My current research is focused on:
“The Realpolitik of Reference,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 89 (2008), 1-20.
I sketch a pragmatic approach to the justification of reference-fixing procedures, in opposition to the widely-held accounts that insist on an invariant set of conditions for fixing reference across environments and linguistic communities. Comparing reference to other relations whose instances are introduced through “initiation” procedures, I outline a picture in which the procedures that are successful for fixing the reference of proper names depend in part on regularities in the actual environment.
“Convention and the Grounding of Linguistic Objects,” Croatian Journal of Philosophy 9 No. 25 (2009), to appear.
Recently a number of competing theories have been proposed in answer to the question of what makes a physical mark or sound a token of a word, and some philosophers have argued against external linguistic entities entirely. I attempt to unravel the confusions underlying many of these positions. I show where arguments for skepticism go wrong, and argue that Michael Devitt’s convention-based account confuses the conditions for being a token of a particular word with the grounds for those tokening conditions.
“The Internal and the External in Linguistic Explanation,” Croatian Journal of Philosophy 8 No. 22 (2008).
Chomsky and others have denied the relevance of external linguistic entities, such as E-languages, to linguistic explanation, and have questioned their coherence altogether. I discuss a new approach to understanding the nature of linguistic entities, focusing in particular on making sense of the varieties of kinds of “words” that are employed in linguistic theorizing. This treatment of linguistic entities in general is applied to constructing an understanding of external linguistic entities.
“The Nonlocality of Semantic Content,” under review.
Many theories of semantic content, such as information-theoretic and causal theories, implicitly require that the contextual factors that figure into content individuation be empirically connected with members of the linguistic community. I deny the need for such empirical connection. I argue that standard Putnam/Burge cases can be extended in natural ways to show that semantic content supervenes on features of the world that are not empirically connected to any individual. I propose an explanation for the role of empirical connection in content individuation, and contrast this explanation with one recently given by Henry Jackman in defending “temporal externalism.”
“Introducing Terms in the Actual World,” under review.
Recently, debate over the requirements for introducing terms into a language has been rekindled by Robin Jeshion, Scott Soames, and others. These philosophers’ approaches share the assumption that there is a necessary correspondence between the procedure used for introducing a term and the semantic category of the term thus introduced. In this paper, I present a series of examples that motivate the search for a new, more pragmatic, theory of the procedures for term-introduction.
Review of Language: A Biological Model by Ruth Millikan, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2006)
I discuss the structure of Millikan’s approach to naturalizing language, and criticize the central elements in the account, in particular her treatment of “natural convention” and “stabilizing functions.” I also discuss her radical recasting of the nature of speech acts.
Metaphysics and Methodology of Social Science
“Ontological Individualism Reconsidered,” Synthese 166, No. 1 (2009), 187-213.
Ontological individualism is the thesis that facts about individuals exhaustively determine social facts. While “explanatory individualism” has remained controversial, ontological individualism thus understood is almost universally accepted. In this paper I argue that ontological individualism is false.
“When Local Models Fail,” The Philosophy of the Social Sciences 38 (2008), 3-24.
I consider economic models of bureaucratic corruption, to show that (a) simple properties of groups often depend on properties of the wider population, and (b) even sophisticated models are commonly inadequate to account for many simple social properties. Adequate models and social policies must treat certain factors that are not local to individual members of the group, even if those factors are not causally connected to those individuals.
“Economics and Nonsupervenience,” presented at RSS2008, under review.
My aim in this paper is to argue against the project of constructing microeconomic foundations for macroeconomics, on the grounds that microeconomic properties fail to exhaustively determine the macroeconomic properties. To show this first requires developing a clearer picture of the domain of microeconomics, and then showing that macroeconomic properties depend on properties outside of this domain.
“Deceptive Properties and Modeling Social Change,” Berkeley CollInt VI Proceedings.
Many interesting properties of social groups are simply aggregated properties of individuals. It would seem obvious that to model the properties of such properties of groups, it would suffice to model the disaggregated properties of the individuals in the groups, and then aggregate them appropriately. I aim to show that this is a fallacy. Models of group properties often fail to treat the fact that even when the individual properties being aggregated are intrinsic properties, they are extrinsic when applied to groups in the aggregate.
“Science without Levels,” under review.
It is widely held among reductionists and anti-reductionists alike that the sciences are arranged in levels. Despite recent challenges to nomological hierarchies, it is nonetheless often assumed that objects can be allocated into compositional levels, and properties into supervening sets. I dispute this. I first consider Jaegwon Kim’s recent criticisms of Oppenheim and Putnam’s picture of levels, and raise difficulties with his proposed revisions. I then argue that there can be no division of objects into levels that even nearly satisfy the intuitive characteristics of a compositional hierarchy, and extend the problem to supervenience hierarchies.
“Agent-Based Models and the Fallacies of Individualism,” conference paper for Models and Simulations 3.
Agent-based modeling is often regarded as an individualistic modeling strategy in the social sciences. In this paper I claim that agent-based models are commonly not individualistic, and instead involve a heterogeneous ontology. They therefore do not necessarily presuppose the two fallacies of individualistic models. Nonetheless, agent-based models are generally subject to three related difficulties.