Professor
Ph.D., Montreal
Research areas: Philosophy of Language, Epistemology, Metaphysics
Email: montminy@ou.edu
Professor
Ph.D., Montreal
Research areas: Philosophy of Language, Epistemology, Metaphysics
Email: montminy@ou.edu
I am interested in how what we mean by our words varies from one context of to another. This issue is importantly relevant to several traditional debates in philosophy. For example, according to epistemic contextualism, a view I endorse, what we mean by ‘know’ may change dramatically, depending on the context. The skeptic associates very strict standards with ‘know.’ So her claim that we ‘don’t know’ anything is compatible with our ordinary knowledge claims, which are associated with more relaxed epistemic standards.
I also hold that the vagueness of our terms gives rise to a kind of context sensitivity. On my view, speakers have the discretion to judge borderline cases of vague predicates as they wish. In addition to offering a plausible treatment of the most puzzling features associated with vagueness, this contextualist account, I argue, has interesting consequences. It can be used to dissolve the debate between content individualism and anti-individualism, and to solve Kripke’s puzzle about belief.
More recently, my research has focused on various issues such as epistemic modals ('It might'), causal contextualism (the idea that sentences of the form ‘c causes e’ have context-sensitive truth-conditions), the norms of assertion (e.g., one should assert only what one knows) and the possibility of obtaining knowledge from false beliefs. These days, I work on moral responsibility. I defend a capacity-based approach, according to which a morally responsible agent ought to do the right thing to the extent of her capacities.