conditional, and also contextually varying,
holistic, expressive, and intuitive. My work can be divided into roughly three strands, which have increasingly come to overlap.First, I am interested in perspectives: open-ended, intuitive dispositions to attend, explain, and respond to the world. Perspectives both enable and limit our ability to understand the world and each other; and perspectivally-inflected disagreements are especially difficult to resolve. We often use framing devices like memes and metaphors to coordinate perspectives. I've investigated the role of perspectives and frames in connection with metaphor, sarcasm, slurs, nicknames, social identity labels, science, fiction, and selves. Second, I am interested in conversation, specifically the interplay between conventionally encoded semantic meaning and use-driven modulation. I think that attending to ways that ordinary speakers use and respond to meaning that is not fully literal and explicit pushes us reconsider standard ways of distinguishing between semantics and pragmatics. I'm especially interested in conversations where interlocutors' interests are not fully aligned, power differentials are in play, and one or both parties is motivated to avoid conversational responsibility. Insinuation and jokes are especially interesting cases. I’m also interested in conventionalized aspects of language, ranging from names and pronouns to accent and register, that function to signal and regulate social identities. Third, I am interested in concepts and representational formats. I take concepts to be systematically recombinable, stimulus-independent representational abilities. Some human thought is conceptual in this sense, as is the cognition of at least some non-human animals to some significant degree. Many theorists have wanted to explain systematicity and stimulus-indepndence by claiming that thought must be implemented by language; I have argued that they can also be underwritten by architectures that use maps. More generally, I aim to identify how the principles that govern different representational systems lead them to exhibit different expressive and implementational profiles, and the implications of these theoretical differences for the empirical investigation of minds and brains. |