Publications:
‘Beyond “All or Some”: Reframing the Debate between Local and Global Expressivists’, published in Erkenntnis, 2024 (open access)
Abstract: Local expressivism is the idea that some kinds of sentences express mental states other than beliefs. Global expressivism is the idea that all sentences are similarly expressive (of attitudes) instead of representational. They appear to disagree, but due to the vagueness of these big-picture ideas, the disagreement between them has not yet been clearly pinned down and has been suspected to be empty. This paper fixes this problem and shows not only how and where they disagree, but also that their disagreement is more profound than it has usually been conceived as. I first show that local and global expressivism have very different conceptual origins and thus that we should not think of them as carrying the same project to different extents. I then show their disagreement: global expressivists think that the meaning of all kinds of sentences is primarily inferential, and the meaningfulness of language is to be primarily explained by our trying to agree with our peers, while local expressivists think that the meaning of some kinds of sentences is primarily representational, and the meaningfulness of language is to be primarily explained by our trying to agree with the environment. An important upshot of this reframing of the debate is that global expressivists’ arguments to convince local expressivists are not successful.
Talks, Reviews, Miscellaneous:
‘Rortyian Lessons of Conceptual Engineering’, at International Conference: Richard Rorty and the German Tradition, Paderborn University, https://richard-rorty-gt-2024-upb.weebly.com, March 15-16.
Review of The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan, published in Critique, 2022
Review of A Sheer Excess of Powers by Cheryl Misak, published in Critique, 2021
Liberation and Maturity: Richard Rorty’s Anti-authoritarianism (intended as a short, general, and accessible introduction to Rorty’s central themes), published in Phi magazine, 2022