about me
I'm a 4th year PhD student in philosophy and a project member in the 5-year
Contextualism and Relativism project at
the University of St Andrews,
Arché. My area of specialization is philosophy of language, but my research also touches on issues in methodology, philosophical logic and epistemology. In philosophy of language, my research has centered primarily on topics such as the semantics of descriptions and natural language determiners, presupposition projection, propositional attitudes, discourse anaphora, and the semantics and pragmatics of focus. However, due to my membership in the contextualism and relativism project at Arché, I've been exposed to a great deal of research on the semantics-pragmatics divide and the disputes between contextualists and relativists in philosophy of language.
DISSERTATION
My dissertation is a collection of papers on the semantics and pragmatics of definite and indefinite descriptions. In
Descriptions, Truth Value Intuitions, and Questions (
Linguistics and Philosophy, 2009) I develop a solution to a famous methodological problem concerning conflicting truth value intuitions. In
Existence Commitments and Presuppositions I discuss a problem concerning existence commitments and non-doxastic attitudes. I argue that in order to solve this problem, existence presuppositions must be assumed to bind into the asserted content of definite descriptions. In the third and final paper I discuss the distinction between attributive and referential uses of descriptions and argue that the analysis defended in the previous paper offers a straightforward explanation of both uses. My primary supervisor is
Herman Cappelen (Arché, St Andrews), and my secondary supervisors are
Jonathan Schaffer (ANU),
Francois Recanati (Jean Nicod), and
Josh Dever (UT Austin).
PUBLICATIONS & WORK IN PROGRESS
In the
research section you'll find samples of my written work. I kindly request to be asked before unpublished material is cited. Contact information is available here:
University of St Andrews Webpage.
Anders J. Schoubye, July 2010