Work in Progress

Some of these projects have readable drafts. If you'd like to see them, please send me an email at grayaidand AT gmail DOT com. 

Coordination, De Se Thought, and Russellian Exceptionalism (with Mahrad Almotahari)

Russellians, Relationists, and Fregeans disagree about the nature of propositional-attitude content and the role of coordination and de se thought in the explanation of rational behavior. We articulate a framework about the form such explanations should take and then use this framework to identify more subtle versions of each doctrine. Through a series of interrelated arguments, we construct a case for an under-appreciated form of Russellianism about attitude content. This view carves content no more finely than its referential features allow; it treats coordination as a matter of normal functional implementation; and it clears the way for a novel argument in support of de se skepticism. A no-less-central aim of the paper is to demonstrate that being more explicit about the broader framework in which these debates take place reveals unexplored possibilities.

Coreference and the Attitudes

Frege's Puzzle teaches us that it must be possible for coreference to be encoded in the attitudes without being explicitly represented. Traditionally, this encoding has been understood in terms of a requirement of coreference imposed by the semantic architecture of the attitudes (for example, in the fact that sense determines reference). But this traditional picture seems to be in tension with externalism about attitude content. After introducing the problem, and rejecting some extant solutions, I introduce a novel account of architecturally-required coreference. One of the upshots of this account is that it is possible to reason faultlessly from true premises to a false conclusion.  

Some Models of Intransitive Coordination

Coordination is rationally-relevant coreference: when representations of the same object are coordinated, this makes a difference to the rational relations—e.g. entailment, incompatibility—in which those representations stand. Traditionally, coordination has been understood as a kind of recurrence—either of a symbol or an element of content (i.e. a sense). I follow Fine (2007) in giving a more abstract characterization of coordination in terms of a representational 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 coordination-as-recurrence picture). I develop different possible intransitive accounts of coordination, noting their strengths, weaknesses, and potential applications.