PUBLICATIONS

The Unity of Pictorial Experience.

Forthcoming in Philosophers' Imprint. https://doi.org/10.3998/phimp.3559

You can find a penultimate draft here. 

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 these features at the same time. The account I give forces a considerable reconfiguration of the space of possible theories of seeing-in.

PUBLIC WRITING

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

Times Literary Supplement. 

See here.

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 attempt to add to the growing pile 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. It resembles Williamson's 'knowledge-first' account of knowledge in several respects.

A paper on pictorial vehicles of representation. (Under review) 

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', while Dominic Lopes and Rob Hopkins discusses their 'designs'. In this paper, I offer an alternative answer that centers the idea of a pictorial vehicle of representation. I argue that this notion is better suited than the others to illuminating our understanding of pictures. 

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 literature on slurs and the state of contemporary philosophy of language in general. 

A paper on depiction and resemblance. (In preparation)

Many people have thought that depiction, by its nature, has something to do with resemblance. I argue that this is not true across the board. Resemblance relations do not generally characterize certain stylistic forms of depiction. I make the case for this by reference to Charles Schultz’s cartoon of Charlie Brown. The upshot of my discussion of the case is not limited to the viability of resemblance theories, but sheds light on the fundamental nature of depiction. 

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

In his paper 'Words', David Kaplan suggests that the key to resolving Frege’s Puzzle about informative identity statements is to attend to the differences between (e.g.) ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ qua syntactic entities. I develop this thought by defending a novel account of what is involved in understanding an uttered name. The idea that grasping an uttered name's meaning is a separate state from hearing or perceiving the name is almost universally accepted, but I think mistaken. I argue that the state of understanding an uttered name does not divide into two components, (corresponding to our engagements with its vehicle and content respectively), but that it is a single indivisible state of perceiving the expression.