PUBLICATIONS

The Unity of Pictorial Experience.

2026. Philosophers' Imprint. 26: 11. https://doi.org/10.3998/phimp.3559 

Seeing-in is the experience of seeing something in a picture. Richard Wollheim observed that this experience displays a puzzling combination of features. On the one hand, seeing-in is experienced as a single, unified experience. It is not like the disjoint experience of visualizing something into a scene that one perceives. On the other hand, seeing-in is 'twofold': it involves being visually aware of two distinct objects – an array of ink-marks, and the depicted scene – in two distinct ways. We perceive the ink-marks as before us, but the form of our visual awareness of the depicted object is different. In this paper, I demonstrate how seeing-in can have both of these features at the same time. The account I give forces a considerable reconfiguration of the space of possible theories of seeing-in.

Pictorial Vehicles of Representation. 

Forthcoming. British Journal of Aesthetics. 

In virtue of what does a picture depict what it does? Different notions have been developed in answer to this question. John Kulvicki presents the notion of a picture's 'syntax', and Dominic Lopes introduces the idea of a picture's 'design'. In this paper, I offer an alternative answer that centers the idea of (what I call) a 'pictorial vehicle of representation'. Unlike the other two notions, this is an intentional object of perception, in Anscombe's sense. I use this notion to forefront an attraction conception of pictorial realism. 

UNDER REVIEW/IN PROGRESS

Please email me for drafts.

A paper on slurs. (Under review)

Some utterances of slurs are derogatory. What grounds or explains the fact that a slur’s utterance is derogatory, when it is? Call this the 'Explanatory Question'. Some people have answered it by suggesting that it is because of what slurs mean, while others have pointed to the words’ extra-semantic associations. In this paper, I do not add to the growing list of answers to the Explanatory Question, but suggest that we call time on asking it. I offer a list of adequacy constraints that an answer would have to meet, and argue that all existing answers to the question fail to meet at least one constraint. Moreover, I give reason to think that jointly satisfying the constraints is in fact impossible.  If that is right, Primitivism follows. Primitivism is the view that there is no non-trivial explanation of the fact that utterances of slurs derogate, when they do. In this respect, it resembles Williamson's 'knowledge-first' account of knowledge.

A paper on depiction and resemblance. (Under review)

Some people have thought that understanding a depictive picture is a matter of identifying resemblances between it and its subject matter. In this paper, I argue against this assumption, on the grounds that it fails to respect the fact that pictures give us visual experiences of their subject matters. (Richard Wollheim also made this point, but did not give an argument for it.) The paper presents a case for thinking that the visual experience sustained by pictures of their subject matters is in fact sui generis. 

A chapter on Jennifer Hornsby on derogatory language. (Invited contribution to a Festschrift on Jennifer Hornsby, edited by A. Haddock, M. Hesse and W. Small)

In this chapter, I discuss Hornsby's insightful but neglected 2001 paper 'Meaning and Uselessness: How to Think about Derogatory Words' in relation to the recent literature on slurs and the state of contemporary philosophy of language in general. 

A paper on Frege's Puzzle.  (In preparation)

Frege famously observed that co-referential names can appear in sentences to which it is possible for a rational person, who understands both sentences, to take different attitudes. This is typically taken to imply that the 'Direct Reference Thesis' is false, according to which names refer to their bearers, and that is all. In this paper, I argue that this conclusion is mistaken, by developing an account of the state of understanding a name, which reconciles Frege's observation with the Direct Reference Thesis. The account parts way in a significant respect from the extanct characterizations of this state in the literature on perception. 

A paper on threefoldness in pictures. (In preparation)

Some depiction theorists have argued that understanding a depictive picture is a threefold experience: it involves being aware of the picture's surface, what the picture refers to, and an intermediary entity that the picture 'encodes'. I undermine the reasons for this position by criticizing the nature of intentionally on which it relies. 

PUBLIC WRITING

Book Review of Irad Kimhi's "Thinking and Being".

Times Literary Supplement. 

See here.