Published and Forthcoming Papers

The published and forthcoming papers in this section are penultimate versions. Please cite the published versions. Papers in progress are just that. Please contact me if you'd like to cite them.

In Preparation

Abstracts of Papers

How General Do Theories Of Explanation Need To Be?
( explanation.pdf | back to top)

Theories of explanation seek to tell us what distinctively explanatory information is. The most ambitious ones, such as the DN-account, seek to tell us what an explanation is, tout court. Less ambitious ones, such as causal theories, restrict themselves to a particular domain of inquiry. The least ambitious theories constitute outright skepticism, holding that there is no reasonably unified phenomenon to give an account of. On these views, it is impossible to give any theories of explanation at all. I argue that both the less ambitious and outright skeptical varieties are committed to a certain context-sensitivity of our explanatory discourse. And though this discourse is almost certainly context-sensitive in some respects, it does not exhibit the context-sensitivity less than fully ambitious theories are committed to. Therefore, all accounts that seek to restrict themselves in scope, including causal accounts of explanation, fail.

Against Intentionalism
( explanation.pdf | back to top)

Intentionalism is the claim that the phenomenological properties of a perceptual experience supervene on its intentional properties. The paper presents a counterexample to this claim, one that concerns visual grouping phenomenology. I argue that this example is superior to superficially similar examples involving grouping phenomenology offered by Peacocke (Sense and Content), because the standard intentionalist responses to Peacocke's examples cannot be extended to mine. If Intentionalism fails, it is impossible to reduce the phenomenology of an experience to its content.

On Semantics for Characterizing Sentences
( explanation.pdf | back to top)

The paper presents semantics for a subset of generics, so-called ''characterizing sentences''. It is argued that claims about the relationship between the truth of characterizing sentences and claims about the distribution of properties among individuals can be viewed independently of considerations about logical form. Some extant approaches are presented and criticized, and a positive analysis of characterizing sentences in terms of normality is introduced and defended. The main innovation is that a notion of normality enters into the analysis in two separate but connected places, not just one as competing accounts suggest.

Processes in the Interpretation of Generics and CP-Laws
( Processes-and-Triviality.pdf | back to top)

Ceteris Paribus (cp-)laws may be said to hold only ``other things equal,'' signaling that their truth is compatible with a range of exceptions. Several theorists have taken this feature to introduce the presumption that cp-laws are trivial, one that needs to be countered if we are to appeal to cp-laws in the course of scientific investigation or our philosophical theorizing about it. I argue that the triviality worry is misplaced by pointing out that cp-laws are just a subset of uncontroversially meaningful and contingent expressions of natural language, the generics. I then present an account of these generics that elucidates some of their most puzzling features, especially the ones that suggested the triviality worry in the first place.

Generics and the Ways of Normality
( Ways.pdf | back to top)

I contrast two approaches to the interpretation of generics such as `ravens are black:' majority-based views, on which they are about what is the case most of the time, and inquiry-based views, on which they are about a feature we focus on in inquiry---an inductive target. I argue that while majority-based views are preferable based on the most basic data about generics, only inquiry-based views can account for a systematic class of sentences: generics with logically complex predicates, such as `cats are black, white, and ginger.' Thus, inquiry-based views should carry the day. I then go on to sketch a theory of inductive targets.

Free Choice and Generic Predication
( Generic-Predication.pdf | back to top)

I discuss problems that arise for quantificational accounts of generics, specifically in accounting for the interpretation of sentences containing complex predicates, such as bears live in North America, South America, Europe, or Asia and elephants live in Africa and Asia. I argue that we can give well-motivated and empirically powerful semantics by assimilating the treatment of such generics to the semantics of non-generic plurals. Doing so requires us to revise some basic assumptions about the LF these generics and the semantics of bare plurals themselves.