Contact details:
Tel.: 01603-593405
E-mail:
Date of birth:
Nationality: British
Areas of Specialisation
Philosophy of mind/cognitive science
Philosophy of language/logic
Generative linguistics
Concept of truth
Areas of Competence
Philosophy of science
Contemporary epistemology/metaphysics
Modern philosophy (esp. Descartes, Kant, and Schopenhauer)
Education & Qualifications
PhD Philosophy
MA Philosophy. Distinction
BA Philosophy. First Class
Employment History
Post: Lecturer October 2003 to the present
Duties: Convenor of up to three units per semester; general admin.; graduate secretary for philosophy; secretary of the Philosophy Society.
Salary: £26,000 per annum.
Post: Teacher January 2003 - March 2003
Course: ‘A’-level Philosophy syllabus/’Critical Thinking’
Duties: Ten hours contact time; essay/exam marking; course organisation and admin.
Salary: £200
per week
Post: Lecturer February 2001 - June 2001
Course: Philosophy of language (2nd year BA)
Duties: Two weekly lectures; essay/exam setting and marking; course organisation and admin.
Reason for leaving: End of contract
Post: Lecturer/Tutor October 2000 - December 2000
Course: Philosophy of Thought (2nd year BA)
Department of Philosophy,
Duties: Two weekly lectures; five weekly tutorials; weekly essay marking and feedback;
general admin.
Reasons for leaving: End of contract
.
Post: Lecturer/Tutor April 1998 - July 1998
Course: Logic and Metaphysics
Department of Philosophy,
Duties: Weekly lectures; tutorials; essay marking
Reasons for leaving: End of contract
Post: Back-up class teacher/Tutor October 1995 - June 1997
Course: Philosophy of Language (2nd year BA)
Department of Philosophy,
Duties: Fortnightly two hour lecture/seminar; tutorials; essay marking
Reasons for leaving: End of contract
Post: Seminar tutor September 1994 - June 1995
Course: Philosophy of Logic
Department
of Philosophy,
Duties: Weekly seminar; essay marking
Reasons for leaving: End of contract
Research Funding
British
Academy Studentship Award for PhD research at
Title of Research: The Meaning of Truth: Tarski, Deflationism, and Interpretation
Professional Activities
Referee for Erkenntnis, Mind, Mind and Language, and Philosophical Papers.
Publications
Refereed Journal Articles
[1] "Theory of Mind, Logical Form and Eliminativism." Philosophical Psychology, 13
(4): 465-490, 2000.
[2] “Truth Conditions without Interpretation.” Sorites, 13: 52-72, 2001.
[3] “On the Very Idea of a Science Forming Faculty.” Dialectica, 56 (2): 125-151, 2002.
[4]
"Truth or Meaning? A Question of Priority." Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research, 65 (3): 497-536, 2002.
[5] “Truth: An Elevation.” American Philosophical Quarterly, 39 (4): 325-341, 2002.
[6]
“Horwich’s Sting: Constitution and Composition.” Croatian Journal of Philosophy, 2
(5): 97-112, 2002.
[7] “On the Proposed Exhaustion of Truth.” Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical
Review, 41 (4): 653-79, 2002.
[8] “Horwich’s Schemata Meet Syntactic Structures.” Mind, 112 (447): 399-432, 2003.
[9]
“Expressions, Sentences, Propositions.” Erkenntnis, 59
(2): 233-262, 2003.
[10] “Cowie on the Poverty of Stimulus.” Synthèse, 136 (2): 159-190, 2003.
[11] “Language: A Dialogue.”
[12] “Faculty Disputes: Chomsky Contra Fodor.” Mind and Language, 2004.
[13] “Nativism: Substantial vs. Deflationary Approaches.” Philosophical Psychology,
forthcoming.
[14] “On the Input Problem for Massive Modularity.” Minds and Machines, forthcoming.
[15] “A Minimalist Perspective: Deflationism and Natural Language Quantification. Part I.”
accepted on condition of revisions.
[16] “A Minimalist Perspective: Deflationism and Natural Language Quantification. Part II.”
accepted on condition of revisions.
[17] “Compositionality, LF-Syntax and Semantics.” accepted on condition of revisions.
[18] “How and Why Intensionality is Clausal”, accepted on condition of revisions.
Chapters in
Collections
[1] “Doing
Without World: Truth as Metarepresentation.” To appear in The Illocutionary
Role of Truth. Kluwer.
Reviews
[1] “Fodor Encapsulated. A Review of Jerry Fodor’s The Mind doesn’t Work That Way.”
Pli, 11 (1): 278-278, 2000.
[2] “A Review of Louise M. Antony and Norbert Hornstein’s (eds.) Chomsky and his
Critics.” Erkenntnis, 60 (1): 274-281, 2004.
Work under Review/in Progress
Books
On ‘Logical Form’: Language in Mind (in preparation)
Articles
[1] “Proxytypes and Linguistic Nativism”, under review.
[2] “Two Kinds of Eliminativism: A Reconsideration of Chomsky’s Skinner review”, under
review.
[3] “Stanley on Logical Form.” Manuscript.
[4] “On an Hitherto Unnoticed Connection between Generative Linguistics and
Schopenhauer’s Transcendental Idealism.” Manuscript.
Critical Studies
[7] “Richard Schantz’s (ed.) What is Truth?” Manuscript.
[8] “Ray Jackendoff’s Foundations of Language.” Manuscript.
Talks and Professional Papers
[1]
“The Place of Representation in the Minimalist Program”. European Society for
Philosophy and Psychology, Turin, July 2003.
[2] “Truth Without World”. University of East Anglia Philosophy Society, Norwich,
November 2003.
[3] “Language, Theory, Politics: Themes from Chomsky”. University of Middlesex Research
Seminar, London, April 2004.
[4] “The Epistemology of Language: an Eliminativist Proposal”. Anglian Philosophy
Triangle, Cambridge, June 2004
[5] “On Not Knowing a Language”. European Society for Philosophy and Psychology,
Barcelona July, 2004.
Research
My PhD research was principally concerned with the philosophical response to Tarski’s work on the concept of truth and model theory. I sought to show that Tarski’s aims and achievements are orthogonal to the contemporary philosophical disputes over whether truth is a robust or deflated concept. Since the completion of this research, my interests have gone in a number of intersecting directions, unified by a commitment to bring to bear on philosophical concerns the methodology and results of naturalistic inquiry into cognition.
(i) Truth. I am developing a cognitive conception of truth under which the concept serves as an internal metarepresentational mechanism whose application allows us to understand our thoughts as both representations and that represented. This approach stands in contrast to both robust and deflationary theories, in that it rejects all but pleonastic construals of the property of being true, and eschews all analytical efforts, while also seeking to explain our truth competence as opposed to resting on the normative or dispositional shape of our use of semantic terms. This approach is articulated in a number of publications and is ongoing.
(ii) Philosophy of mind/cognitive science. My chief interests are cognitive architecture, the status of propositional psychology, and the internalism/externalism debate. These interests come together in my faculty ensemble approach to cognitive architecture. As well as distinguishing this view from alternative accounts, such as ‘Theory-theory’ and ‘massive modularity’, I have, on its basis, tackled a number of philosophical issues, including eliminativism and the cognitive basis of scientific explanation. I have also proposed an interface theory under which a Theory of Mind faculty is dependent on the output of the language faculty. This proposal is defended with syntactic, semantic, and psychological evidence.
(iii) Language. My interests in the philosophy of language are shaped by an internalist conception of linguistic competence, which is (i) free of any normative/epistemological constraints and (ii) non-causal. My thesis is that language, proprietarily understood, is a sui generis structural aspect of the human mind/brain. I am currently exploring the consequences of the this model for many traditional philosophical concerns, especially ‘knowledge of language/meaning’, compositionality, and intensionality.
(iv) Linguistic theory. I have articulated and defended the framework of generative linguistics. I have been especially concerned to explain ‘poverty of stimulus’ arguments and to dispute ‘non-linguistic’ explanations of syntactic competence. I have also made specific proposals about (inter alia) the syntax of generalised quantification, the structure of intensional transitive verb phrases, and phase level derivation.
(v) Logical Form. The book I have in preparation is concerned with the various senses of the traditional philosophical notion of logical form, and what legitimacy they might have. The central claim of the work is that there is no pure notion of logical form that is not infected with features of lexical meaning. Thus, the common thought that form is one thing, word meaning is another thing, collapses. I draw various consequences from this claim to do with knowledge of meaning, truth conditional semantics, and the putative role of logical form within metaphysical inquiry. The work also argues, pace many philosophers, linguists, and psychologists, that the direction of current research in generative linguistics supports my sceptical attitude towards the purity of logical form.
(vi) The future. As well as continuing the above research, I intend to further
investigate issues in scientific methodology, especially the difference between the normative and the cognitive, and to
explore the historical debates concerning innate ideas, the putative role of
justification in accounting for knowledge, and the status of ‘the Given’, with
especial reference to Sellars, Evans, McDowell, and Fodor.
Referees
Prof. Jennifer Hornsby, Department of Philosophy,
Tel.: 020 7631 6564
Fax: 020 7631 6564
Email: j.hornsby@phil.bbk.ac.uk
Prof. Michael Luntley, Department of Philosophy,
Tel.: 01203-522581
Fax: 02476-523019
Email: michael.luntley@warwick.ac.uk
David Miller, Department of Philosophy,
Tel.: 02476 524543
Fax: 02476 523019
Email: d.w.miller@warwick.ac.uk
More Recent Teaching Referees
Dr.
Daniel Cardinal,
Tel: 01689 899700
Fax: 01689 877949
Email. DCardinal@Orpington.ac.uk
Dr. Neil Gascoigne, School of Languages and Social Sciences, Anglia Polytechnic University, East Road, Cambridge, CB1 1PT.
Tel.: 01223-363271, ex.2419
Fax: 01223-352973
Email: n.gascoigne@anglia.ac.uk