Section I: Philosophical Approach
While my current research is focused mainly on the semantics of proper names, my research interests vary widely, ranging from the topic of personal identity to the nature of free will, from issues in moral psychology to related issues in feminist scholarship. Amidst this diversity, however, runs a common philosophical approach. My varied interests are one and all informed by my standards for good philosophical theorizing set mainly by Kripke's work in Naming and Necessity in which he says:
Of course, some philosophers think that something's having intuitive content is very inconclusive evidence in favor of it. I think it is very heavy evidence in favor of anything, myself. I really don't know, in a way, what more conclusive evidence one can have about anything, ultimately speaking.
Based on Kripke's meta-philosophical scruples, most of my own philosophical work subscribes to a certain position on an underlying controversy concerning the relationship between intuitions and philosophical theories; I privilege taking certain intuitions as basic over values such as theoretical simplicity, something to strive for only once one has a certain amount of explanatory power. Because of Kripke's work in Naming and Necessity, one of the few pieces of philosophical work that I believe contains nuggets of indisputable data, I spend a good deal of time in my own philosophical work developing and explaining these bits of data, as well as attempting to discover some new nuggets myself.
Yet another influence on my general philosophical outlook is due to Lewis. Specifically, I aim in my work to respect Lewis's claim in On the Plurality of Worlds that the way we judge a philosophical theory should be the same as the way we judge the value of any scientific theory. That is, how does it look in relation to other theories with respect to its theoretical virtues? For this reason, I invest much of my time in developing new theories that are at once intuitive and yet instantiate more theoretical virtues than other theories, rather than attempting to refute any particular theory. Even so, my conviction that Goodman's Fact, Fiction and Forecast, is a tour de force, largely a refutation of a collection of philosophical theories, does lead me, on occasion, to write some purely critical work.
Section II: Publications
Brock, Heidi. 2023. What Matters in Survival: Self-determination and The Continuity of Life Trajectories
Savage, Heidi. 2020. The Truth and Nothing But the Truth: Non-literalism and The Habits of Sherlock Holmes. Southwest Philosophy Review 36(2).
Savage, Heidi. 2020. How I Stopped Worrying and Started Loving 'Sherlock Holmes': A Reply to Garcia-Carpintero. Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy XXXIX:1.
Savage, Heidi with Melissa Ebbers and Robert M Martin. 2020. The Meaning of Language, 2nd Edition. MIT Press.
Savage, Heidi. 2017 . "Not Just Another Philosophy of Language Book." Review of Sourcebook in the History of Philosophy of Language. Eds. Margaret Cameron, Benjamin Hill, and Robert J. Stainton. Springer, 2017. Metascience.
Savage, Heidi. 2016. "Review of Brian Hedden's Reasons without Persons: Rationality, Identity, and Time." Oxford, 2015. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
Tiedke, Heidi. 2011. "Proper Names and Their Fictional Uses." Australasian Journal of Philosophy 89 (4): 707-726.
Section III: What Was, What Is, and What Will Be
Below is a summary of work I have done in the past, that is currently in progress, and that I will be doing in the future on my main area of research: proper names. It is the future research that is likely be of most interest.
Philosophy of Language
Present Research
One of the assumptions I made previously, but could not offer a proper defense of, was the idea that a sentence like (1) is literally true. However, I now have an article in which I offer a detailed defense of this claim in “The Truth and Nothing But the Truth: Non-literalism and The Habits of Sherlock Holmes” (2020). In that work, I adopt a well motivated methodological constraint that theories of natural language should stick as close as possible to its actual use by speakers. In light of this, my defense of the claim that a sentence like (1) is literally true, involves first pointing out that natural language speakers do, and without much thought, assign the value true to sentences like (1). Second, the standard explanation of this fact fails in a multitude of ways. Third, truth conditionalism itself, to remain scientific respectability, must modify the traditional rule for evaluating the truth of predicative sentences containing proper names -- that they are true just in case the referent of the name has the property delineated by the predicate. Fourth, and finally, scenarios that test for literal truth indicate that sentence (1) is in fact literally true.
A second issue concerning my view of names was why it should count as an anti-realist view about fictional entities, since my view is that the meaning of a fictional name is a set of properties, and a set is an object. Therefore, why does this fail to assign a referent to the name ‘Sherlock Holmes’. In fact, Garcia-Carpintero raises this issue in his “Semantics of Fictional Terms” (2019). My response is that because on my account of the meaning of fictional names, and the rule used for evaluating sentences containing such names, fictional names play the role of a function, in determining the truth of sentences containing them. They do not provide an argument, and therefore, there are no realist implications that follow from the view.
Future Research
In a book called Naming and Referring, I explain how the approach I take to proper names, while jettisoning reference as essential for being a name, is still Kripkean in nature. In fact, I take it simply as a generalization of Kripke’s view that fully exploits its advantages more so than its more Millian counterparts.
This generalization of Kripke’s view, solves the problem of fictional names without the ontological mess that pure referentialist views, like Millianism, seem to generate (2011). In fact, in “Kypris, Venus, And Aphrodite: More Puzzles About Belief” I argue that realism about fictional entities is entailed by Millianism, assuming they wish to solve puzzles about belief that involve synonymous fictional names.
In addition to solving the problem of fictional names, the generalized Kripkean approach also solves problems posed by other types of names. For instance, Kripke argues that all empty names are necessarily empty. Our intuitions, however, do not always comport with this claim. Some names we might think are merely contingently empty. In “Four Problems for Empty Names,” I show how generalizing Kripke’s view can accommodate these intuitions. In addition, it can also be used to explain the apparently mixed nature of descriptive names as I do in “Descriptive Names and Shifty Characters: A Case for Tensed Rigidity.”
In the book, I will also pay special attention to the fact that not only does Kripke say that names are rigid, but that he also says that they are de jure expressions. In fact, I claim that it is this feature of proper names as de jure expressions that makes them their own unique kind of expression.
For the previous reason, I also argue against views that attempt to assimilate or reduce names to another expression kind. For instance, I argue against predicative views of names (at least those that make them first-order predicates), the most plausible of which, as I explain in “Being Called Names: The Predicative Attributive Account,” simply fails. In fact, in “Names Are Not Predicates,” I show that no predicative views are justified since all predicative constructions containing names have plausible non-predicative analyses.
Furthermore, attending to the de jure nature of proper names also allows for an understanding of the relation between name types and name tokens, which I claim, once properly understood, does not generate dichotomous views of the identity conditions on proper names. Another consequence of attending to the de jure nature of fictional names is that there must be a significant role for mentioning names as well as using them in a full account of the role of names in the language. This calls for revisiting Kripke’s dismissal of the role of meta-linguistic theories in accounts of proper names. I argue that meta-linguistic actions and analyses have two fundamental roles in a complete theory of names. Certain kinds of meta-linguistic actions have the status of being performative, and this explains how acts of naming actually work. The second role that mentioning a name plays is in explaining how speaker’s can be competent with a proper name. These issues I explore in “You Never Even Called Me by my Name: A Meta-linguistic Analysis of Competence with Proper Names.”
Lastly, while the progress, and simplification of semantic analysis that Frege’s notion of composition as function application cannot be underestimated, it has been applied in ways that erase the nuance of the notion of predication. Once reference is de-emphasized, new possibilities for compositional rules for evaluating predications arise that allow it to involve more than property exemplification, a traditional issue of concern for many philosophers. Furthermore, if predication does not simply involve property exemplification, the issue of ontological commitment re-arises, as it may no longer be possible to capture our ontological commitments simply with first-order existential generalization. I offer an alternative analyses in “The Contingencies of Ontological Commitment.” All of the mentioned papers in draft form are summarized below, along with others.
The Metaphysics of Personal Identity
Past Research
As a graduate student, I took a course on the topic of personal identity. I was skeptical of the very idea of giving a theory of the necessary and sufficient conditions on a person's persistence due to skepticism about the kind person in general. This made me sympathetic to Parfitian non-identity theories almost immediately, and yet my reaction to fission as a form of survival was to reject it. I spent years attempting to reconcile these intuitions, which finally led me to develop an externalist theory of what matters in survival, and to adopt a corresponding externalist theory of the kind persons. These ideas are elucidated in their final form, I hope, in a paper currently under review now titled "What Matters in Survival: Self-determination and The Continuity of Life Trajectories," which you can find posted below.
Present Research
Recently, I finally came to understand my skepticism about the kind persons -- that it was based in skepticism about persons as the kinds of things that one could give a metaphysical theory of without considering its normative consequences. This led to examining some of the underlying assumptions about the metaphysics of the kind persons in the literature on personal identity. I came to focus on the fact that our concept of the kind person at least has serious normative consequences, and might even be constitutively normative. I therefore adopted a the methodological principle that in giving metaphysical theories of personal identity, our background assumptions about the kind persons and its normative consequences must be considered, and if found to have serious negative normative consequences, the metaphysical theory itself should be doubted, if not outright rejected.
Future Research
My future aim is to write a book defending this principle, and then arguing against certain theories of personal identity due to relying on normatively loaded assumptions that are politically biased, defending the idea that they are, and then arguing that my own metaphysical theory does not harbor such assumptions. A description appears below in the Book Projects section.
Section IV: Drafts In Progress
Philosophy of Language
Recently, and rather startlingly, given the history of the debate about a name's semantic content, some claim that names are in fact predicates -- predicativism. Some of predicativists claim that a name's semantic content involves the concept of being called -- calling accounts that have been traditionally meta-linguistic. However, these accounts fail to be informative. Inspired by Burge's claim that proper names are literally true of the individuals that have them, Fara develops a non-meta-linguistic concept of being called analysed in terms of property attributions. I offer seven separate reasons for rejecting the account, one of which is that Fara's development of the view, at least, has implausible consequences for a theory of name acquisition. I sketch an alternative account of name acquisition that is meta-linguistic in nature, but because it is not offered as a theory of name's content, the standard worries fail to apply. In fact, I argue that an account of name acquisition must be meta-linguistic, and therefore a more nuanced conception of meta-linguistic speech acts is required. The account invokes Austin's performative-constative distinction. It analyses name acquisition as due to performative meta-linguistic speech acts.
There are many examples offered as evidence that proper names are predicates. Not all of these cases speak to a name’s semantic content, but many of them do. These include attribution, quantificational, and disambiguation cases. We will explore those cases here, and we will see that none of them conclusively show that names are predicates. In fact, all of these constructions can be given alternative analyses that eliminate the predicative characteristics of the names they feature. These analyses do not involve having names functioning as predicates in any way whatsoever. In attribution cases, the names within them are to be understood as occurring in a comparative construction, not an attributive construction. In the last two kinds of cases, the names that occur are analyzed as part of a more complex name for a specific domain, rather than functioning as predicates. Both paraphrases can be given plausible semantic treatments that have significant advantages over their competitors. For this reason, there is less motivation to focus on predicative views of proper names. The alternative semantic treatments are tailored to the different cases, and are therefore different from another, but the treatments do not entail an ambiguity hypothesis, since the second of them is not a semantic treatment of the specific proper names occurring within them at all.
My aim in this paper is to show that the existence of empty names raise problems for the Millian that go beyond the traditional problems of accounting for their meanings. Specifically, they have implications for Millian strategies for dealing with puzzles about belief. The standard move of positing a referent for a fictional name to avoid the problem of meaning, because of its distinctly Millian motivation, implies that solving puzzles about belief, when they involve empty names, do in fact hang on Millian assumptions after all.
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, unlike Kripke's account, my account allows a definite description to fix a descriptive name’s content actively over time, thereby explaining its inherent shiftiness.
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 essentially fails to refer, or they are too broad -- they make every empty name essentially 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.
You Never Even Called Me by my Name: A Meta-linguistic Analysis of Competence with Proper Names
In Naming and Necessity, the work that transcribes Kripke's watershed lectures, he argues that meta-linguistic analyses of the meanings of proper names are doomed to be uninformative, since a speaker does not achieve the ability of identifying their referent, and therefore must be wrong. In this very same work, he also gives a set of nearly conclusive criticisms of the classical descriptivist theory of proper names. He points additionally points out that being competent with a name does not require acquaintance with its referent directly, only deference to those who do. These arguments, however, leave few options giving an answer to the questions of what competent speakers understand when competent with a name. We cannot say that what they know is simply the name's linguistic role within a language, its meta-linguistic content -- that, say. the name 'Benacerraf' applies to is whatever that name refers to, since this would not make it possible to identify a name's referent. What a competent speaker knows also cannot consist in knowing the uniquely reference determining descriptions for a particular name, since that view is false. Last, an act of deference also cannot be what a speaker knows, since this also does not identify a referent for the speaker unless they also can trace the history of communicating the name to its referent, and this is simply unrealistic. So, what do speakers understand when they understand a name? It can't be knowing the referent of a name directly, since this is frequently never achieved.
I suggest a revised meta-linguistic account that distinguishes between the language used to talk about a particular language -- the meta-language -- from direct speech reports made within a language -- the object language. Making this distinction leads to a kind of meta-linguistic analysis of competence with names that is not simply tautologous, so long as competence with names is not construed as knowing this: 'Tyler' is whatever is called 'Tyler'. Rather, it should be this: the name 'Tyler' is whatever speakers of an object language call "Tyler," where the double quotes represent direct speech acts. This makes it possible that the schema, 'X' is whatever speakers of an object language call "X," could very well be informative, and serve as an explanation of what a speaker understands when competent with a name. Well, it would insofar as a speaker could learn something about the meaning of the the name 'Tyler' by examining its utterances. In fact, something like this must have to have some truth to it. After all, even non-fluent children learn to speak a language, in part, by attending to utterances of certain expressions in particular situations. The major difference is that when we are finally competent with the expression 'duck' it is not because we have grasped the previous schema. It is because we will engage in duck-awareness behaviors when our environment has something to with ducks at a certain time. In contrast, simply understanding the previous schema is exactly what competence with names consists in.
This is what I hope is an illuminating, and to a certain degree, novel exposition of Montague Grammar. It is against many standard interpretations, and perhaps even against things Montague himself says at times. However, it makes more sense of how his various commitments fit together in a systematic way. Why, for instance, is it called "Montague Grammar" rather than "Montague Semantics," and what role does his commitment to Fregeanism plays in his conception of language. It is clear that he is committed to the idea that function application is the fundamental mode of semantic composition, and that he is committed to an intensional framework.
However, intensions have, since Carnap, been understood as nearly conceptually equivalent to functions from possible worlds to sets of individuals. But, in truth, possible worlds semantics is just dressed up extensional semantics. There are just more objects to go around to serve as inputs for functions, whatever we think of their ontological status. That is, possible worlds semantics is really a semantic reduction of intensional semantics achieved by expanding our ontological commitments.
It would be difficult to make sense of Montague's strong commitment to Fregean semantics, if his notion of intension was that of Carnap's. According to my interpretation, Montague's notion of intension must be distinct from the version adopted by possible world semantics. Montague took seriously the idea that intensional semantics was something quite different from extensionalist semantics. The first was not reducible to the second semantically speaking. Just as Frege believed that meaning consisted of both sense and reference, so too did Montague. However, just as Frege also believed, Montague thought that sense and reference were systematically related.
As I illustrate, interpreting Montague as adopting a different notion of intension can also resolve the apparent problem of distinguishing the difference in meaning between intensional equivalents. It might also enable us to draw a distinction in epistemic logic between an agent having contradictory beliefs and believing contradictions.
Metaphysics
It's Easy Being Free: Notes on Frankfurt-Style Real-Self Conceptions of Free Will (with Noah Sider)
On Frankfurt's view of free will, in its simplest form, an agent is free just in case her second-order volitions -- those desires about what she wants, which she are in accord with her first-order volitions. That is, if an agent's second-order desires that she wants to have or endorses -- -- those first-order desires that one actually acts upon. That is, an agent has free will just in case she has the desires she wants to have and they are the desires she acts upon. But now consider an agent who lacks free will because her first-order volitions and second-order volitions conflict. Suppose also that, with enough therapy, she could alter her first-order volitions to be in accord with her second-order volitions. So it is true that she can alter her first-order volitions. Still, there is the question of what she should do.
A natural response that a real-self theorist might make is that the agent should change her first-order volitions in order to reflect her second-order volitions, since somehow, our second-order volitions better reflect our "real-selves" and this is something we ought to be true to. But this is not, in principle, the only option available to our agent. Instead of changing her first-order volitions to reflect her second-order volitions, she might also simply decide to revise her second-order volitions to fit with her first-order volitions. This option, of course, is not recommended by real-self theorists, and an agent making such a decision would not be choosing to have free will. For a real-self theorist, we hold our second-order volitions fixed, and insofar as there are mismatches between these volitions and first-order volitions, an agent lacks free will.
But it is simply not clear why second-order desires should hold such a privileged position. On Frankfurt-style conceptions of free will, which are compatibilist, we have as much choice about our second-order desires as our first. In fact, since second-order volitions are arguably more responsive to reason, it could turn out, for our agent, that changing her second-order volitions is the most rational option to take, assuming she has a desire to do things besides spending 5 hours a day in therapy attempting to shift her first-order volitions. This point applies even to the most recent developments of real-self, hierarchical, reasons-responsive, and even intention-embedded accounts of free will. In fact, empirical evidence shows that people will readily change their conceptions of themselves -- reflected in their second-order volitions -- when faced with the kind of cognitive dissonance created by desire conflicts.
But this way of attaining free will does not seem to comport with our conception of a free agent. Free will seems too easy to obtain if all that is required is that our second-order volitions are in accord with our first-order volitions, and I see no particularly principled way of arguing that we shouldn't consider changing our second-order volitions instead of changing our first-order volitions. Unless, free will is primarily a psychological good.
Secondly, this conception of free will is also subject to other counter examples. A person, for instance, may not be able to respect hierarchies due to some personality trait or other, but she might also be the kind of person for whom even were this trait lacking, still would not want to respect hierarchies. Here we have case in which a person's first order volitions and second order volitions coincide, but we do not want to call her free either.
Additional evidence that this cannot be the right conception of free will comes from ideas put forth in the literature on practical rationality: I can be in situations in which the only rational action for me to take is to change my desires (MacIntosh), but if we cannot make irrational decisions, and these are understood as decisions to act in ways that go against our current desires, then being in a situation in which I choose to change my current desires should not be possible, thereby challenging any conception of free will that requires the changing of desires, whether first-order or second-order. I conclude, then, that any compatibilist conception of free will of the kind mentioned will be ultimately unsatisfying.
The Contingencies of Ontological Commitment
Some time ago, Quine asserted that to be is to be value of a variable. This entails that if one wishes to accept any theory as true, we must be committed to the existence of those objects over which we existentially quantify. I suggest instead that we are committed only to the existence of things for which certain intrinsic properties are contingent (those that an object can have independent of the properties that make it a member of a certain kind). Any discourse that involves existential quantification over entities for which those properties can change should be given an objectual interpretation, and these objects are therefore real. In contrast, all discourse that involves existential quantification over objects who have at least some intrinsic properties essentially, which are properties that are not what make them members of a kind, will be given a substitutional interpretation, which does not entail a realist interpretation. This conception of ontological commitment has potential direct consequences in several areas -- the status of fictional characters, the debate about the existence of god, realism about mathematical entities, and so on.
Free Will and Foreseeability
For many of us, at least, some of the most important events in our lives were not foreseeable. Indeed, for many of us, the trajectory of our lives in retrospect is often completely unexpected. We can, it seems, predict very few of the results of our efforts at controlling our lives. Particularly troubling is that this phenomenon seems to affect us exponentially in the long term, and some of our most important goals in life are long-term goals. What's more, is that attending more closely to the micro-effects of our actions on the world does little to alleviate this problem, since our efforts alone are not sufficient to determine the outcomes of our actions, as Nagel's discussion of moral luck taught us.
Of course, there are those whose life trajectory seems entirely predictable in retrospect, leading to the belief that we are in control of our lives after all. However, it is not clear that such reasoning is much more justified than the reasoning that leads people to conclude that Nostradamus must have been predicting the future given that things turned out as he said.
Because the unpredictability of our lives is so prevalent and the status of cases in which they do seem predictable are unclear, I conclude that the existence of the kind of free will that seems matters to us, the kind that determines our life paths, is largely a myth. But, on the positive side, taking my cue from Wolf's work on moral saints, I also conclude that since having this kind of free will would likely make our lives much less interesting, perhaps we shouldn't care about having it after all.
On Diachronic, Synchronic, and Logical Necessity
According to EJ Lowe, diachronic necessity and synchronic necessity are logically independent. Diachronic possibility concerns what could happen to an object over time and therefore concerns future possibilities for that object given its past history. Synchronic possibility concerns what is possible for an object in the present or at a past present moment. These are logically independent, given certain assumptions. While it may true that because I am 38, it is impossible diachronically for me to be 30 (at least once we restrict the degree of relevant possibility), it is possible, given that at some point in the past, I may have been conceived slightly earlier than I was, that I am now 37. Likewise, it is possible diachronically for me to be somewhere other than where I am, but given that one object cannot be in different places at the same time, it is impossible for me now to be somewhere other than where I am, and this is true at each past point in my history too. There are, then, two axis upon which to distinguish what is and is not possible: tensed possibilities and possibilities of degree, which include nomic, metaphysical, and logical necessities, among others. I examine the interactions between these possibilities and I come to the conclusion that logical necessity is not in fact logical necessity simpliciter. Whether something is logically necessary depends upon tensed possibilities. I argue that while synchronic logical necessity entails diachronic logical necessity, the reverse entailment does not hold. I explore the consequences of this for certain philosophical debates in semantics including the concept of rigid designation, and descriptive names.
Meta-Philosophy
The Voluntarist's Argument against Ethical and Semantic Internalism
A parallel argument to the doxastic voluntarist argument -- a general voluntarism argument -- can be constructed against both ethical and semantic internalism. In the ethical case, the parallel argument begins with the idea that if ethical internalism is true, that is, if we cannot help but be motivated to do the right thing internally, then it would appear that our being moved to do the right thing is involuntary in the same was as our beliefs are involuntary. If correct, this leaves the ethical internalist with a dilemma. Like the epistemologist faced with the doxastic voluntarism argument, she can either deny the plausible ought implies can principle in order to maintain that the idea that ethical obligations make sense, or she must rest content with the idea that ethical internalism has the status of a descriptive account of moral behavior rather than a prescriptive theory. But, the ethical internalist is engaged in giving an account of the nature of moral action, it is entirely unclear what differentiates moral behaviors from any other kind of internally motivated actions -- the normativity of morality is lost. If we believe that normativity is constitutive of morality, then ethical internalism fails even as a description of its nature. In the semantic case, if we cannot for instance simply decide that 'Glory' means the same as 'There's a nice knockdown argument for you', it is unclear how meaning could be determined internally and yet be normative at the same time. If ought implies can, and we cannot change the meaning of our expressions internally, then the normativity of meaning cannot come from the inside, it must come from without, but how could the normativity of linguistic behavior come from without given that it is an artefact? The semantic internalist therefore faces the same dilemma that both doxastic voluntarism and ethical internalism face.
Meta-Ethics
The Inevitability of Death: Going from an Is to an Ought
Since Hume, many ethicists have assumed that inferring normative claims from descriptive claims is fallacious. Some classic examples that illustrate this fact are those in which everyone commits some act, but we do not therefore conclude that it is the right thing to do. Everyone may jump off a bridge, asserts your mother, but that does not entail that you should. However, not all such claims illustrate this. In fact, some of them illustrate precisely the opposite claim. For example, consider the person who repeatedly bemoans the unfairness or sadness of dying, and who is often faced with the response that this happens to everyone. What should she do? One plausible response is that she should accept the fact that this occurs and make her peace with it, an unequivocally normative directive. This example, then, is a prima facie counterexample to the infamous gap between is-claims and ought-claims.
Philosophy of Mind
Against False "Pretences"
Any plausible account of the act of pretending, either by presupposition or constitution, involves an assumption that the facts are other than what they are. An examination of various accounts of pretence shows this to be the feature that distinguishes it from other actions such as imagining, fantasizing, creating, or hypothesizing. This discovery has implications for standard analyses of the nature of fiction. To wit, whatever is occurring when engaged in reading a work of fiction, it is not an act of pretence, since in reading a work of fiction, whether the facts are other than what they are is irrelevant to understanding and enjoying the story. The rather long history of appeals to pretence to explain the nature of fiction and our engagement with it, then, fail.
Book Projects
This book is about whether reference to an individual is the essential feature of a proper name -- a widely held view -- or whether referring to an individual is simply a contingent feature. Three questions need resolving, then. First, whether all names in particular contexts are themselves referring devices. Second, whether recognizing names types and the consequent issue of their ambiguity can be resolved simply by distinguishing between name types and tokens thereof. Last, whether names are ever referential in the way Kripke and others have convincingly argued. The answer to first two questions is negative. The answer to third is a qualified "yes." I explain the theory that allows for these answers in the manuscript, as well as addressing other issues such as: the problem of fictional names; descriptive names; empty names; what an act of naming consists of; an account of ontological commitment; and the data that suggests that names are predicates.
The Metaphysics and Politics of Being a Person
This book addresses the topic of the explicit and implicit commitments about persons as a kind in the literature on personal identity and draws out their political implications. I claim that the political implications of a metaphysical account can serve as a test on its veracity in cases in which the object-kind under analysis is itself constitutively normative, as the kind person might be, or in those cases in which counting as a member of the kind in question confers a certain normative status upon those that do so count, which the kind person certainly satisfies. I argue that metaphysical accounts of personal identity often contain certain mistaken background assumptions concerning personhood, often due to a failure to recognize that being a person is environmentally dependent.
Because being a person is environmentally dependent, but this is not often noted, let alone incorporated into our theories of persons, although there are exceptions, a closer look at those theories is required if we are to have a just society. In fact, it is a bit surprising that this is the current situation, since the claim that certain members of society are oppressed due to being denied full personhood and its attendant rights has been the basis of several social movements: first-wave feminism, anti-slavery movements, and civil rights movements generally. Historically, these resistance movements aimed at claiming that, unlike how they were treated, they did in fact meet the requirements for personhood that those in more privileged sectors did and should therefore enjoy the same rights as the more privileged.
While I agree with the justification for these movements -- that the injustice driving them is that of the denial of the rights of persons -- I advocate for moving away from the idea that the only appropriate response is to count those who make such claims as being members that meet the dominant conception of personhood. Instead, I want to highlight the fact that if being a person is an environmentally dependent fact, theories of the nature of persons must recognize this or risk reflecting and perpetuating the current status quo.
For these reasons, those in need of recognition of their rights as persons should not only resist the failure of having them granted but should also question the current understanding of the concept itself, since the very notion may be riddled with normative assumptions typical only of those with certain kinds of privilege. That is, fighting for recognition as persons, without also resisting and questioning the source and objectivity of our current concept of personhood, risks failing to truly challenge the currently unfair social structure in any deep way.
There is a risk, however, with taking such a stance -- that it will be fallaciously inferred that there is no fair concept of persons at all to which are owed rights. But this does not follow from the stance I take. All that follows is that we must recognize our fallibility in offering metaphysical theories, particularly when the concept under investigation is normatively sensitive and environmentally dependent in the way that the kind person seems to be.
Theories concerning the metaphysics of persons, then, must address the fact that those with privilege not only have more power to assert their rights as persons, but they are also the source of most received views of the concept itself. It is possible, therefore, that our current metaphysical theories may be misdescribing the objective nature of personhood as a kind for politically biased reasons.
I argue that one of the particularly pernicious assumptions frequently made is that to be a person is to be a certain kind of psychologically integrated being. This is an ideal we seem to hold dear, since we tend to pathologize the failure to achieve it. I claim, however, that this thesis about persons as integrated is exactly the kind of idea that fails the environmental dependence test, since this state of integration is often only readily had by those who have a certain amount of control over their external environment, which many of us do not enjoy. For those who are not members of the dominant group, a strongly integrated self is sometimes simply not on the horizon, since being subject to the vicissitudes of the external environment often leads to conflict, fragmentation, or disintegration. Having inadequate power over one's own circumstances tends to produce what we might call “fractured selves,” selves that face a multitude of environmental forces, many times thrusting contradictory norms, roles, and traits, upon those subjected to them.
The fact that the failure to achieve integration is in fact pathologized makes the integration thesis seriously questionable, since it creates a situation in which those most in need of being conferred the normative status of being a person will fail to get such recognition, and in fact, possibly labelled as "defective" in some way or other. This is unjust for many reasons, at least one of which is that it relies on morally irrelevant facts to determine a person's normative status.
The previous issues raise the question of whether the aim of a giving a metaphysical account of persons ought to be understood descriptively or prescriptively, since current metaphysical accounts would fail to count many individuals as persons. However, taking metaphysical accounts as a prescriptive is highly controversial. I doubt that most of those offering explicit metaphysical theories of persons would agree that they are engaged in any kind of prescriptive project. Some psychologists and psychiatrists perhaps may take themselves to be determining whether a person is "healthy" by our current understanding of what it is to be a person, but the idea of having a healthy psychology sufficient for being a fully competent person is vastly different from having a healthy physical body, which does seem to have a more objective basis, although even this is questioned in disability studies.
The strong integration thesis, then, as now applied, clearly raises political issues, and has potential negative consequences for many beings that we typically do think of as persons. The integration thesis then needs to be replaced with a more adequately descriptive metaphysical theory or revised in a way so that it avoids these negative political consequences.
I see two paths open: (1) maintain the integration thesis as an ideal, and grant those who fail to meet it a temporary kind of normative status equal to that of being a person and push for substantive equal opportunity to achieve integration; or (2) reject the ideal altogether and offer a different account of the nature of being a person that counts so-called "fractured selves" as persons.
I believe that path (2) is preferable to path (1) for several reasons. First, it requires no condescension or paternalistic attitudes towards those who fail to be fully integrated; second, it expresses intellectual humility in accepting that standards that appear objective are often, in reality, biased and should not be universally applied; and third, it is more realistic in that it does not assume that there is an infinite amount of resources, and therefore harbors no illusions that equalizing power structures will allow everyone to enjoy the same amount and kind of power currently held by the dominant classes.
My own metaphysical account of what matter in survival for persons over time advocates for the idea that persons ought to be understood as constituted not only by internal psychological relations, but also by their relations to their surrounding environments, and this includes relations to inanimate objects. This view, I argue, can accommodate fractured selves as full persons, allowing for various psychological configurations to count as persons. It is also an improvement on view that do happen to recognize the environmental influence on persons -- social constitution views. The reason is that these views argue that persons just are what their environmental social surroundings dictate, which also has potentially negative political consequences, since it threatens to bind persons so closely to socio-cultural contexts that it closes off the possibility of resistance to them. However, because the view I endorse, makes persons environmentally dependent not only on their socio-cultural context, but on the whole of their environment, this makes persons partly independent of socio-cultural contexts, allowing them room to question them.
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