Research

I argue in favor of what I call the ‘Cooperative Warrant Thesis’ (CWT), according to which the determinants of testimonial contents in communication are given by the practical requirements of joint action. This thesis distances itself from conventionalist accounts, according to which testimony must be strictly bounded by conventions of speech. CWT proves explanatorily better than conventionalism on several accounts. It offers a principled and accurate criterion to distinguish between testimonial and non-testimonial communication. In being goal-sensitive, this criterion captures the effects of weak and strong cooperation has in determining the contents to which speakers testify (or fail to testify). And, finally, it yields a principled explanation of why our testimonial practices entail the normativity of epistemic commitment.

This paper explores how humans communicate more than they literally say, and the connection between this familiar point and discourse coherence. We begin by arguing that non-literal conversational moves like implicatures can make their content common ground, just as literal moves can. We argue that this is best understood as ‘practical coherence’. We propose that practical coherence involves explaining how a given speech act counts as progress towards the goals shared by the interlocutors in a given conversation. We then show that some information p can become common ground when assuming p is required for practical coherence. Throughout, we situate practical coherence within existing QUD-approaches, psychological approaches, and grammatical approaches. We aim for a high-level account by employing the Cognitive Models framework for practical reasoning developed by Harris and inspired by Gibbard.

There is an intuitive normative difference between declarative speech acts that commit the speaker to a content and speech acts that do not. I propose a novel account of this distinction in terms of the role cooperative reasoning has in communication. Focusing on cooperative action warrants a distinction between stated contents—contents required as the cooperative interpretations of an utterance—and insinuated contents—contents merely permitted as the cooperative interpretations of an utterance. In turn, the normative difference between statements and insinuations owes to the fact that stated contents inherit the cooperative commitments that enable them, while insinuated contents do not. Crucially, this view recommends rejecting literalism: the view that the distinction between committal and non-committal speech corresponds to the distinction between literal and non-literal speech. After presenting the distinction between statements and insinuations, I argue how this view captures and accommodates literalist intuitions and how it fares against literalist objections.

The fact that defective assertions are subject to criticism strongly suggests that assertions are subject to a norm adjudicating between proper improper assertions. Constitutivism about assertion is the view that there is a deep conceptual connection between this norm and the ontology of the speech act of assertion. This family of views has been mostly concerned with what I call the normative question of assertion: Should speakers, for instance, know what they assert, or should they have certainty or justified belief? Here I aim to sketch an answer to this question by way of another significantly less visited question: What kind of norm is the norm of assertion? Call it the metanormative question of assertion. I argue that the constitutive norm of assertion is not Searlean, social, or conventional. Rather, it is an instrumental norm, stemming from the instrumental normativity of cooperative action. This view neatly accommodates the non-constitutive role of other communal norms in the practice of assertion. Moreover, it provides a distinctive path to answer the normative question of assertion. I conclude by exploring how the connection between knowledge and (cooperative) action yields reasons to think knowledge is the norm of assertion.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) has been an influential thesis since the earliest stages of western philosophy. According to a simple version of the PSR, for every fact, there must be an explanation of that fact. In the present research, we investigate whether people presuppose a PSR-like principle in judgment. Across four studies (N = 1,007 in total, U.S., Prolific), we find that participants consistently presuppose PSR in judgments about candidate explananda. Such judgments predictably track the metaphysical aspects relevant to the PSR (Study 1) and diverge from related epistemic judgments (Study 2) and value judgments (Study 3). Moreover, we find participants’ PSR-affirming judgments apply to a large set of facts that were sampled from random Wikipedia entries (Studies 4). These findings suggest that certain metaphysical judgments play an important role in our explanatory activities, one that is distinct from the role of the epistemic and value judgments that have been the focus of much recent work in cognitive psychology and philosophy of science.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) has been an influential thesis since the earliest stages of western philosophy. According to a simple version of the PSR, for every fact, there must be an explanation of that fact. In the present research, we investigate whether people presuppose a PSR-like principle in ordinary judgment. Across five studies (N = 1,121 in total, U.S., Prolific), we find that participants consistently make judgments that conform to the PSR. Such judgments predictably track the metaphysical aspects of explanation relevant to the PSR (Study 1) and diverge from related epistemic judgments about expected explanations (Study 2) and value judgments about desired or useful explanations (Study 3). Moreover, we find participants’ PSR-conforming judgments apply to a large set of facts that were sampled from random Wikipedia entries (Studies 4-5). In tandem with our experimental findings, we offer a rational analysis of the PSR-like presumption that renders precise when and why having such a presumption makes inquiry an enticing prospect. The present research suggest that certain metaphysical judgments play an important role in our explanatory activities, one that is distinct from the role of the epistemic and value judgments that have been the focus of much recent work in cognitive psychology and philosophy of science.

Consider two premises. P1: Speakers commit to the cooperatively required contents of their words, given the joint goals that structure their conversation; P2: Power allows agents to impose joint goals to others. I aim to explore the conclusion: Power modulates the contents to which speakers commit.

Euphemistic speech represents an odd gap in the philosophy of language. We’re here to fix that. Spoiler: the euphemistic character of an expression does not lie in its content, the intentions of the speaker, nor the conventions of her community.