Research

Bad Words

Slurs and deadnames: social norms that shape conversational dynamics.

Slurs: The Sound and the Fury

Noûs: forthcoming

Slurs have a stinging impact that is virtually inescapable – in any context, whether used or mentioned, slurs cause a psychological slap. This observation makes available a sweeping style of objection to content-based theories of slurs, and in doing so paves the way for non-content-based theories. Such views face two orthogonal choice-points. First, what exactly triggers a slur’s impact? Second, what psychological mechanism links trigger to effect? After charting the (heretofore uncharted) conceptual terrain, I defend a word-based prohibitionist account of slurs’ impactfulness. Along the way, I demonstrate the importance of empirical psycholinguistic research in assessing competing theories of slurs.

Slurs, Words, and Articulations [critical notice]

Analytic Philosophy: forthcoming — preprint

The Articulation Account provides a novel explanation of how slurs shock and offend their audiences, and is defended by Stojnic and Lepore (2025). The account is defined by two primary commitments: to being articulation-based and to being associationist. I look at these commitments and consider some reasons to be hesitant about adopting them. Along the way, I discuss the inheritance phenomenon, one of the major pieces of evidence given in support of the Articulation Account, and question its scope.

Deadnaming, Taboo, and Linguistic Authority

Mind 134 (536): 1015-1039 (2025) — publisher page / PDF

To deadname is to call a trans person by a name they have rejected due to their gender transition. Deadnaming has a visceral impact, and is presumptively blameworthy. I offer an account of these properties in terms of taboo violations and acts of linguistic authority. Linguistic authority is posited to derive from a fundamental interest in being the author of one’s own social persona(e). I also consider, and reject, a semantic account of the behaviour of deadnames.

The Impact of Deadnaming

Philosophical Quarterly: advance online (2025) — publisher page / PDF

To deadname is to call a trans person by a name they have rejected. Deadnaming has a visceral impact. Why? This paper canvasses several possible answers. While deadnaming may sometimes evoke painful memories or communicate that the speaker is transphobic, I suggest that deadnaming is hurtful for fundamentally prohibitionist reasons. When a deadname is used, it violates a prohibition that has been enacted by a trans person’s exercise of linguistic authority; violating this prohibition is impactful. I sketch how this explanation of impact can be readily extended to provide a rights-based account of the normative dimensions of deadnaming, too.

Good Words

Metaphor: how creativity and convention in come together in metaphorical speech.

Metaphor, Truth, and Composition: Against Non-Cognitivism

Inquiry: advance online (2026) — publisher page / PDF

Non-Cognitivism about metaphor – the thesis that there is no such thing as metaphorical meaning or content – is defended in a 1978 paper by Donald Davidson, and the view has lately enjoyed a revival due to work by Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone. I argue that while non-cognitivists are right to emphasize that certain characteristic effects of metaphor – especially its relationship to ‘seeing as’ and the imagination – cannot be explained in terms of meaning, it does not follow that there is no work for metaphorical meaning to do. Metaphorical language (i) has non-literal truth conditions, which call for explanation in terms of meaning and content, and (ii) is compositionally operative: to determine the content of a complex sentence that embeds a metaphorical phrase, metaphorical contents must be composed along with literal contents. This fact is best explained through recourse to semantic compositionality and therefore the notion of metaphorical meaning.

Metaphor and Ambiguity

Philosophical Studies 181 (11): 3059-3087 (2024) — publisher page / PDF

What is the status of metaphorical meaning? Is it an input to semantic composition or is it derived post-semantically? This question has divided theorists for decades. Griceans argue that metaphorical meaning/content is a kind of implicature that is generated through post-semantic processing. Others, such as the contextualists, argue that metaphorical meaning is an input to semantic composition and thus part of “what is said” by an utterance. I think both sides are right: metaphorical meaning is an input to semantic composition and it is also derived post-semantically. I explain how this is possible by positing that successful metaphor involves coining a new word on the spot; this new metaphorical word is ambiguous with its literal counterpart. I show that an ambiguity theory of metaphor, far from being the obvious non-starter that it has long been treated as, actually offers elegant predictions of a whole suite of otherwise recalcitrant linguistic data.

Distinguishing Two Kinds of Fictionalism: Metaphor, Autism, and the Imagination

Synthese 204 (128): 1-23 (2024) — publisher page / PDF

Fictionalist theories of metaphor hold that metaphorical utterances aim at fictionality. Fictionalism successfully explains speaker judgments about the truth and aptness of metaphorical utterances, and it also accurately predicts the data around metaphor and autistic individuals (who have deficits in both imaginative play and metaphor comprehension). But fictionalism is not a viable theory of metaphor, despite these merits, because of (what I call) the problem of semantic entailment: semantic entailments that are normally valid fail under metaphorical interpretation, but fictionalism predicts otherwise. I argue this to ultimately show that theorists of metaphor should reject the linguistic side of the fictionalist story; but this leaves open the possibility of accepting psychological fictionalism, i.e., the hypothesis that fiction/make-believe is central to the cognitive processing of metaphor. Coupling psychological fictionalism with a different theory of metaphorical meaning and content (such as contextualism) promises to keep the explanatory upsides of traditional fictionalism while avoiding the problem of semantic entailment.

Rule-Following

What (I think) Wittgenstein thought.

Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Meaning by Alexander Miller [book review]

Review of Metaphysics 78 (3): 554-556 (2025) — publisher page / preprint

Semantic Dispositionalism and the Rule-Following Paradox

Metaphilosophy 53 (5): 685-695 (2022) — publisher page / PDF

In virtue of what does a sign have meaning? This is the question raised by Wittgenstein's rule-following considerations. Semantic dispositionalism is a (type of) theory that purports to answer this question. The present paper argues that semantic dispositionalism faces a heretofore unnoticed problem, one that ultimately comes down to its reliance on unanalyzed notions of repeated types of signs. In the context of responding to the rule-following paradox – and offering a putative solution to it – this amounts to simply assuming a solution to the problem in one domain and using it to solve the same problem in another. Given, moreover, the level at which the rulefollowing paradox undercuts dispositionalism – the level of the notion of a sign's repetition – the objections made to the view also rule out causal/informational theories of meaning as well as communitarian/assertion-theoretic ones as potential solutions to the rule-following paradox.

Resolution in §201 of the Philosophical Investigations

Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (2): 393-402 (2020) — publisher page / PDF

It is widely thought that, in §201 of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein reveals himself to oppose a definite view or theory of rule-following. I argue that, due to the self-undermining character of that section, no such interpretation should be accepted. Then I sketch a reading of Wittgenstein’s method that accounts for the paradoxical nature of §201, and I show how this methodology is realized in his remarks on following a rule.

Excursus on Wittgenstein's Rule-Following Considerations

Nordic Wittgenstein Review 6 (1): 53-83 (2017) — publisher page / PDF

In this essay, I seek to demonstrate the interplay of philosophical voices – particularly, that of a platonist voice and a communityagreement-view voice – that drives Wittgenstein’s rule-following dialectic forward; and I argue that each voice succumbs to a particular form of dialectical oscillation that renders its response to the problem of rule-following philosophically inadequate. Finally, I suggest that, by seeing and taking stock of the dilemma in which these responses to the skeptical problem are caught, we can come to appreciate Wittgenstein’s own view of what might constitute a proper a response to the so-called problem of rule-following. This view can be preliminarily characterized by saying that Wittgenstein’s aim is to dissolve the temptation to philosophically rebut the skeptical challenge posed by the rule-following dialectic, an aim he achieves by revealing the semantic emptiness of the apparent sentences that raise the skeptical problem.