About My Research

In the philosophy of language, my research focuses on semantics, pragmatics, and speech act theory. One of my projects in this area concerns the speech act of assertion, and in particular its dual role as a means of communicating information and a device for undertaking conversational commitments. Another project seeks to understand the semantics of mixed quotation and related constructions and evaluate the extent to which quotation occurs covertly in natural language. A third project focuses on the semantics of slurs and other evaluative expressions. In connection with this third project, I like to think about things like expressivism, illocutionary force, and semantic multidimensionality.

In the philosophy of artificial intelligence, I am interested both in issues related to the safety of emerging technologies — for example, approaches to mitigating the existential risks associated with advances in machine learning — and in issues of technological fairness, transparency, and governance. I am part of Rutgers–Newark's initiative in Computer Science, Data Science, and AI.

In social philosophy, I am interested in exploring the implications of accounts of gaslighting which are purely epistemic in the sense that they do not tie gaslighting constitutively to the intentions of the gaslighter. Such accounts raise the possibility that gaslighting might occur in unexpected domains, for example in certain academic discussions in applied ethics. I am also interested in gendered language, and in particular in the semantics of gendered pronouns and words like 'woman', 'man', 'female', and 'male'. I believe there is strong empirical support for trans-inclusive theories of the meanings of these expressions.