research
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I work on philosophy of language, feminist, social and political philosophy, and the intersections thereof. My dissertation is about normative discourse and social negotiation: I examine the ways in which speakers use language to propose, enforce, reinforce, and modify power dynamics within linguistic interactions. Examples of such language are normative generics -- expressions, like "boys don't cry," whose typical usage conveys more than its straightforward surface content -- presupposition, and non-literal speech more generally. I am also interested in meta-philosophical and methodological questions about work at the intersection of philosophy of language and social philosophy.
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Normative discourse in the wild.
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Publications
"Normative Generics and Social Kind Terms" (Inquiry, 2022)
"Generics as Instructions" (Synthese, 2021)
“Normative Generics: Against Polysemy” (Thought, 2021)
“New Things With Words: Review of New Work on Speech Acts.” (Philosophical Review, 2020)
“Illocutionary Frustration” (Mind, 2018)
“Newton's De Motu Corporum, Liber Secundus (1685): Commentary,” (co-authored with George Smith). forthcoming as book chapter.
“Newton's De Motu Corporum, Liber Secundus (1685): Translation” (co-translated with Anne Whitcomb, Bernard Cohen, George Smith). The Newton Project. in preparation
Works in Progress / Forthcoming (drafts available; please email)
Script Disruption and Social Change (forthcoming in Constructing Social Hierarchy. eds. Karen Jones, Laura Schroeter, Francois Schroeter, OUP.)
This paper gives an overview of social scripts; highlights way they can be used to reinforce oppression and injustice; gives an analysis of disruption of social scripts; and connects script discussion to social change. First, I provide a history of the notion of a social script as it is used in philosophy and philosophy-adjacent disciplines. I explicate two main kinds of scripts — structural scripts and interpersonal scripts. Structural scripts encompass the norms, stereotypes, and expectations that pervade a given ideology. Interpersonal scripts are more closely related to a scripted scene in a movie or play. One person says something, the other person says something else, and dynamically, what the first person says partially scripts what the next person says. Interpersonal scripts are tied to patterns of dialogue and model the ways in which one individual responds to another over the course of a given conversation. This paper focuses primarily on the latter kind of script. I then discuss the ways in which these scripts are often taken advantage of to put interlocutors in a double bind: either go along with the script or reject it with social cost or risks to personal safety. I use this to motivate the view that there is reason to disrupt some interpersonal social scripts. Then, I give an analysis of interpersonal disruption according to which the disrupter: (i) calls attention to the script; (ii) does so subliminally or implicitly; (iii) in doing so reveals the script’s workings or assumptions; (iv) results in voiding, subverting, or making the speaker rethink the script.
With a notion of disruption in place, I argue that disruption can and does lead to large-scale social change. While much of the literature on scripts and social change addresses the benefits of introducing new scripts and doing away with old ones, I argue that there is intrinsic value in disruption alone. this paper goes on to propose three mechanisms by which interpersonal script disruption can contribute to large-scale social change. The mechanisms, spotlighting, aggregation, and empowerment, connect scripts to philosophical work on counter-speech, harassment, and empirical literature on scripts and cognition. I argue that each of these mechanisms reveals a different dimension along which disrupting scripts can lead to social change.
Philosophical Intuitions about Socially Significant Language (forthcoming in Hypatia)
As we’re doing philosophy of language that bears on social and political issues, it is worth revisiting the question of how we rely on our philosophical and linguistic intuitions, and what assumptions underlie our justification of such a reliance. At least two threads of thought in the philosophical literature are relevant to this question: first, the discussion of situatedness in feminist epistemology; second, the experimental philosophy literature about philosophical expertise and philosophical intuitions. My argument is that we (analytic philosophers examining social and political philosophy of language) should be careful – perhaps more careful than we have been – when we rely on our intuitions to make claims about what is going on linguistically and socially. Specifically, we should be more careful than we are when we deal with other kinds of language. I don’t think we should give up relying on our linguistic intuitions about racist, sexist, homophobic, and otherwise harmful and derogatory speech. Rather, we should be more explicit that our intuitions are limited, and open to the possibility that they might not align with the intuitions of those most impacted by the the kinds of speech we are analyzing (and that we might have been taking for granted that they do).
Linguistic Innovation and Metalinguistic Update (forthcoming in Linguistic Luck: Essays in Anti-Luck Semantics eds. Carlos Montemayor & Abrol Fairweather, OUP.)
Donald Davidson challenges Lewis’s view of conventionalized language by appealing to lexical innovation. We can and do often use completely novel and made-up expressions to communicate successfully. So, linguistic communication can’t be fully or fundamentally conventional. In a recent paper, Josh Armstrong proposes a dynamic account of linguistic conventions, motivated by cases of linguistic innovation. He gives an explanation of the mechanism of linguistic innovation as a process of updating the common ground. Armstrong takes as a starting point the notion of common ground proposed by Robert Stalker and expanded on by Craige Roberts. According to Armstrong, a similar mechanism is going on when we accommodate “I’m going to pick up my sister from the airport” into the common ground as “I’m going to measure this package with a koba.” I explore in more detail what a procedure of updating the common ground with linguistic items — as opposed to facts or states of the world, as is more traditional — would look like. This paper explores the difference between two kinds of lexical innovation: (i) lexical innovation as it pertains to lexical items that are already in use in a given linguistic community (for example, the evolution of the term ‘unicorn’), and (ii) lexical innovation that involves the creation of new linguistic items. I evaluate whether there is a tension between treating the two the same way. I argue that views that treat these two in tandem (Davidson 1984, Armstrong 2016) do so at the expense of overlooking certain features of linguistic innovation.
Title removed (paper under review)
Sometimes, it is better to presuppose something than to assert it outright. You ask me to dinner, I say, “I’m sorry; I have to pick up my brother.” Introducing this information by presupposition seems not only licensed, but preferable to the alternative. If I say instead, “I’m sorry; I have a brother and I have to pick him up,” that is considerably stranger. Most extant theories discuss constraints on presupposition. This paper answers the question: are there constraints on when not to presuppose? I argue for the existence of a new conversational norm governing the use of presupposition: A speaker who presupposes p by saying S assumes conversational parity between p and S, where parity is defined in terms of aptness for conversation. I argue that Parity explains why we sometimes ought to introduce new information via presupposition accommodation, rather than assert it explicitly.
Title removed (paper under review)
In this paper, I take a philosophical lens to the notion of a ‘social script’ (following Appiah (1994), Oshana (2005), Stoljar (2012), and others). I then give a high-level theoretical overview of what it would mean to disrupt a social script and give reasons why that would be morally and practically prudential. Then I present several examples of this as it seems to be happening in the world outside of philosophy. I end with a more detailed discussion of what a disruption is: arguing that a well-executed disruption draws attention to the script in a way that makes the entire audience aware of the implicit workings of the script.
