Online research in philosophy

Empty names vary in their referential features. Some of them, as Kripke argues, are necessarily empty -- those that are used to create works of fiction. Others appear to be contingently empty -- those which fail to refer at this world, but which do uniquely identify particular objects in other possible worlds. I argue against Kripke's metaphysical and semantic reasons for thinking that either some or all empty names are necessarily non-referring, because these reasons are either not the right reasons (...) for thinking that a name necessarily must fail to refer, or they are too broad -- they make every empty name necessarily non-referential. Plausibly, the explanation for the necessary non-reference of fictional names should be semantic, yet the explanation should not rule out a priori the contingent non-reference of certain other empty names. In light of this, I argue that a name's semantic value needs to carry information about its referential potential. I claim that names do so by encoding information about the way they were introduced into discourse. Names that are fictional will be marked as being non-referential -- they will fail to refer as a matter of their semantics. In contrast, names that are contingently empty will be marked as referential, but they will be failed referential names that could have been successful. The reason, then, for the non-referential status of a fictional name, will be semantic, as our intuitions suggest it should be. Likewise, the reason for the non-referential status of other empty names, those created by acts of failed attempts to refer, will be metaphysical, again, in keeping with our intuitions. (shrink)

Because names from fiction, names like ‘Sherlock Holmes’, fail to refer, and because it has been supposed that all simple predicative sentences including a sentence like ‘Sherlock Holmes smokes’ will be true if and only if the referent of the name has the property encoded by the predicate, many philosophers have denied that an utterance of the sentence ‘Sherlock Holmes smokes’ could be true. Despite this, natural language speakers appear to engage in sensible conversations using these kinds of sentences, and (...) appear to convey information to one another in doing so. These facts have led non-literalists about fictional discourse to maintain that the utterances of the sentences by speakers engaged in such conversations are literally false, but that those utterances should be interpreted as pragmatically conveying information about what is true according to the story. I argue, however, that these story operator accounts cannot capture all of the true readings of an utterance of a sentence like ‘Sherlock Holmes smokes’. There are other true readings that arise both in some of the ordinary natural paths fictional discourse might take, as well as in modal discourse about fiction. What’s more, I offer arguments that not only are there other true readings, but those readings should be taken as what is literally said by speakers in uttering sentences like ‘Sherlock Holmes smokes’. (shrink)

A recent defence of the idea of analyzing names as predicates that relies on the calling relation to explain their meanings, an account developed by Fara, is claimed to escape the problems afflicting analyses that rely on the calling relation that are meta-linguistic. For Fara, this is because the calling relation itself is not essentially meta-linguistic. Fara claims that distinguishing between meta-linguistic and non-meta-linguistic notions of calling disperses with the common objection to treating names as predicates, specifically, Kripke's objections to (...) the informativeness of these kinds of accounts. To fully address Kripke's worry, two things must hold (a) the theory must yield a criterion that allows us to determine a name's reference, and (b) it must be non-circular. I argue that Fara's theory satisfies neither of these criteria. (shrink)

While there are many different motivations for raising questions about the Sexual Assault Awareness Movement, at least one motivation comes from feminist controversies about what counts as consensual sex. Historically, this controversy arose between those known as "anti-pornography feminists", and "sex positive feminists" whose proponents had very different understandings of what counts as sexual autonomy for women. It is important to understand that questioning the current definitions of what counts as an instance of sexual assault does not entail an anti-feminist (...) agenda. There is not a unified feminist front on this topic. To assume otherwise is to risk silencing victims of sexual assault even further by imposing a particular conception of sexual assault upon them that they might themselves reject. If we are to properly address sexual assault as feminists we must listen to victims of sexual assault and develop a theory of consent in tandem with victims' own understanding of that concept. NB: This was a public speech and so use-mention conflations are contained within. I invite you to read it as a speech. (shrink)

This is a victim oriented study of sexual experiences that I would like to see administered at SUNY Geneseo.

Standard rigid designator accounts of a name’s meaning have trouble accommodating what I will call a descriptive name’s “shifty” character -- its tendency to shift its referent over time in response to a discovery that the conventional referent of that name does not satisfy the description with which that name was introduced. I offer a variant of Kripke’s historical semantic theory of how names function, a variant that can accommodate the character of descriptive names while maintaining rigidity for proper names. (...) A descriptive name’s shiftiness calls for a semantic account of names that makes their semantic values bipartite, containing both traditional semantic contents and what I call "modes of introduction." Both parts of a name's semantic value are derived from the way a name gets introduced into discourse -- from what I refer to as its "context of introduction." Making a name's semantic value bipartite in this way allows for a definite description to be a part of proper name's meaning without thereby sacrificing that name’s status as a rigid designator. On my view, a definite description is part of descriptive name’s mode of introduction. That is, it is part of what determines the content assigned to that name. As it turns out, making a definite description part of a descriptive name’s mode of introduction allows for that definite description to play the role of a mere reference-fixer regarding that name’s content, as Kripke would have it. However, my account allows a definite description to fix a descriptive name’s content actively over time, thereby explaining its inherent shiftiness. (shrink)

Contra Derek Parfit’s psychological continuity theory, I argue for an externalist conception of what matters in the survival of persons over time. Specifically, I claim that what matters in the survival of persons is the continuation of what I call their “life trajectories.” This condition on the quasi-continuation of the diachronic identity of persons comes from considering the implications of what certain kinds of cases of “complete virtual immersion”-- the immersion of a psychological subject in a completely virtual world, a (...) world in which experiences are de-correlated with events in the objective world. This hypothesis results in some fairly strong conditions on the synchronic identity of persons, conditions that demonstrate that psychological continuity over time is insufficient for having what matters in survival. Of course, the idea that externalist constraints are important in a complete account of what is metaphysically necessary for maintaining persons and what matters in their survival is not new, but I propose my own specific theory about how to understand these constraints. What’s more, I explain in detail why incorporating externalist constraints in an account of what matters in survival proves to rule out fission as a case in which we have what matters equally as much as we do in single case, and unlike the traditional way of rejecting these cases, I do so without requiring a commitment to an identity theory of what matters. The view I offer can also explain our reactions to different virtual immersion scenarios. Therefore, simply on explanatory grounds alone, my view is to be preferred over pure psychological continuity theories. (shrink)