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Biography
My primary research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. Much of my work has been about how grammatical structure is related to linguistic meaning, how words are related to concepts, and how language is related to distinctively human thought. In Conjoining Meanings: Semantics without Truth Values (OUP 2018), I argue that meanings are instructions for how to build concepts of a special kind. In various papers--often collaborative and involving psycholinguistic experiments--I have defended a nativist approach to the study of human languages, a mentalistic conception of what these languages are, and an internalistic account of the meanings that human linguistic expressions exhibit. A recurring theme is that with regard to how words are used and understood, representational format matters a lot.
