Current Projects 

My research focuses on the philosophy of language and foundations of cognitive science. My main focus is the nature of linguistic meaning, the operations that produce complex meanings and thoughts, and their interaction with context, memory and general reasoning. Those topics overlap with central topics in philosophy of mind, including questions about the structure of concepts and their role in judgment and decision-making. I also work on the foundations of cognitive science and neuroscience, focusing on reductionism, multiple-realizability, and the nature of scientific inference and inter-level explanation. I briefly describe my current and future work in each of these topics below, and include some selected papers. 

language, meaning, and Natural logic  

 Most linguists and philosophers agree that the language system includes a syntax and a compositional semantics. Recently, several influential semanticists have argued that the language system also includes an automatic inferential system---sometimes called a `natural logic'---that can determine when expressions are informationally useless, and mark them as unacceptable. Building on this work, I have advanced three claims. First, I argue that the natural logic used by the language system is largely classical. This suggests that we need not posit a logic that is idiosyncratic and domain specific for language, as various extant accounts have done. Second, I argue that the logical forms of natural language expressions are representations which can support general reasoning. This contrasts with several recent accounts which postulate various levels of representation between linguistic logical form and the representations which support general cognition and inference. Third, I argue that this view works best when combined with the hypothesis that the lexicon encodes, and the language system has access to, rich sets of encyclopedic and other information. Taken together, these claims support a view of the language system as, ultimately, a very powerful inferential device, i.e., a system that does a lot of useful yet unconscious/automatic thinking for us. 

Selected papers: 

  • The Logicality of Language: Contextualism vs. Semantic Minimalism Mind (forthcoming) [p. draft here]

CONCEPTS and SOCIAL COGNITION  

Multidimensional theories can directly inform the study of concepts and how they affect social cognition. For example, research on implicit bias assumes that concepts encode salient or statistical associations between features and categories, e.g., stripped is encoded as salient and typical of tigers. Similar structures are thought underlie stereotypes, such as when the negative feature lazy is used to represent entire social groups. However, concepts also encode additional information, esp., how conceptual features ‘depend on each other’, which determines their degree of centrality. In a series of collaborative papers, we have argued that these non-associative, dependency networks can encode socially significant biases. These biases are undetectable by measures of saliency/typicality, and have been largely ignored by research in social psychology and the philosophical accounts of implicit bias that rest on them. 

Selected papers: