Research

I work on foundational questions in philosophy of language and mind.  My research can be divided into four related clusters:

1. Linguistic Meaning, Language Use, and Speech Acts

Linguistic expressions are meaningful and that is why competent speakers can use them to perform speech acts and communicate. But what is it for an expression to be meaningful in a language like English or Estonian? Starting with my dissertation, I’ve been developing a new version of a Rule-Based view on which for a linguistic expression to have a meaning in a public language is for it to be governed by a conventionally accepted rule that permits its use in certain conditions (e. g. its use-conditions). I've spelled out the view in detail and shown that it’s consistent with established frameworks in descriptive semantics (e.g. truth-conditional semantics, Kaplan’s characters) and is not subject to the Frege-Geach problem, and explained why it has been found continually attractive from Strawson to Kaplan (see here). In a different paper, I argue that Lewis’s famous picture in terms of conventional regularities in use should be supplanted by the picture in terms of conventionally accepted rules of use since only the latter can explain how one can use an expression meaningfully while intentionally misusing it.  

I’m currently bringing this research together by writing a book on the nature of linguistic meaning (see here).

I've also written about the normativity of meaning and linguistic mistakes (see here), a two-part overview of rule-following and Kripke's skeptical paradox (see here and here), meaning change and its relation to debates about how to think of conceptual engineering (see here), and speech acts. Recently, I've been thinking about the nature of saying, assertion, and telling-that. Another new interest is the possibility, nature, and justification of formal regulation of language use by institutions like Academie Francaise and the Institute for the Estonian Language.

2. Rules and Normativity

We are everywhere surrounded by rules that constrain us but also make certain things possible. Regulative rules like laws and social rules regulate our everyday life and thereby support its smooth functioning. Constitutive rules make possible playing games, and, in my view, speaking languages and performing speech acts like assertion.  But what are regulative rules in general and how are constitutive rules special? My research on rules is focused on these and related questions (for a quick overview, see here). On my view, regulative rules are general normative contents that are in force due to human activity: enactment by an authority or acceptance by a community. Rules are unlike orders in having propositional content involving the attribution of deontic statuses but unlike normative truths in not being themselves truth-evaluable. I also show how running rules together with normative truths has led to a common objection to Hart’s practice theory of rules first offered by Warnock, and how proper appreciation of the distinction shows that it has no bite (see here). Constitutive rules are special in that they always specify necessary and sufficient conditions for the antecedent action to have a particular deontic status and in that they’re put in force for the sole reason that it makes the new rule-constituted action possible. And to perform a rule-constituted action is for you to perform the antecedent action while the rule is in force for you (see here). I've also argued that we need to revise Suits’s classical account of game-playing which builds in voluntariness in the light of the possibility of forced games. Even though players typically voluntarily put the rules in force for themselves, this is not essential for playing. What is necessary to play is that someone puts the rules in force for the players for the reason so that they could play (see here, and also this Youtube video by the channel Game for Thought).  I'm currently thinking about what it is to accept a rule and the nature of the sort of normativity characteristic of law, social rules, games, and language more generally.

3. Propositional Thought and the Metaphysics of Propositions

Propositional thought is at the core of the rational mind and propositions are widely used in accounts of mind and language. But what is it to have a propositional thought and what are propositions? Recent years have seen the emergence of Naturalist views on which our ability to have propositional thoughts is taken to be explanatory of what propositions are and their representational properties. For example, both Hanks and Soames have proposed an Act-Based view on which our ability to propositionally represent is understood in terms of the act of predication and propositions are identified with types of resultant acts like judgments. My research on propositional thought has been focused on developing a new version of such a view by answering a range of questions about predication and judgment. In an early paper, I argued that Hanks's version on which predication is taken to be forceful is subject to the Frege-Geach problem and that his solution to it doesn't work (see here).  In a more recent paper I  revisited the issue and argued that while Hanks is right that predication is forceful, Soames is right that we should evade the Frege-Geach problem, and offered a  version of the view that does both (see here). Recently, I've been thinking about the metaphysical relations between reference, predication, and judgment (see here) and how we should think of the nature of the properties we predicate. 

4. Perception

Perception somehow puts us in touch with things in the world and their properties and thereby provides us with part of the subject matter for our thoughts and evidence about how things are. But does it do it by establishing a genuine relation to mind-independent reality or does it rather represent it? Does it give us access to only so-called low-level properties like colors and shapes, or also high-level properties like kind properties, semantic properties, and moral properties? And is it non-conceptual or conceptual and how exactly does it provide evidence? My research on perception engages with all of these questions. In earlier work, I argued against views on which we can perceptually experience different types of high-level properties (see here, here, and here). My general take on these issues is that we need to sharply distinguish non-conceptual sensations and perceptual experiences from conceptual seemings which are what categorize things into higher-level kinds, and that the right combination of experiences and seemings are what provide perceptual evidence (see here).  Recently, I've been thinking about the metaphysics of perception, the nature of perceptual content, and how to make sense of perceptual representation of property instances/tropes (see here).