The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic offers a unique case study for understanding conceptual and linguistic propagation. In early 2020, scientists, politicians, journalists, and other public figures had to, with great urgency, propagate several public health-related concepts and terms to every person they could. This paper examines the propagation of coronavirus and social distancing and develops a framework for understanding how the language used to express a notion can help or hinder propagation. I argue that anyone designing a representational device for propagation needs to appreciate the three-way causal relationship between language, people’s mental representations, and the extramental world. Using this framework, I explore what makes “social distancing” a bad name for social distancing and why it is unproblematic that “coronavirus” is a scientifically loose way of speaking about the virus. Through this and further study of the many historical examples of linguistic and conceptual propagation, conceptual engineers can better understand the complex challenges facing people who want to propagate representational devices.

​

Download (penultimate version)

​

In recent years, two competing methodological frameworks have developed in the study of the epistemology of philosophy. The traditional camp, led by experimental philosophy and its allies, has made inferences about the epistemology of philosophy based on the reactions, or intuitions, people have to works of philosophy. In contrast, multiple authors have followed the lead of Deutsch and Cappelen by setting aside experimental data in favor of inferences based on careful examination of the text of notable works of philosophy. In other words, the debate is split between authors focusing on philosophy’s consumption and those focusing on philosophy’s production. This paper examines the motivation for focusing on original texts and other evidence of philosophy’s production and finds it lacking. Drawing upon Hills’ distinction between propagation and transmission, I argue that the social epistemology of philosophy does not justify the recent focus on original texts of philosophy. Because the philosophical knowledge of consumers of philosophy is likely inspired by producers of philosophy, as opposed to epistemically grounded in the producers’ epistemic states, experimental philosophy had it right all along – if we want to know the epistemic standing of philosophy, we need to look to philosophy’s consumers.

​

Download Penultimate Version

 

The last two decades have seen the proliferation of the empirical study of philosophy. This dissertation defends the practice and argues that to understand the way contingent features of the practice of philosophy affect the epistemic standing of philosophers, we need to draw upon a wider and more varied set of empirical data than is sometimes supposed. To explore this, the dissertation focuses on two places where the practices of the discipline of philosophy have an effect on the epistemology of philosophy.

​

First, the dissertation discusses the interaction between notable works of philosophy and their readers. In particular, it critiques the method of defending the epistemic standing of philosophers through careful examination of notable works of philosophy to discern the methods in the text. Ultimately this method is epistemically unmotivated. It is instead far more important to study how people have interacted and reacted to works of philosophy.

 

Second, the dissertation defends the use of lexicography in philosophy. Using "intuition" as a case study, the dissertation argues metasemantically and lexicographically that philosophers often use common words with meanings unique to philosophy.

​

 

Through both discussions it is argued that experimental philosophers and epistemologists of philosophy need to drastically expand the sorts of data they collect and consider in their theorizing.

​

Download

​

There is a conspicuous overlap in the people who hold two apparently unconnected metaphilosophical positions: People who don't think Xphi has a place in philosophy and those working on semantic externalist frameworks of conceptual engineering. This project is a first step to show that the two positions are, if anything, in tension.

​

Winner of (E)SPP 2022 prize for best poster.

​

Download

​

The assumption that philosophers rely on intuitions to justify their philosophical positions has recently come under substantial criticism. In order to protect philosophy from experimental findings that suggest that intuitions are epistemically problematic, a number of metaphilosophers have argued that intuitions play no substantial epistemic role in philosophy. This paper focuses on attempts to deny intuitions’ epistemic role through exegetical analysis of original thought experiments. Using Deutsch’s particularly well-developed exegesis of Gettier’s 10 coin case as an exemplar of this method, I examine the challenges the strategy faces. I argue that intuition denial fails to provide a satisfactory account of how verdicts of thought experiments are justified. Instead, it commits intuition deniers to the conclusion that the arguments of Gettier, Kripke, Thomson, and others are bad arguments. As a result, rather than defusing challenges to the case method raised by experimental philosophers, intuition denial ultimately leads to the same troubling conclusion – that philosophers hold their positions on bad grounds.

​

Link to PhilPapers Page

​

Traditional discussions of meaning among semantic externalists have tended to focus on 1-to-1 relationships between words and meanings. Polysemy, in contrast, occurs when a single word has multiple related senses. These senses have a shared causal history, are related in the minds of speakers, but represent separable and sustained patterns of use, thereby raising the puzzle of how exactly semantic externalists should explain polysemous senses.

 

This paper argues that on semantic externalist frameworks established polysemous senses constitute distinct semantic meanings of a word. Looking first at cases where a single use of a word splits over time into multiple apparently unrelated senses, the paper argues each use straightforwardly represents distinct semantic meanings of a single word. The paper then argues that the addition of close semantic or psychological relationships between senses does not change matters. Finally, the paper rejects metasemantic explanations of established polysemous words that preserve single unified meanings by appealing to word use, linguistic beliefs, and Gricean implicature. Therefore, the paper argues, semantic externalists should accept that most words are ambiguous between multiple related meanings.

​

Download Draft

​