My papers can be downloaded from: https://philpeople.org/profiles/alex-davies-1.

There are four issues that I'm currently focusing on in my research (i.e. stuff you should expect to see future publications from me about). I'm always looking for collaborators to work on these projects with. So if you want to know more about what I'm doing, or/and you have similar interests then get in touch. This includes master's and doctoral candidates.

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Organizational design and Stabilizing the Meaning of Context-Sensitive Texts: How does the design of an organization surrounding a text (e.g. a set of guidelines, a grading rubric, a syllabus description) help or hinder the text to develop a stable interpretation across its different users, despite it being composed of context-sensitive constructions? I'm interested in examining this in its applications: e.g. the role of organizational design in the application of a law across multiple organizations (e.g. sexual harassment guidelines across the universities of a country that has a sexual harassment law). This issue is now being pursued in the Metacontexts project (2024-2025) financed by the Estonian Research Council. More about that here.

Science (Mis)Communication: Researchers into the efficacy of science communication do not attend to the extent to which language is context-sensitive. What role does the fact that the language scientists use to communicate their findings hinder their ability to be understood as intended? (see here).

Social Media as a Linguistic Context: Not all linguistic contexts are equal in how conducive they are to (mis)communication. For instance, protagonists to a romance gone sour are surely more likely to interpret each other's utterances with meanings that were not intended, than the protagonists of a strong friendship. What then of social media? Are there distinctive features of social media which make it more or less likely to generate divergent interpretations of common "utterances"? (draft paper in progress for the OUP collection Conversations Online (edited by Patrick Connolly, Sandy Goldberg, and Jennifer Saul)).

Contextual Injustice and "Eastern Europe": It's possible for the contents of context-sensitive constructions to be set in ways that unjustly hurt people. The cases of contextual injustice so-far studied by anglophone philosophers have paradigmatically been closely related to salient issues of social justice in the USA. An undertheorized phenomenon is the way that countries that commonly referred to as "Eastern Europe" are spoken about with context-sensitive constructions by people who don't live there. I'm interested in better understanding what may be wrong with such uses of context-sensitive constructions and whether arguments can be given against such uses which would be found compelling by those engaging in the uses. (draft paper in progress).