Papers

Here are some papers of mine, as well as my PhD thesis, for the real fans.

"Social Inconsistency" (Ergo 9(2), 2022). This paper argues for the possibility of inconsistency among the social facts. It describes a mechanism whereby the distinctive malleability of social facts, combined with the possibility of basic human error, makes it possible for a consistent physical reality to ground an inconsistent social reality. You can find the penultimate draft below and the published version here.

"Hybrid Collective Intentionality" (Synthese 199(1-2), (2021), pp. 2267-3403). This paper is joint work with Roberta Ferrario and Daniele Porello. It develops an interpretationist theory of collective attitudes which is suited to hybrid collectives, that is, collectives consisting of both people and other material objects. You can find the published version or online here.

"Prospects for a Cognitive Norm Account of Logical Consequence" (In: Pavel Arazim & Michal Danzak (eds.), The Logica Yearbook 2014, College Publications (2015), pp. 13-32.) Riffing on the literature on the normative import of logical consequence, this paper explores an account on which entailment relations consist in requirements on rational agents. You can find a penultimate draft below.

"A Paradox of Rejection" (Synthese 191(18), (2014), pp. 4451-4464). This paper outlines a self-referential paradox involving the propositional attitude of rejection. I argue that it shows us something about the in-principle limits of cognitive agents. You can find the penultimate draft below, and the published version here.

The Metaphysical Commitments of Logic (PhD Thesis). The main question I ask is whether our use of logic (specifically, the first-order logical constants) tell us something about the structure of reality, as some (e.g. Ted Sider) have argued. I argue that they don't. Along the way (this is the interesting bit) I develop an expressivist semantics for logical vocabulary which associates logically complex sentences with structured attitudes towards sets of atomic propositions. I'm currently redeveloping this semantics for some other philosophical applications.