Elek Lane

I am a postdoc at the University of Vienna affiliated with the Knowledge in Crisis project. My Ph.D. is from the University of California, Berkeley, where I was advised by John MacFarlane and Seth Yalcin. Before that, I was an undergrad at the University of Chicago.

I work in the philosophy of language. My research is on the capacities, conventions, and forms of knowledge that enable communication. So far, I have approached this overarching question from three interrelated directions.

1. Metaphor: here I investigate how creativity and convention interact with each other in the production and comprehension of figurative speech.

2. Slurs and deadnames: I am interested in how non-linguistic social norms can play a role in shaping conversational dynamics.

3. Wittgenstein and rule-following: this research is on foundational questions of meaning that arise in Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations.

Within all of these streams, I am interested in bringing together semantic and pragmatic models of the exchange of information, socio-ethical explanatory resources, and a realistic picture of norm psychology.

Lo, my curriculum vitae.