Papers
Personal Identity and Two Kinds of Possibility (pdf)
When personal identity puzzle cases are imagined "from the outside", our judgments support the view that personal identity supervenes on psychological, bodily, and brain continuity. But when the same cases are imagined "from the inside", our judgments suggest that personal identity does not supervene. These apparently conflicting intuitions can be reconciled if we accept that these two forms of imagination correspond to two kinds of metaphysical possibility, centered and uncentered.
Propositions, Semantic Values, and Rigidity (pdf)
In a recent paper, Jeffrey King argues: (i) that the semantic value of a sentence at a context is (or determines) a function from possible worlds to truth values; and (ii) that this undermines part of Jason Stanley's case against the rigidity thesis, the claim that no rigid term has the same content as a non-rigid term. I show that King's main argument for (i) fails, and that Stanley's argument is consistent with the claim that the semantic value of a sentence at a context is (or determines) a function from worlds to truth values.
Illusions of Influence in Newcomb's Problem (pdf)
I argue that the one-boxing intuition in Newcomb's Problem arises from the fact that it wouldn't be epistemically rational for an agent in a Newcomb Problem to be certain that her decision would not affect the contents of the opaque box. The best argument for this account is that it offers a fairly precise explanation of why changing certain parameters in the case alters our intuitions in systematic ways.
Two Puzzles About Deontic Necessity (pdf)
In New Work on Modality, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 51 (2005). Edited by J. Gajewski, V. Hacquard, B. Nickel and S. Yalcin.
The deontic modal must has two surprising properties: an assertion of must p does not permit a denial of p, and must does not take past tense complements. I first consider an explanation of these phenomena that stays within Kratzer's semantic framework for modals, and then offer some reasons for rejecting that explanation. I then propose an alternative account, according to which simple must sentences have the force of an imperative.