Work in Progress
Work in Progress
Click on a title below to see the associated abstract. Some of these projects have readable drafts. If you'd like to see them, please send me an email at grayaidand@gmail.com.
Intransitive Coordination
There is a representational relation that has traditionally gone under the name sameness of sense or sameness of concept (or of guise, etc.). This is the relation that must hold between two co-referential representations for their coreference to be logically productive. Call this relation ‘coordination’. Treating coordination as, fundamentally, a kind of sameness (of sense, concept, or of anything else) forecloses certain questions about it. I follow Fine (2007) in giving a more abstract characterization of coordination as the semantic requirement of coreference. I use this characterization to explore whether we can make sense of coordination as an intransitive relation (something that is inconsistent with the sameness picture). After motivating the exploration, I show how we can alter the traditional account of coordination to make it intransitive. But any such account is incomplete without a model of the rational relations induced by intransitive coordination. And standard logical systems are not fit for purpose. I develop a formal system that explicates the logic of intransitive coordination. This has surprising consequences. Most notably, it makes available a novel form of context externalism, according to which the rational evaluation of a collection of transitions is not determined by the rational evaluation of the members of that collection.
Name Dynamics
This paper explores the idea that what is characteristic of names is that they are devices for achieving reference to individuals across a range of contexts. Names, on this view, refer to cross-contextual discourse referents; that is, entities which are assumed to be available for reference, with the name in question, in arbitrary contexts. After characterizing this notion, I will examine: i) whether there is any evidence for it, and ii) what approaches to the semantics of names are consistent with it. I will tentatively conclude that approaches to names that treat their dynamic role as analogous to pronouns, demonstratives, or definite descriptions are ill-suited to capturing this feature.
Perry Cases and Rationalizing Explanations (w/ Mahrad Almotahari)
In recent work we’ve argued that progress can be made on debates about attitude content by articulating an implicit assumption operative in many discussions of Frege’s Puzzle: Explanationism. This is the view that attitude content plays a genuine causal-explanatory role and that we should individuate such contents in whatever way best fits with that assumption. Explicitly articulating that assumption involves offering a story about i) the form of intentional explanation, and ii) whether all intentional explanations, or only some privileged subset, are content-carving.
In this paper, we extend this work to focus on the essential indexical. We have several goals: to show that articulating the Explanationist framework allows to distinguish positions in the debate about the essential indexical that are otherwise easy to conflate; to bring out a difficulty in being a sceptic about the essential indexical that has been overlooked; and, in spite of that difficulty, to use the framework to introduce a novel argument for scepticism about the essential indexical.