About Me

I’m a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. I work mainly on epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. 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

• “Probability Modals and Infinite Domains”
  (Abstract; Download)

  Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of attempts to apply the mathematical theory of probability to the semantics of natural language probability talk. These sorts of “probabilistic” semantics are often motivated by their ability to explain intuitions about inferences involving words such as “likely” and “probable”—intuitions that Kratzer (1991; 2012) fails to accommodate through a semantics based solely on an ordering of worlds and a qualitative ranking of propositions. However, Holliday and Icard (2013) has been widely thought to undercut this motivation: they present a new method of lifting an ordering on worlds to an ordering on propositions that promises to explain the intuitions just as well. In this paper, I argue that the challenge remains: defenders of world-ordering semantics have yet to offer a plausible semantics that captures the logic of comparative likelihood. I show that Holliday and Icard’s (2013) semantics fails to validate one intuitively valid inference pattern when the domain of epistemic possibilities is infinitely large. In contrast, probabilistic semantics validates the inference nonetheless. I consider several ways of patching Holliday and Icard’s (2013) semantics to validate the desired inference. But I argue that each has considerable costs that have no analogue for probabilistic semantics. As a result, probabilistic semantics remains the better explanation of the data.

• “On the Hypothetical Given”
  (Abstract; Download)

  My aim in this paper is to assess the viability of a perceptual epistemology based on what Anil Gupta calls the “hypothetical given”. On this account, experience alone yields no unconditional entitlement to perceptual beliefs. Experience functions instead to establish relations of rational support between what Gupta calls “views” and perceptual beliefs. I argue that the hypothetical given is a genuine alternative to the prevailing theories of perceptual justification but that the account faces a dilemma: on a natural assumption about the epistemic significance of support relations, the hypothetical given results in either rationalism or skepticism. I conclude by examining the prospects for avoiding the dilemma. One option is to combine the hypothetical given with a form of coherentism. Another is to combine the view with a form of hinge epistemology. But neither offers a simple fix.

• “Epistemics and Emotives” (with James R. Shaw)
  (Abstract; Download)

  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.

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

  Talk of reasons for belief exhibits a surprising pattern of linguistic behavior that raises a puzzle about the semantics of epistemic reasons. I argue that the solution lies in re-thinking the semantics of epistemic modals: it is talk of epistemic reasons, not epistemic modals, that describes knowledge.

Teaching

• Concepts of Human Nature, TA, University of Pittsburgh, 2017
• 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