Professor of Philosophy
University of Connecticut - Storrs
My research interests include logic, philosophical logic, the history and philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and Kant's ethics.
Semantic Singularities: Paradoxes of Reference, Predication, and Truth was published by Oxford University Press in 2018.
I have also published recently on Curry's paradox and paradoxes of validity:
'Curry and Context: Truth and Validity', Philosophical Studies 180, 2023.
'Paradoxes of Validity', Philosophical Studies 179, 2021.
My book on truth and the liar paradox, Universality and the Liar: An Essay on Truth and the Diagonal Argument appeared in hardback in 1993 and in paperback in 2008, with Cambridge University Press.
I am the co-editor, with Simon Blackburn, of Truth, in the series Oxford Readings in Philosophy, published by Oxford University Press 1999.
See below for Selected Articles, with links.
I am currently at work on a Monograph on Truth, focused on the debate between the substantivist and the deflationist. Here is a chapter-by-chapter breakdown:
Chapter 1 Substantivism vs Deflationism. Reviews the ongoing debate between the substantivist and the deflationist about truth. Distinguishes three levels of the debate: about the predicate 'true', about the concept truth, and about the property truth. Lays out the plan of the book.
Chapter 2 Deflationism: The Problem of Formulation. Argues that there is a problem with the very formulation of deflationism.
Chapter 3 Truth and Assertion. Argues that the concept of truth is needed to explain assertion: to assert is to put forward as true.
Chapter 4 Truth and Meaning. Argues that the concept of truth is needed to explain meaning: meaning is (at least) truth conditions.
Chapter 5 Truth and the Liar. Argues that the Liar shows that we cannot escape semantic concepts and essentially semantic states of affairs, on pain of unacceptable costs.
Chapter 6 The Property of Truth. Argues from a substantive concept of truth to a substantive property of truth. Reviews problems for standard correspondence theories.
Chapter 7 Truth Conditions and Worldly Conditions. Argues that a truth-conditional theory of meaning yields both intensional truth conditions and metaphysically individuated worldly conditions. Argues for a dyadic truth property that ties sentences to the world in a way free of the problems for standard correspondence theories.
Chapter 8 Truth and Truthmakers. Argues that the worldly conditions identified in Chapter 7 serve as truthmakers, yielding an explanation-first truthmaker theory.
Chapter 9 Truth Monism and Truth Pluralism. Argues for truth monism, and against truth pluralism. Locates pluralism in the world, in the plurality of kinds of worldly conditions. Argues that this preserves a robust realist/anti-realist debate, and resolves the problem of creeping minimalism.
Chapter 10 Concluding remarks.
Research
SELECTED ARTICLES
“Contextual Theories of Truth”, The Oxford Handbook of Truth, edited by Michael Glanzberg, Oxford University Press 2017
“Three Questions for Minimalism”, Synthese 2016 (Special Issue, for the 25th year anniversary of Paul Horwich’s Truth).
“Paradox, Repetition, Revenge”, Topoi 34 (1): 121-131, 2015.
“Tarski’s Logic: Mathematics, Metamathematics, Logic and Semantics”, in Handbook of the History of Logic, vol. 5, Logic from Russell to Church, edited by John Woods and Dov Gabbay (eds.), Elsevier B.V. 2009, pp.511-616 (45,000 words).
“Revenge and Context”, in The Revenge of the Liar, edited by J.C. Beall, Oxford University Press 2007.
“The Use of Force Against Deflationism: Assertion and Truth” (with Dorit Bar-On), in Truth and Speech Acts: Studies in the Philosophy of Language, D. Greimann and G. Siegwart (eds.), Routledge 2007, pp.61-89.
“Deflationism and the Autonomy of Truth”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. LXXII, No. 1, 2006.
“Deflationism” (with Dorit Bar-On), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, edited by Ernest Lepore and Barry Smith, 2006.
“Truth”, in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2nd edition), 2005.
“A Berry and a Russell without self-reference”, Philosophical Studies (2005) 126: 253-261.
“A Logico-Philosophical Tour: The Search for Certainty” (critical study of The Search for Certainty by Marcus Giaquinto), Philosophia Mathematica (3) Vol. 12, 2004, pp. 162-175.
“A Critique of Dialetheism” (with Greg Littmann), The Law of Non-Contradiction: New Philosophical Essays, edited by Graham Priest, J.C. Beall and Bradley Armour-Garb, Oxford University Press 2005.
“Reference and Paradox”, in Liars and Heaps: New Essays on Paradox, edited by J.C. Beall, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2003, pp.230-252.
“Semantical and Logical Paradox”, in A Companion to Philosophical Logic, edited by Dale Jacquette, in the series Blackwell Companions to Philosophy, Blackwell, Oxford, 2002, pp.115-130.
"Sets, classes and extensions: A singularity approach to Russell's paradox", Philosophical Studies 100: 2000, pp.109-149.
"Three paradoxes: circles and singularities", in Circularity, Definition and Truth, Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 2000, pp.333-354.
"Deflationary Truth and the Liar", Journal of Philosophical Logic 28, 1999, pp.455-488.
"Poincaré and Paradox", in Henri Poincaré: Science and Philosophy, Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1996.
"Paradoxes of Denotation", Philosophical Studies 76: 71-106, 1994.
"A Paradox of Definability: Richard's and Poincaré's Ways Out", History and Philosophy of Logic 15: pp.33-44, 1994.
Three entries: (a) "Metaphysics", (b) "Ontology", (c) "Philosophical Logic"
in The Hebrew Encyclopedia, Supplementary Vol. I, Tel Aviv, Israel: Massada, 1994 (with Dorit Bar-On).
"On an argument against omniscience", Noûs, March 1993.
"Outline of a Contextual Theory of Truth", Proceedings of Logica 1991, An International Conference in Logic, pp.43-57.
"The Diagonal Argument and the Liar", Journal of Philosophical Logic 19: pp.277-303, 1990.
"Kant on Moral Worth", History of Philosophy Quarterly, Volume 6/Number 1, January, 1989,
pp.85-100.
"On a Medieval Solution to the Liar Paradox", History and Philosophy of Logic, 8, 1987, pp.121-140.
Teaching
Recent Courses:
Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems
Modal Logic
Symbolic Logic
Kripke's Naming and Necessity
Paradoxes
Truth: Logic and Metaphysics
Contact
University of Connecticut
Department of Philosophy
Manchester Hall
344 Mansfield Road, Unit 1054
Storrs Connecticut 06269-1054
Tel: 860-486-4416