Research Interests

I am currently pursuing a PhD at York University, under the supervision of Claudine Verheggen. My dissertation develops an act-based account of meaning, along the lines of Scott Soames' What is Meaning? (2010) and Rethinking Language, Mind, and Meaning (2015) as well as Peter Hanks' Propositional Content (2015). However, while Soames and Hanks motivate their accounts with the problem of the unity of the proposition, I think that we find a better motivation for an act-based account of meaning in Wittgenstein's rule-following considerations. When we begin with Wittgestein's 'paradox' (in Investigations #201), which applies to individual words and not just whole propositions, there is reason to think that our account of meaning should be act-based all the way down, that it should be non-reductive, and that it should be holistic. While one might justifiably think of act-based accounts as a species of use theories of meaning, there are distinct explanatory advantages to making a robust and explicit appeal to the nature and shape of intentional action in an account of meaning. 

I have other interests in the philosophy of language as well. Most notably, I am working on defending anti-conventional literalism, the position that many of a speaker's words have their 'literal' meanings fixed in advance of their utterance but not by social conventions. Part of this project involves arguing that Davidson developed just such a view across his work (though, particularly in his paper "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs").

Outside of the philosophy of language, I have interests in the philosophy of action and in the philosophy of religion, as well as an abiding interest in the history of analytic philosophy.