Papers Under Review:

“Nonliteral Speech as Committing to the Bit on the Common Playground” (R&R)

• I argue for a general theory of figures of speech like irony and metaphor, claiming that they license speakers to commit to the bit, ie, act as if their literal content was expressed. I argue that figures of speech are distinct because they require different interpretive mechanisms, but pretense underlies them all because they must be interpreted using the common playground, a pretense-flavored version of the common ground.

“AI, Autism, and Conversational Alignment”

• I show how AI chatbots can help conversational minorities “mask,” ie, mimic majority conversation styles to promote safer and more effective communication. However, for AI chatbots to be sustainable masking assistants, I argue they must be trained on audiovisual data, enabling them to have more human-like conversations.

Papers In Prep:

“Conversation Styles”

• I present a philosophical theory of conversation styles as solutions to communicative coordination problems, using emerging psycholinguistic data on autism as a central case study. I argue that there is no ideal conversation style, which has important implications for how we should think of conversational conventions, conversational fairness, and autism generally.

“Accept This Paper” (w/ Andy Egan)

• We argue that acceptance, a mental state often taken for granted in philosophy of language, is active in action generally and solves numerous issues in philosophy of action. Acceptance is a sui generis voluntaristic mental state which is crucial for diachronic and cooperative action.

“Art Should Be Fun”

• I focus on movies that are so bad that they’re good, like Tommy Wiseau’s The Room to argue that the aesthetic value of fun has been neglected in dominant theories of aesthetic value.