About Me

I’m a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. I work mainly on epistemology and philosophy of language. My current research focuses on the semantics of reason claims. I’m particularly interested in how the semantics of epistemic modals can help us understand talk of reasons for belief. I’m also interested in the epistemology of perception and neglected propositional attitudes like hope and fear.

You can contact me at adshak@gmail.com.

Download my CV here.

Papers

• “The Semantics of Epistemic Reasons and Epistemic Modals”
  (Abstract; Email for draft)

  The aim of this paper is to raise a puzzle about the semantics of epistemic reasons. Talk of reasons for belief exhibits much of the odd behavior that is characteristic of epistemic modal discourse. However, the embedding behavior of reason claims differs from that of epistemic modals in a way that rules out extending each of the leading semantics for modals to reasons. Consequently, it’s difficult to see what the semantics of reasons should be: if we simply give reasons the semantics of a modal, we make the wrong predictions about embedding behavior, but if reasons and modals each have a different semantics, then how can we give a unified explanation of the distinctive behavior they share? I argue that the solution to this puzzle lies in rethinking the semantics of epistemic modals. The embedding behavior of reason claims actually pressures us to abandon all of the leading semantics for modals, but once we have the right structure for the semantics of modals in place, we can give a semantics for reasons that captures both the similarities and differences between reasons and modals.

• “Epistemics and Emotives” (with James R. Shaw)
  (Abstract; Email for draft)

  In the flurry of recent work on the semantics of epistemic modals, it has been noted that they embed under preferential attitude verbs known as emotive doxastics. We argue that these embeddings provide an extremely rich source of constraints on the semantics of epistemic modals. After presenting the data, we run through several prominent semantics for modals, focusing first on broadly expressivist positions before transitioning to contextualist forms of descriptivism. We note how pairing each theory we consider with various semantics for emotive doxastics yields highly problematic truth-conditions or entailments, or sometimes no predictions at all. The process in turn uncovers an increasingly complex data set, with no current theory poised to account for all of it. Some of this data is particularly important because of how it pressures us to reconceive lessons drawn from modal embeddings under verbs expressing familiar attitudes of acceptance (Hacquard (2006), Yalcin (2007)). After discussing these issues, we sketch a novel kind of contextualist semantics that is capable of accommodating all the data. We conclude with some recommendations for how expressivists and descriptivists should adjust their compositional frameworks along with their philosophical underpinnings, if our conclusions are on the right track.

Teaching

• Intro to Logic, TA, University of Pittsburgh, 2017
• Intro to Philosophical Problems, Primary Instructor, University of Pittsburgh, 2016
• Intro to Logic, Primary Instructor, University of Pittsburgh, 2016
• Theories of Knowledge and Reality, TA for writing-intensive sections, University of Pittsburgh, 2016
• Intro to Logic, TA, University of Pittsburgh, 2013
• Minds and Machines, TA, University of Pittsburgh, 2012
• History of Modern Philosophy, TA, University of Pittsburgh, 2012
• Intro to Philosophical Problems, TA, University of Pittsburgh, 2011
• Intro to Philosophy, TA, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2007
• Intro to Philosophy, TA, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2006