The following papers are drafts. Please do not cite or quote without permission. Comments welcome!
“Fuzzy Epistemicism” (version of August 14, 2007; forthcoming in an Oxford University Press volume on vagueness edited by Richard Dietz and Sebastiano Moruzzi)
It is taken for granted in much of the literature on vagueness that semantic and epistemic approaches to vagueness are fundamentally at odds. If we can analyze borderline cases and the sorites paradox in terms of degrees of truth, then we don’t need an epistemic explanation. Conversely, if an epistemic explanation suffices, then there is no reason to depart from the familiar simplicity of classical bivalent semantics. I question this assumption, showing that there is an intelligible motivation for adopting a many-valued semantics even if one accepts a form of epistemicism. The resulting hybrid view has advantages over both classical epistemicism and traditional many-valued approaches.
“Pragmatism and Inferentialism” (version of July 11, 2006; forthcoming in a Routledge volume entitled Reading Brandom: Making It Explicit, edited by Bernhard Weiss and Jeremy Wanderer)
I discuss the connections between Brandom’s pragmatism and his inferentialism. I argue that pragmatism, as Brandom initially describes it—the view that “semantics must answer to pragmatics” —does not favor an inferentialist approach to semantics over a truth-conditional one. I then consider whether inferentialism might be motivated by a stronger kind of pragmatism, one that requires semantic concepts to be definable in terms of independently intelligible pragmatic concepts. Although this more stringent requirement does exclude truth-conditional approaches to semantics, it is not clear that Brandom’s own approach meets it.
These are papers I’ve given as talks but not (yet) worked up for publication.
“Truth and Subjectivity” (version of April 2, 2007)
This is a short, self-contained introduction to relativist semantics, as I understand it.
“Comments on Lasersohn” (version of September 29, 2006)
Comments on Peter Lasersohn’s paper “Relative Truth, Speaker Commitment, and Control of Implicit Arguments” from the 2006 Rutgers Semantics Workshop. (Note: Lasersohn’s paper has changed slightly since these comments were written.)
“In What Sense (If Any) Is Logic Normative for Thought?” (version of April 21, 2004; presented at the 2004 Central Division APA symposium on the normativity of logic. I think there is a lot that is wrong or confused in this paper, but also some things that are right. I hope to return to this project in the future.)
Logic is often said to provide norms for thought or reasoning. Indeed, this idea is central to the way in which logic has traditionally been defined as a discipline, and without it, it is not clear how we would distinguish logic from the disciplines that crowd it on all sides: psychology, metaphysics, mathematics, and semantics. But it turns out to be surprisingly hard to say how facts about the validity of inferences relate to norms for reasoning, and some philosophers have concluded that the whole idea is confused. In this talk I will survey a space of possible “bridge principles” connecting logical facts with norms for reasoning. After discussing some considerations relevant to choosing between these bridge principles, I will defend two of them. I will then consider the implications of various choices of bridge principle for the long-standing debates about the roles of relevance, necessity, and formality in our notion of logical consequence. The methodological aim of the talk is to provide an alternative to the usual brute appeals to our “intuitions” about logical consequence in these fundamental debates.
“What Is Modeled by Truth in All Models?” (version of March 23, 2000; presented at the 2000 Pacific Division APA)
John Etchemendy has argued that the model-theoretic definition of logical truth fails as a conceptual analysis of that notion. I will argue that Etchemendy’s criticism cuts deeper than recent critics have conceded. Properly understood, it is directed against the underlying analysis of logical truth as truth on all possible semantic interpretations of a language’s nonlogical vocabulary, not against any particular mathematical realization of that analysis. The only way to block Etchemendy’s argument is to reject his assumption that the possible semantic values for singular terms in an extensional language are the actually existing objects. In fact, a version of his argument goes through even if we retreat to the weaker assumption that the possible semantic values for singular terms are the possibly existing objects. I defend the model-theoretic analysis by arguing that there is a sense of “possible semantic value” for which both these assumptions are false.
These are articles or talks that I probably won’t develop further, because I have worked out their ideas more fully in other papers (or intend to do so). They are here mostly because some people have cited them.
“How to Be a Relativist About Truth” (version of May 24, 2004; now superseded by “Making Sense of Relative Truth” and “Relativism and Disagreement”)
This is a talk I gave at several places in spring 2004. I address three questions: (1) Why might one want to embrace relativism about truth? (2) How should the position be stated? (3) How can we make philosophical sense of relative-truth talk?
“Epistemic Modalities and Relative Truth” (version of November 13, 2003; now superseded by “Epistemic Modals are Assessment-Sensitive”)
According to a standard account, “It might be the case that p” has an epistemic reading on which it is equivalent to “No one in group G knows, or is in a position to come to know in way W, that not-p,” where G and W are determined by the speaker’s intentions at the context of use. I present some data that the standard account cannot easily explain, and I use it to motivate a new account on which the truth of an utterance of “It might be the case that p” depends on the assesser’s epistemic state, not the utterer’s. The new account presupposes a framework for assessment-relative truth whose utility and coherence I have defended elsewhere. After explaining the framework, I show how the relativist semantics for epistemic modals not only explains the puzzle cases but yields a simpler treatment of the data that motivated the complexities in the standard contextualist semantics. Finally, I explain why one might expect epistemic modal operators to be assessment-sensitive.
“Three Grades of Truth Relativity” (version of October 14, 2003)
I argue that sentence truth must be relativized not just to contexts of use, but to what I call contexts of assessment. First I develop a semantic framework that clarifies the difference between circumstances of evaluation and contexts of assessment, and I explain the significance of the proposed relativization of truth by embedding the semantic framework in a general theory of assertion. I then argue that the relativization of truth to contexts of assessment is needed in order to give an adequate account of future contingents. I show how “true” and “actually” can be handled in the framework. Finally, I explore applications of the new framework to Lewis’s theory of accommodation and to evaluative relativism.
“Ought: Between Objective and Subjective” (with Niko Kolodny)
Reflecting on the use of “ought” in deliberation has led many philosophers to assign it a “subjective” sense (ought, given the deliberator’s evidence). Reflecting on its use in advice has led others to assign it an “objective” sense (ought, given the facts). We argue that both sides have part of the truth. Attempts to resolve the conflict by “taking sides” one way or the other, or by taking “ought” to be ambiguous or indexical, cannot succeed. Only by recognizing that “ought” is assessment-sensitive, we argue, can we account for its dual role in deliberation and advice. We apply our theory to some paradoxes involving oughts and conditionals, and to a puzzle Allan Gibbard raised about truth and correct belief.
Assessment Sensitivity: Relative Truth and Its Applications (book)