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My interests lie mainly in the philosophy of language, construed in the analytic (Anglo-American) tradition.  One of my interests in this area revolves around the American philosopher Donald Davidson (1917-2003) and the ways in which his important contributions to our understanding of language and communication can shed light on various current concerns in these areas.  I am also interested in questions that have to do with the relation between semantics and pragmatics, as well as attempts to provide semantic (or pragmatic) accounts of deviant or marginal uses of language (e.g., malapropisms, pejoratives, expressives, etc.).

Here are a couple of papers I have published in this area:

“Is Davidson a Gricean?”, Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, Vol. 48 (3), 2009, pp. 557-75.

In his recent collection of essays, Language, Truth and History (2005), Donald Davidson appears to endorse a philosophy of language which gives primary importance to the notion of the speaker’s communicative intentions, a perspective on language not too dissimilar from that of Paul Grice. If that is right, then this would mark a major shift from the formal semanticist approach articulated and defended by Davidson in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984). In this paper, I argue that although there are many similarities between these two thinkers, Davidson has not abandoned his earlier views on language.

“Mindblindness and Radical Interpretation in Davidson,” Analecta Hermeneutica, Journal for the International Institute for Hermeneutics, Vol. 1, 2009, pp. 13-28.

This paper reviews some of the arguments put forward by some psychologists in which they come to the conclusion that autistic individuals suffer from mindblindness, and also looks at one particular implication these sorts of individuals pose for Donald Davidson’s theory of radical interpretation. It has been claimed that a particular manifestation of mindblindness in autistic people serves as a counter example to claims Davidson has made about the relation between belief and intention in linguistic competence.

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