Drafts Available Upon Request
TITLE REMOVED FOR PEER REVIEW - About the puzzle of copredication, the quest to find plausible semantic values for sentences like The book will weigh five pounds if it's ever published, where the predicates appear to apply to different things (e.g. a copy of a book will weigh five pounds but some ). In particular, I consider sentences involving numerical quantifiers like Three books are on the shelf.
Copredications with Multdimensional Individuals - Also about the puzzle of copredication. I observe copredications exhibit striking failures of the substitutivity of identicals. I draw out two consequences: i) that copredications pose no special problem for truth-conditional semantics, contrary to what is previously assumed and ii) that the substitution failures are best explained by revising the compositional semantics for copredications. I then propose a theory where copredication-supporting nouns denote n-tuples of individuals, and predicates are type-shifted to predicates of individuals by means of a silent predication operator in logical form.
Truth-Conditional Semantics Tells No Lies (joint work with Kenneth Black) - in recent years, some authors have repurposed the liar paradox into an objection to truth-conditional semantic theories (we call the objection The Liar Challenge). The idea is that liar sentences (e.g. "this sentence is not true"), have inconsistent T-sentences (e.g. ""This sentence is not true" is true iff this sentence is not true") and therefore truth-conditional theories are false (since they derive T-sentences as theorems). We argue the Liar Challenge is mistaken: first, we point to analagous problems for the Liar for non-truth-conditional theories. Second, the challenge assumes the truth-predicate used in the metalanguage of semantic theorising is the meaning of ordinay language "true"; and we argue this is an empirical hypothesis that's fully detachable from truth-conditional theories.
In Preparation
The Liar Paradox as Presupposition Failure (joint with Kenneth Black) - we argue on the basis of sentences like `The Bible is true' that natural-language true and other aletheic predicates applies not to sentences or propositions but to objects first and foremost to objects. We then sketch a new semantics for `true' where it's a presupposition trigger, and explain how it diagnoses liar sentences suffering as suffering from presupposition failure whilst avoiding typical revenge paradoxes. We conclude by suggesting that the problematic notion underpinning the paradox is not truth as such, but of an entity's possessing content, echoing recent work by Bacon and Goodman.
A project about the relationship between retraction/deniability and semantic content.
A project about the metaphysics of repeatable artworks.