Research

My research interests fall in the general areas of philosophy of language, language and mind, philosophical logic, and metaphysics.

In the philosophy of language, I am investigating the relation between pragmatics and syntax, theories of meaning and truth, theories of reference, and accounts of indexicals and anaphora. I have written on pragmatic aspects of argument, in which I attempt to give a coherent and general account of the fallacy of begging the question. I have also written critically on redundancy and prosentential theories of truth, and am writing a critical paper on disquotational theories of truth. Recently I have collaborated with George Dickie in criticizing intentionalist theories of artistic interpretation. I adopt a loosely Chomskyan stance toward theories of language and mind and hope to develop a theory of reference and a pragmatic theory that is integrated with a Chomskyan position. I am also interested in developing arguments supporting nativism in the theory of language and language acquisition and examining arguments for and against connectionist models of language acquisition.