Robert Thompson's Homepage

CONTACT INFORMATION: Office: Humanities 203 Office Hours: Monday 3-5 and Tuesday 3-5, or by appointment Office Telephone: 713-348-5620 Email (preferred): jrthomps *at* rice.edu Mailing Address: Department of Philosophy Rice University 6100 Main Street, MS 14 Houston, TX 77005 Fax: (713)348-5847

BIOGRAPHY:

I am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rice University. I received my Ph.D. from Washington University in Saint Louis in December of 2004. Like many of my teachers in the Department of Philosophy and Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program at WashU, my investigations into the nature of mind, language, and knowledge integrate both philosophical and empirical perspectives.

COURSE INFORMATION:

CURRENT RESEARCH:

My research focuses on mind, language, and knowledge. Within these areas, I am interested in two specific topics. The first is the manner in which semantic theories should deal with expressions with context-dependent meanings. The second is the ability that humans use in understanding the minds of others, what is known as “Theory of Mind”. Although I am interested in these issues separately, they come together in my defense of a semantic theory I call “Intention-dependent Semantics”, a theory which allows semantics to accommodate a modest number of context-dependent expressions, and examines the role that Theory of Mind plays in understanding the communicative intentions that fix the meaning of these context-dependent expressions. My current projects are determining exactly how much context-dependence semantics should have to deal with, and examining how Theory of Mind deals with communicative intentions in unusual populations, i.e. in young children and humans suffering from autism or Asperger’s syndrome.

PUBLICATIONS:

Grades of Meaning (forthcoming in Synthese)

In this paper, I lend novel support to H.P. Grice’s account of speaker meaning (GASM) by blunting the force of a significant objection. Stephen Schiffer has argued that in order to make GASM sufficient, one must add restrictions that are psychologically impossible to fulfill, thereby making GASM untenable. In what follows, I explain the elements of GASM that require it to invoke these psychologically unrealizable restrictions. I then accept Schiffer’s criticism, but modify its significance to GASM. I argue that the problem that Schiffer notes is not a reason to reject GASM, but a reason to embrace it. GASM shows that meaning is best understood as an absolute concept—an unrealizable ideal limit. Taking some inspiration from contextualist theories of knowledge attribution, I argue that my version of GASM offers a useful contextualist account of meaning attribution. Hence, pragmatic theories of meaning and communication should not wholly exclude GASM from their theorizing, at least not for the reasons that are commonly given.

H.P. Grice’s Legacy in Psycholinguistics and the Philosophy of Language (to appear in a special issue of Teorema celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication of Grice’s “Meaning” (May 2007))

In this paper, I outline evidence of Paul Grice's enduring influence in Psycholinguistics and the Philosophy of Language. I focus on two particular cases: the role of intentions within developmental psycholinguistics and the notion of what is said within current debates over the notion of semantic content and the semantic-pragmatic boundary. I end the paper with a discussion of a lingering difficulty facing those who hope to square Grice's stance on naturalism with this work, focusing on his posthumously published Aspects of Reason.

Reviving Communication and Convention (in J. Saagua (ed.), (2005), The Explanation of Human Interpretation, Lisbon: Colibri Press)

Several philosophers defend a picture of communication that I call the Conventional Signaling model (CS). According to CS, communication occurs when a speaker produces a signal which is intended to get the audience to have a certain thought, and the speaker relies on conventions which are known by the audience, by which the audience recognizes the signal as an indicator of the speaker’s intention to get them to have that thought. Donald Davidson has attacked this picture of communication, arguing that conventions are neither necessary nor sufficient for communication to occur. I outline a form of CS, explain Davidson’s critique of CS and his alternative picture of communication, and examine what is left of the notion of convention. It turns out, I will argue, that Davidson is correct in rejecting the explicit CS notion of convention, but is unable to exorcise convention, or something very much like it, altogether.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

Epistemology

Gibson and Quine: Experimental philosophy and the reciprocal containment of epistemology and ontology (to appear in a festschrift for Roger F. Gibson, Jr.): One of Roger Gibson’s most valuable philosophical contributions is his interpretation of W.V. Quine as a systematic philosopher. Much of his work has consisted in laying out Quine’s central themes and showing the various relationships among them. Gibson invariably highlights a terse claim in Quine, one which has been passed over by most philosophers, and shows how this claim embodies a crucial relationship among the Quinean themes. In this paper, I want to highlight one such claim: that for Quine, epistemology and ontology reciprocally contain one another. I will use this claim to analyze recent work in experimental philosophy which suggests an instability in the intuitions to which analytic epistemologists appeal. While it may seem that this empirical investigation is an example of Quinean naturalized epistemology, par excellence, I will argue that the results are much less interesting than they seem, if we are to be thoroughgoing Quineans. These results may offer more evidence that there is no non-natural source for knowledge, but they are only significant if one adopts a theory of explanation and confirmation which is radically non-Quinean. Given that Quine was not above offering thought experiments of his own, I will attempt to give a more thoroughly Quinean account of these results.

Philosophy of Language

A Note on Subsentential Utterances: In this paper I attempt to resolve a dispute between Robert Stainton and Jason Stanley over the status of subsentential utterances. Stainton insists that subsentences are capable of making assertions, whereas Stanley argues that they are incapable of this speech act. I argue that subsentences have some logical form that constrains their interpretation, but recognizes that an unbounded number of other features can come into play in interpreting what they say. I advocate a moderate version of contextualism for sentences, but a more radical version of contextualism for subsentences, one which allows for much more contextual influence on what is said. I explain why this is not ad hoc, but rather justified by the nature of the two sets of linguistic phenomena. Uttering a subsentence is a genuine speech act, but it is not full-fledged assertion.

Theory of Mind

Language Use without Intentions? Moving beyond Grice to the real relationship between meaning and theory of mind: I believe that understanding intentions is crucial to our semantic competence. I address a worry that if children are semantically competent yet lack an understanding of intentions, then we have clear evidence that understanding intention cannot be crucial to our semantic competence. I conclude that the evidence that children are incapable of understanding intentions is flawed, so the role of intentions in semantic competence is not undermined.

The role of intentions in Autistic linguistic behavior: I believe that understanding intentions is crucial to our semantic competence. I address a worry that if subjects suffering from Autism (which, it is assumed, is due to a deficit in their Theory of Mind) are semantically competent yet lack an understanding of intentions, then we have clear evidence that understanding intention cannot be crucial to our semantic competence. I argue that it is not as clear as my opponents suggest that Autism is due to a deficit in their Theory of Mind, as is evidenced by the ability of many Autistics to pass standard tests for the presence of Theory of Mind. Once the supposed population of language users without a Theory of Mind is identified, I argue that there is strong evidence that these language users actually do have a Theory of Mind, so the role of intentions in semantic competence is not undermined.

Believe it or Not? Explaining why children fail the standard false belief task: It has been well established that children before the age of four fail a crucial test for Theory of Mind abilities, the Standard False Belief Task. The significance of this fact, however, is less clear for philosophy and cognitive science. One striking fact which fuels this confusion is that children can pass simpler versions of this task as early as 15 months of age. In this paper, I argue that these early abilities are evidence that these children understand belief, yet fail to have the full-blown concept of belief. I offer some analysis of how one should go about ascribing these different competencies with mentality to young children by offering several different milestones which explain the major differences in the abilities of the younger and older children.

Intending and Desiring: It is well known that children manifest the fact that they understand desires before beliefs and intentions. Given the fact that our folk conception of an intention specifies that the agent have, at a minimum, a desire for some outcome and a belief that the agent can bring about that outcome, some have offered an account in which it is the addition of the concept of belief to the concept of desire that explains the emergence of the concept of intention. I argue for another interpretation of this situation. I explore evidence that a proattitude exists at an early age in children (before they fully master belief), that is much more like an intention than a desire. I will argue that focusing on when children use terms for desire, intention, and belief leads us to fail to recognize the grasp of motivation for acting that children possess at this stage. I also consider whether something like this early proattitude might exhibit itself in adults as well.

How homogeneous is the class of intentions?: The belief that an outcome can be achieved (or some such success condition) is said to be a necessary condition for having an intention to act. I question the extent to which this is the case, and I hope to figure out whether all intentions must have this requirement satisfied. Many will say that if this condition is not satisfied, then the agent is not intending to do A, but merely trying to do A. Intuitions, however, differ about this. I hope to explore ways in which the success condition may need to be amended to deal with problematic cases, e.g. communicative intentions, where success is merely the recognition of the intention, and cases where there is not a belief that the outcome won’t come about, but it is unclear that there is a belief that it is probable that the outcome will be achieved (e.g. intending to make a hole in one).