Nat Hansen Curriculum Vitae

Department Address Department of Philosophy University of Chicago Chicago, IL, 60637

Home Address 5428 S. Kimbark Ave., Apt 3R Chicago, IL 60615 [email protected]

Education Ph.D. B.A. (Hons.) A.B.

Philosophy, University of Chicago (Expected June 2009) P.P.E., First Class, Brasenose College, Oxford University, 2000–2002 Philosophy, Georgetown University, Summa Cum Laude, 1996–2000

Areas of Specialization Philosophy of Language, Metaphysics, Epistemology Areas of Competence Philosophy of Mind, Aesthetics, Early Analytic Philosophy, Wittgenstein Dissertation Radical Contextualism Dissertation committee Josef Stern (director), James Conant, Michael Kremer, David Finkelstein, Jason Bridges Short Dissertation Abstract In my dissertation, I develop and defend radical contextualism, the view that what is said by utterances of sentences is shaped in far-reaching and unobvious ways by aspects of the context of utterance. Recently, philosophers inspired by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein have argued that embracing radical contextualism means rejecting the dominant systematic approach to explaining how the meaning of sentences are built up out of the meaning of their parts, and how speakers are able to understand novel sentences of their language. The dominant approach to explaining those facts about language is compositional truth-conditional semantics (CTCS). Some defenders of CTCS agree with the neo-Wittgensteinians that radical contextualism is incompatible with CTCS, and have attempted to exclude most context-sensitivity from semantic theory. In my dissertation, I reject the assumption shared by both the neo-Wittgensteinians and the anti-radical-contextualist defenders of CTCS, that radical contextualism and the explanatory project of CTCS are incompatible. My approach to radical contextualism gives a systematic account of the rich variety of ways that meaning and context interact to yield what is said by an utterance of a sentence.

Works in Progress “Color Adjectives and Radical Contextualism” “Radicalism and Rule-Following” “Dionysian Semantics” “Radical Contextualism and Communication” “Faute de Mieux : J.L. Austin on Ordinary Sense” “Crary on J.L. Austin and Literal Meaning” Academic Awards, Fellowships, Grants Lee Prize (for best graduate essay in theoretical philosophy), University of Chicago, 2008 Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2007–2008 Franke Institute of the Humanities Affiliated Fellow, University of Chicago, 2007–2008 Nicholson Center for British Studies Dissertation Fellowship (Declined), 2007–2008 Stuart A. Tave Teaching Fellowship, Spring 2007 Century Fellow, University of Chicago, 2002–2007 Doolittle-Harrison Travel Fellowship, Summer 2007 Nicholson Center for British Studies, Graduate Project Grant (History of 20th Century British Philosophy II), 2006-2007 Humanities Travel Grant (For research on J.L. Austin in Oxford), Summer 2006 Nicholson Center for British Studies, Graduate Project Grant (History of 20th Century British Philosophy), 2005-2006 Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, Practicum Grant, 2004 Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies, 2002–2003 Allbritton Fellowship, Brasenose College, Oxford University, 2000–2002 Ryan Medal for highest GPA in advanced philosophy courses at Georgetown University, 2000 Undergraduate Honors Philosophy Thesis defended with distinction, 2000

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Talks “Radicalism and Rule-Following”, Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop, University of Chicago, Spring 2008 “Occasion-Sensitivity and Perceptual Representation”, Philosophy of Mind Workshop, University of Chicago, Spring 2008 “Varieties of Semantic Explananda”, Contemporary Philosophy Workshop, University of Chicago, Spring 2008 “On ‘Wittgenstein’s Rule-Following Considerations and the Central Project of Theoretical Linguistics’”, Franke Institute for the Humanities Affiliated Fellows Group, January 2008 “Three Debunking Arguments: Circularity, Open Texture and Rule-Following”, Wittgenstein Workshop, University of Chicago, January 2008 “Faute de Mieux : J.L. Austin on Ordinary Sense”, Perception et sense commun Austin et la question du r´ealisme, Colloque international `a l’Universit´e de Picardie–Jules Verne, ` a Amiens, June 2007 “Wittgensteinian Contextualism” Wittgenstein Workshop, University of Chicago, December 2006 Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop, University of Chicago, November 2006 “Radical Contextualism and Communication”, Contemporary Philosophy Workshop, University of Chicago, December 2006 “Time, Tense and Change” (with Jay Elliott), Philosophy of Mind Workshop, University of Chicago, May 2006 “Contextualism: The Lazy Man’s Approach to Philosophy?”, Philosophy of Mind Workshop, University of Chicago, March 2006 “Haute Banal : An Aesthetic of the Everyday” University of New Mexico Pop Culture Conference, February 2007 Cornell University Aesthetics of Pop Conference, March 2006 “Reconsidering Frege on Demonstratives”, Contemporary Philosophy Workshop, University of Chicago, January 2006 “Files, Chains and Internal Continuity” Oxford University Graduate Philosophy Conference, November 2005 University of Iowa Graduate Philosophy Conference, May 2005 “Groucho’s Joke” Lecture for Undergraduate Philosophy Majors, University of Chicago, October 2005 University of Pittsburgh/Carnegie Mellon Graduate Philosophy Conference, April 2005

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Intermountain West Philosophy Conference, University of Utah, February 2005 “Contraries, Echoes, Pretense: Approaches to Irony”, Lecture for Undergraduate Philosophy Majors, March 2005 “De-Filing the Mind” Contemporary Philosophy Workshop, University of Chicago, November 2004 Philosophy of Mind Workshop, University of Chicago, November 2004 Indiana Philosophical Association, Indiana University, November 2004 “Unconscious Belief”, Contemporary Philosophy Workshop, University of Chicago, March 2004 “The Unintuitive Criterion of Difference”, Wittgenstein Workshop, University of Chicago, November 2003 “Is Thought Essentially Social?” Northwest Philosophy Conference, Reed College, November 2003 Graduate Philosophy Conference, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, April 2003 Marquette University Intentionality Conference, April 2003 “Gareth Evans vs. Walker Evans: Photography and Thought” Philosophy of Mind Workshop, University of Chicago, June 2003 Indiana Philosophical Association, Ball State University, November 2003 “The Knights Who Say: WE! Normativity and Social Practices”, Graduate Student Colloquium, Georgetown University, May 2000

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Teaching Experience Instructor Philosophy B.A. Thesis Seminar, University of Chicago, Fall 2008–Spring 2009 Philosophical Perspectives I: Ancient Philosophy, University of Chicago, Fall 2008 Philosophical Perspectives III: Ethics, University of Chicago, Summer 2007 Telling the Truth: Skepticism, Relativism and Bullshit (Tave Fellowship Class), University of Chicago, Spring 2007 Philosophical Perspectives II: Early Modern Philosophy, University of Chicago, Winter 2007 Philosophy of Mind, Center for Talented Youth, Loyola Marymount University, Summers 2004 & 2005 Personal Identity, (Funded by Woodrow Wilson Practicum Grant), University High School, California State University Fresno, Summer 2004 Ethics, Center for Talented Youth, Johns Hopkins University, Summer 2003 Teaching Assistant Analytic Philosophy (for Master of Arts in the Humanities students), Professor Michael Kremer, University of Chicago, Spring 2006 Hegel’s Phenomenology, Professor Michael Forster, University of Chicago, Spring 2006 Reasons and Reasoning (for Master of Arts in the Humanities students), Professor Jason Bridges, University of Chicago, Winter 2006 The Philosophy of J.L. Austin, Professor Ted Cohen, University of Chicago, Fall 2005 History of Philosophy III: Kant to Hegel, Professor Michael Forster, University of Chicago, Spring 2005 Ethics, Johns Hopkins University, CTY Summer Program, 2001 & 2002 Writing Intern Philosophical Perspectives I: Ancient Philosophy, Professor Jason Bridges, Fall 2006

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Dissertation Abstract In my dissertation, I develop and defend radical contextualism, the view that what is said by utterances of sentences is shaped in far-reaching and unobvious ways by aspects of the context of utterance. Recently, philosophers inspired by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein have argued that embracing radical contextualism means rejecting the dominant systematic approach to explaining how the meaning of sentences are built up out of the meaning of their parts, and how speakers are able to understand novel sentences of their language. The dominant approach to explaining those facts about language is compositional truth-conditional semantics (CTCS). I refer to the critics of CTCS as Radical Neo-Wittgensteinian Contextualists (RNWC). Some defenders of CTCS, like the neo-Wittgensteinians, have argued that radical contextualism is incompatible with CTCS, and have attempted to exclude most context-sensitivity from semantic theory. In my dissertation, I reject the assumption shared by both the neo-Wittgensteinians and the anti-radical-contextualist defenders of CTCS, that radical contextualism and the explanatory project of CTCS are incompatible. I embrace the idea that what is said by utterances of sentences is pervasively context-sensitive while giving a systematic account of the variety of ways that meaning and context interact. In the first two chapters of my dissertation, I set out the basic commitments of CTCS: it assumes that the meaning of a sentence is compositional (the meaning of complex sentences depends solely on the meaning of their parts and the rules for their combination) and truthconditional (a central part of the meaning of a declarative sentence is what would make it true). The central explanandum of CTCS, and a motivation for assuming that language must be compositional, is the ability of subjects to understand sentences of their language that they have never encountered before. Only if speakers (tacitly) know the meanings of expressions of their language and the rules for the combination of those meanings can their ability to understand novel sentences be explained. In Chapter Two, I discuss a range of context-sensitive phenomena that have motivated gradual modification of CTCS, including ambiguity, indexicality, and the claims of what Grice called “A-philosophy”. Chapter three presents the basic RNWC argument against CTCS. The basic RNWC argument is what has been called a “context-shifting” argument. A context-shifting argument introduces a declarative sentence, like “The cat is on the mat”, or “That leaf is green”, and describes two different contexts in which the sentence is uttered. The shift in context is supposed to elicit the judgment that the content of the two utterances of the sentence is different. After considering a wide variety of different context-shifting arguments, advocates of RNWC conclude that the effects of context-sensitivity are too varied and pervasive to be systematically described by CTCS. Rather than accept that the RNWC context-shifting arguments raise insuperable difficulties for CTCS, defenders of CTCS have enthusiastically responded to the RNWC attack. In Chapter Four, I criticize a variety of different responses to the context-shifting arguments offered by advocates of CTCS. In place of the responses that have so far been offered on behalf of CTCS, I describe the pervasive effects of context-sensitivity while also showing how meaning significantly constrains those effects. I describe in detail the different ways that a prominent category of expressions at work in RNWC examples, color adjectives, vary their content depending on context. Peeling apart the different kinds of context-sensitivity displayed by color adjectives reveals more context-sensitivity than one might expect in the meaning of expressions of ordinary language, but not the wholesale, untamable variability the RNWCs endorse. One central aspect of the RNWC attack on CTCS has been ignored in the literature. In

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addition to describing examples of unnoticed forms of context-dependence, RNWC attempts to show that CTCS is mistaken in principle. In Chapter Five, I examine and rebut several different a priori arguments deployed by RNWC against the possibility of CTCS, all of which are supposed to be inspired by Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following. In place of the interpretations of rule-following offered by RNWCs, I show how Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following, properly understood, are compatible with the explanatory project of CTCS, and that they actually challenge the picture of unconstrained context-sensitivity advocated by RNWC. In Chapter Six, I develop a picture of cross-contextual communication that is compatible with widespread context-sensitivity. Some advocates of CTCS have launched counterattacks against the radical contextualist picture of content, claiming that if sentences expressed a surprising amount of contextual variability in content in different contexts, then it would be impossible for subjects in different contexts to understand one another. It is a necessary condition for understanding what is said on the radical contextualist picture of content that one know those features of the context that contribute to the determination of content. But it is very plausible to think that someone can understand what is said in a very different context without knowing all of the relevant features that went into the determination of the content of the original utterance. This is a prima facie problem for radical contextualism. I respond to this criticism by developing a context-dependent view of content individuation. There is a wide range of different ways of individuating the content of an utterance, some of which have more contextually sensitive content than others. Acknowledging that fact allows radical contextualism to accommodate the intuition that audiences with little or no knowledge of the context of utterance can still understand what was said. Finally, in the conclusion to my dissertation, I describe how embracing radical contextualism affects neighboring areas of philosophy. The radical contextualist account of color adjectives I defend problematizes accounts of the metaphysics of color that rely on the idea of how objects look to “standard observers in standard conditions”, the radical contextualist approach to content-individuation raises foundational questions about the project of explaining how subjects understand novel sentences of their language, and combining radical contextualism with the view that perceptual states have propositional content yields a highly context-sensitive picture of perceptual content.

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Research Statement My research concerns the variety of ways that context interacts with linguistic meaning and the contents of a subject’s mind. I am most interested in whether the notion of context can play a role in systematic explanations of linguistic understanding, or whether the contribution of context is so open-ended and complicated that it resists systematic explanation. Because context plays such a pervasive role in constituting the content of what is said and thought, how one answers the question of whether context has a role to play in a systematic explanation of understanding bears directly on the question of whether language and mind—the so-called space of reasons—can be systematically explained, or whether the kind of intelligibility that characterizes the space of reasons cannot be captured in the nets of systematic theory. I therefore take the issue of the context-dependence of language and mind to be a small but significant part of the much larger debate over the relation between humanistic forms of understanding and natural scientific explanation. My dissertation approaches these issues in a focused way, by participating in a debate between radical critics of the idea that context can play a role in systematic explanations of the content of sentences and mental states (radical neo-Wittgensteinian contextualists, or RNWCs) and advocates of a particular kind of formal semantics, compositional truth-conditional semantics (CTCS). I argue that while the RNWCs produce a range of important hard cases for CTCS, the hard cases can in fact be accommodated within the explanatory project of CTCS, and RNWC attempts to produce arguments a priori that show CTCS to be impossible all fail. I intend to publish parts of the dissertation as independent articles: Chapter Four consists of several sections that would be suitable to be published as independent papers on different responses that have been offered to RNWC: a “stubborn” response that simply denies the data presented by RNWC; a relativist response, which is becoming an increasingly popular way of handling a number of different linguistic phenomena; and various attempts at the response I find most fruitful, which tries to accommodate the RNWC hard cases by way of enriching the semantic theory so that it can represent different kinds of ambiguity and context-sensitivity. Chapter Three assesses the use of Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations and Waismann’s reflections on the “open texture” of concepts as debunking arguments, which try to prove a priori that CTCS is impossible. Publishing my chapter on rule-following would contribute to the literature on both Wittgenstein and the explanatory project of semantic theory because it is not concerned with the standard question of how intentional content is so much as possible (what Boghossian and others have called the “constitutive” question), but rather with the issue of how intentional content is something that a subject can have epistemic access to. I also intend to publish the final chapter of the dissertation, which defends radical contextualism against the charge that it makes communication across different contexts impossible. I conclude the dissertation by discussing the impact of radical contextualism on neighboring areas of philosophy. I aim to expand that discussion into at least two papers: one on the way radical contextualism affects our understanding of the metaphysics of color, and another on radical contextualism’s implications for the content of perceptual states. I will also soon submit for publication two papers that are related to my dissertation, but are more focused interpretations of the work of J.L. Austin. One paper, “Faute de Mieux : J.L. Austin on Ordinary Sense” responds to a number of interpreters who misinterpret Austin’s notion of ordinary sense. The second paper, “Crary on Austin and Literal Meaning”, gives an account of how Austin’s writings bear on the notion of literal meaning. In particular, I argue against a recent attempt (due to Alice Crary) to treat Austin as rejecting the notion of literal

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meaning altogether. I also will continue research that I began two years ago, with the support of grants from Chicago’s Humanities division and the Nicholson Center for British Studies, on Austin’s unpublished notes (held in Oxford’s Bodleian Library). My goal in undertaking this research is to produce a commentary on Austin’s classic Sense and Sensibilia for the 50th anniversary of its publication, in 2012, revealing the importance that the book continues to have for debates about radical contextualism, realism in theories of perception, and the study of philosophical methodology. The early chapters of the dissertation concern the nature of explanation at work in CTCS, and the challenge to that explanatory project mounted by RNWC. I aim to expand the early material of the dissertation into a book focusing on the nature of explanation in semantic theory. The kind of explanation at work in CTCS is deductive: given a modest set of syntactic and semantic rules, and a large, but finite, set of lexical (dictionary-like) entries for the words of a language, one should be able to deduce the truth-condition of any sentence of the language. But how would semantic theory change if its model of explanation was not strict deductive proof but explanation utilizing the exception-laden generalizations of the special sciences? Most of the attention that has been given to the important topic of explanation in semantic theory is confined to sketchy introductions in works on semantics or unsympathetic treatments in the work of the RNWCs. I intend to bring the topic of the explanatory project of CTCS into the context of more general debates about the nature of scientific explanation. Building on my work on the RNWCs and Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations, I intend to write a book on the relevance of certain Wittgensteinian concepts (rule-following, language games, family resemblance, practice) for contemporary philosophy of language. The most familiar opinions about the relevance of Wittgenstein’s work for contemporary philosophy of language are those of the RNWCs or those who argue that Wittgenstein’s work is of little contemporary significance. I think both groups misrepresent essential aspects of his work and miss the possibility for a fruitful dialogue between his thought about the nature of language and topics of contemporary interest beyond the standard ways of addressing Wittgenstein’s rule-following argument. Finally, I would like to combine my interests in analytic philosophy and aesthetics by writing a short book on a fascinating period in 20th century art (roughly 1966–1972) in which conceptual artists were inspired by, and thought of themselves as contributing to, analytic philosophy. Bruce Nauman produced works inspired by remarks from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Joseph Kosuth claimed, based on a reading of A.J. Ayer’s Language Truth and Logic, that art should be tautologous, and the British collective Art & Language published a quasi-academic journal which frequently cited Wittgenstein, Quine, and Kuhn (they exhibited issues of the journal with an index as a work of art in 1972). The book would take a close look at both the artworks and the writings produced during this period and assess their significance as both art and philosophy.

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