(Rutgers, 2006)  Assistant Professor Faculty of Philosophy School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies Arizona State University Tempe, AZ USA EMAIL: 'pinillos' followed by '@asu.edu' EDUCATION: PhD Philosophy, Rutgers University. New Brunswick, NJ B.S. Mathematics, Tufts University. Medford, MA RESEARCH INTERESTS: I work mainly in Philosophy of Language, Experimental Philosophy and Epistemology. I also have interests in Philosophy of Mind, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Logic and Meta-Ethics. WORK IN PROGRESS: 'Experimental Evidence in Support of Anti-Intellectualism About Knowledge' with Shawn Simpson. See this for a discussion on some of our results. 'Millianism, Relationism and Attitude Ascriptions' (Parts of the paper were presented at an invited conference on reference in Parma, Italy (Sept 2010))
SynopsisSuppose we look at pair of name occurrences, such as ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Hesperus’, and inquire about its meaning. A traditional Millian will say there is nothing to the meaning of this pair that can’t be straightforwardly derived from the facts that the first ‘Hesperus’ refers to Hesperus and the second ‘Hesperus’ (also) refers to Hesperus. A semantic relationist may disagree with the Millian but not necessarily because they reject Millianism. The relationist may well accept the Millian dictum that the meaning of a proper name is exhausted by its reference. Rather, the relationist may disagree because she thinks that there is a further relational semantic feature of the pair that cannot be recovered by looking at the intrinsic semantic properties of the individual members: the members of the pair are said to be ‘coordinated’. This notion of coordination has been thought by Kit Fine and this author to play a central role in language and thought. Fine has further argued that coordination can even solve what is perhaps the toughest problem for Millians: the behavior of proper names in attitude contexts. Scott Soames, on the other hand, is not optimistic about Fine’s proposal. In this paper, I assess semantic relationism’s prospects for solving the Millian problem in light of the Soames/Fine debate. I conclude that there is good reason to think that relationism is on the right track. Knowledge and Moral Relativism (presented at an invited symposium---Pacific APA 2010, San Francisco CA). Parts of this paper will be presented at the 'Ordinary Language, Linguistics and Philosophy' conference in June 2011 at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. See also the semantic appendix
Synopsis: I raise some considerations in favor of a certain type of moral
relativism. I argue that it provides the best solution to a puzzle I construct about knowledge and morality. I also sketch a theory of moral standards in this longer version which incorporates some recent empirical work by Jonathan Haidt and others on Moral Foundations Theory. In the appendix here, I outline a semantics for moral language based on the notion of relative truth.
Knowledge and Dual Systems Considerations.
Individualistic Conceptions of Names Folk Relativism (experimental work) PUBLICATIONS: Pinillos, N. Ángel. 'Knowledge, Experiments and Practical Interests', Forthcoming New Essays On Knowledge Ascriptions (Eds. Jessica Brown and MIkkel Gerken) Oxford University Press. (Parts of this paper will be presented at an invited conference "Can Experimental Philosophy Contribute to Traditional Epistemology?", San Diego CA 2011; also at Group Session on Experimental Philosophy (invited), Boston, MA December 2010; and also at an invited conference at the University of Arizona (January 2011)). Please see discussion of this paper here, here, here and here. There is also some discussion of the general topic here. For a response to this paper, see W. Buckwalter (here) and also this paper by Chandra Sripada and Jason Stanley. Synopsis: Recently, we have seen a surge of fascinating experimental work on moral concepts. In contrast, there has been a lot less experimental research on epistemic notions, including the concept of knowledge. This is unfortunate since many philosophers have argued that the concept plays a central guiding role in our lives. In this paper, I describe some new experimental techniques and results that aim to shed light on knowledge and epistemology. The results presented here can be elegantly explained by adopting an interest relative notion of knowledge, a new idea that has been gaining currency in philosophy. [These are the first experimental studies to date which (perhaps) give some direct evidence that the human concept "knowledge" is sensitive to practical interests (this goes against prior research which has not detected sensitivity to practical interests)]. Pinillos, N. Ángel. Recent Work in Experimental Epistemology Forthcoming Philosophy Compass. Synopsis.I survey some recent experimental work relevant to assessing contextualism in epistemology as well as Interest Relative Invariantism and contrastivism. I discuss some difficulties with drawing strong conclusions from these studies. Pinillos, N. Ángel. 'Coreference and Meaning' or here (Springer). Philosophical Studies (154, 2). 2011. Parts of this paper were presented at the Pacific APA (2008), ASU, Rutgers University, Southern Methodist University, UCLA, and Vassar College. For discussion on this paper please see F. Récanati (pg. 19-25 ) here (and here June 2011) and K. Lawlor (pg. 27-54) here and (same pdf file) both at this 2010 conference on Mental Files (Paris, ENS). M. Murez here (pg. 47-78) at this 2009 conference on Relativism and Context Dependency (Paris, ENS). Synopsis: I argue that to fully capture certain cases of (co)reference, we must posit a new relational semantic primitive. Pinillos, N. Ángel., Nick Smith, G. Shyam Nair, Peter Marchetto, Cecilea Mun. 'Philosophy's New Challenge: Experiments and Intentional Action.' Mind and Language (February 2011) 26:1 (115-139). Please see discussion of this article here.To see what this research is about, see this New York Times article, this article in Slate, or this one in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Parts of this paper were presented at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland (2009) and also at an invited talk at the University of Arizona (2010). Synopsis: We propose three experimental designs for determining whether certain experimental philosophy results really give evidence that cast doubt on the current practice of using intuitions in traditional philosophy. We carry out these experiments on the Knobe Effect and conclude that the pessimism about traditional methods is unwarranted. [One of the experiments involved a novel use of the CRT (Cognitive Reflection Test). An example of this use can be found in this forthcoming paper 'Reflection and Reasoning in Moral Judgment' by Paxton, Ungar and Greene.] Pinillos, N. Ángel. 'Time Dilation, Context and Relative Truth'. or here (Wiley-Blackwell). Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. (January 2011) 82:1. 65-92. Parts of this paper were presented at the Mt. Plains Conference (2008). Parts of this paper will be presented at the 'Ordinary Language, Linguistics and Philosophy' Conference in June 2011 at The University of St. Andrews, Scotland. Synopsis: I argue that truth is relative (in the sense recently defended by some prominent analytical philosophers) by focusing on some semantic issues raised by Einstein's theory of relativity together with our ordinary attributions of truth. I also argue that whether some linguistic expressions admit of a relativistic semantics is "external" in the sense of Putnam/Burge. Pinillos, N. Ángel. 'Counting and Indeterminate Identity'. Mind (2003). Oxford Link. (I wrote this as a graduate student). Parts of this paper were presented at the Eastern APA (2002). Please see discussion of this article here (D. Hyde), here (D. Hyde) and here (R. Heck). Synopsis: I argue that it can't be the case that identity statements (a=b) are indeterminate (neither true nor false), where the indeterminacy is due to the world and not just language.
Pinillos, N. Ángel. Review of J. Saul "Simple Sentences, Substitution and Intuitions". Forthcoming Mind. Oxford University Press Link
'Experimental Philosophy' (with Wesley Buckwalter, Joshua Knobe, Shaun Nichols, Philip Robbins, Hagop Sarkissian, Chris Weigel, and Jonathan Weinberg) Oxford Bibliographies Online.
TEACHING (All at ASU): Fall 2006: Introduction to Philosophy, Seminar on Coreference
Spring 2007: Philosophy of Language, Argument and Exposition
Fall 2007: Symbolic Logic, Introduction to Philosophy
Spring 2008: Philosophy of Language, Modal Logic
Fall 2008: Argument and Exposition, 20th Century Philosophy
Spring 2009: Philosophy of Language, Seminar on Relativism
Fall 2009: Argument and Exposition, Metaphysics Spring 2010: Symbolic Logic, Seminar on Moral Concepts Fall 2010: Symbolic Logic, Philosophy of Language
Spring 2011: Introduction to Philosophy, Seminar on Philosophical Intuitions LINKS: My dissertation committee members: Kit Fine, John Hawthorne, Stephen Neale (Chair), Ted Sider. Philosophical Gourmet Report (Ranking of graduate programs in philosophy) ON BEING A PHILOSOPHY MAJOR The discipline of philosophy is an active area of research covering fundamental topics on morality, society, knowledge, language, mind, art and many others. Philosophy majors get an opportunity to think, discuss and write about important problems in these and other foundational areas. At the same time, they learn critical thinking skills and how to communicate effectively. The study of philosophy also emphasizes the questioning of assumptions and thinking "outside the box", a skill that is essential in creative problem-solving. As a consequence, philosophy majors are well prepared for a number of careers. For more on this, see this New York Times Article about the increasing popularity of the philosophy major. Also, philosophy majors perform exceptionally well on standardized tests for graduate study including law and business. In fact, philosophy majors perform the second best in both the law (LSAT) and business (GMAT) graduate examinations. And contrary to popular myth, philosophy majors earn more (mid career) than many majors, including business, biology, and communications. It is not advisable, however, to choose a course of study based solely on these considerations. All majors expose students to fascinating and important areas of investigations, and teach students valuable skills. The right major for you should be one that brings out the best in you, and helps you achieve your potential. In general, you can't go wrong if you pick a major you love, excel at it, and combine it with a broad and challenging range of courses. 
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