Current research

My current research builds on the work I have done both for the book I co-authored with Robert Myers (Donald Davidson's Triangulation Argument: A Philosophical Inquiry, Routledge, 2016) and for the volumes I recently edited (Wittgenstein and Davidson on Language, Thought, and Action, Cambridge University Press, 2017 and Kripke's Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language at 40, Cambridge University Press, 2024).

My most important project is a book, entitled Minding the World, in which I address critiques of what I take to be Wittgenstein and Davidson’s conception of the relation between thought and reality, and develop and defend the conception of objectivity that can be based upon it.  Other projects include further work connected to non-reductionism.  First, I plan to address attempts, more and more frequent in the past few years, to reduce propositional thought, no longer, as used to be the goal, to altogether non-intentional facts, but rather to intentional facts that are not propositional or semantic.  Relatedly, I also plan to address attempts to establish a continuity between non-propositional thought and propositional thought.  Second, I wish further to consider the claim, often made by commentators on Wittgenstein, that non-reductionism and quietism necessarily go hand in hand.  In connection to this, I plan to investigate further the kind of answer Wittgenstein is often taken to give to the sceptic about the external world, viz., a “therapeutic” kind of response, according to which the sceptic can be silenced but not shown to be mistaken, as the non-quietist would have it.