Dissertation

I defended my dissertation, The Pragmatics and Epistemology of Conceptual Disagreement, in 2019. The dissertation was advised by Mark Lance. The first reader was Quill R Kukla. The committee members were Kate Withy, Bryce Huebner, and Sally McConnell-Ginet (Professor Emerita of Linguistics, Cornell University). The dissertation can be viewed here.

Abstract: When speakers defend conflicting understandings of a concept that plays a fundamental role in how they make sense of the world, it is unclear whether they can rationally resolve their disagreement. To address this epistemological puzzle, I argue that we first need to confront the question of what speakers are doing when they defend or articulate an understanding of a concept – what kind of speech act they are performing. I argue that speakers are carrying out acts of stipulation. I lay out a detailed account of the pragmatics of stipulation and argue that with this pragmatic structure clarified, we can open up novel resources for defusing the epistemological challenge of deep, conceptual disagreement.