Juan Murillo Vargas

I'm broadly interested in the relationship between language and thought. I'm especially interested in the ways thought is and isn't language-like, and what this tells us about thought and language.

Currently I'm thinking a lot about questions: what they are, what it takes to represent them, what role they play in how we think and talk, and how we should study them empirically.

I also have a suite of other interests. On the more mind-y side I'm interested in the nature of intentionality and what a naturalistically respectable theory of it ought to look like. On the more language-y side I'm interested in the pragmatics of imperatives and the semantics of attitude verbs (especially desires). At their intersection I'm interested in how thinking about representational format and cognitive architecture can help us make progress on the semantics-pragmatics interface.

Published Papers

How Language-Like is the Language of Thought? Forthcoming in Ergo. In which I argue it's not obvious what makes the language of thought similar and dissimilar to natural language. This is a problem for the language of thought hypothesis--it threatens to make it trivially true or obviously false. I argue on empirical and theoretical grounds that we should think natural language and the language of thought are similar insofar as they have consequence relations. This allows that the language of thought can feature non-propositional contents, contra standard formulations of the language of thought hypothesis. I end with some goodies on concepts, Frege's Puzzle, and the nature of intentionality more generally.

Papers I'm Currently Working On

What Does it Take to Represent a Question? [In preparation]. In which I defend a pluralist answer to the titular question and explore its consequences. I presented this at the 2025 Inquiry Workshop in Memphis (under the title Prevalence and Paucity) and at SPP2025 in Ithaca (under the title Questions, Possibilities, and Questions of Possibilities). I'll be presenting this at CUNY in December.

Semantics and Pragmatics: An Architectural Approach. [In Preparation]. In which I argue that semantics competence and pragmatic competence constitute different cognitive (sub)-systems. I argue this suggests linguistic competence and non-linguistic cognition are separate cognitive (sub-) systems too. I end by arguing that while one can be a modularist about semantic competence and/or pragmatic competence, one needn't be.

Papers In The Backburner

Planning and Directing (with Dan Harris). In which we argue that utterances like "shut the door, but you might not" are infelicitious because they break rational requirements on plans. A version of this paper was presented at the 2024 Agency and Intentions in Language workshop and at MIT's work-in-Progress Series.

Desires are Definitely Not Propositional Attitudes. In which I offer several linguistic, psychological, and meta-semantic arguments for the titular claim.

Questions in Psychosemantics. In which I argue that many popular meta-semantic principles can't handle representations whose content is a question.

Putting Context in Context. In which I argue that formal models of conversation that assume conversations centre on the common ground play various non-explanatory roles in contemporary practice. Upshot: whether these models are perniciously idealized depends both on what kind of explanation one wants and whether one even wants an explanation at all.