Research
Publications
The Argument from Determinate Vagueness, Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, forthcoming
The Lewis-Sider argument from vagueness is one of the most powerful objections against restricted composition. Many have resisted the argument by rejecting its key premise, namely that existence is not vague. In this paper, I argue that this strategy is ineffective as a response to vagueness-based objections against restricted composition. To that end, I formulate a new argument against restricted composition: the argument from determinate vagueness. Unlike the Lewis-Sider argument, my argument doesn’t require accepting that existence is not vague, but only that it is not vague in a specific way, which, I argue, is entailed by restricted composition. I show that the rejection of this species of vague existence follows from assumptions even friends of vague existence should be happy to accept.
Being tall compared to compared to being tall and being taller, Proceedings of ELM 1, (with Alexis Wellwood and Deniz Rudin)
This paper investigates the semantics of implicit comparatives ('Alice is tall compared to Bob') and its connections to the semantics of explicit comparatives ('Alice is taller than Bob') and sentences with adjectives in plain positive form ('Alice is tall'). We consider evidence from two experiments that tested judgments about these three kinds of sentence, and provide a semantics for implicit comparatives from the perspective of degree semantics.
Work in progress
Propositions, truthmaking, and set-membership (with Gabi Dumet-Delgado)
Oughts and Gaps (with Nurit Matuk-Blaustein)