Kaplan (1989) famously claimed that monsters -- operators that shift the context -- do not exist in English and "could not be added to it". Several recent theorists have pointed out a range of data that seem to refute Kaplan's claim, but others (most explicitly Stalnaker 2014) have offered a principled argument that monsters are impossible. This paper interprets and resolves the dispute. Contra appearances, this is no dry, technical matter: it cuts to the heart of a deep disagreement about the fundamental structure of a semantic theory. We argue that: (i) the interesting notion of a monster is not an operator that shifts some formal parameter, but rather an operator that shifts parameters that play a certain theoretical role; (ii) one cannot determine whether a given semantic theory allows monsters simply by looking at the formal semantics; (iii) theories which forbid shifting the formal "context" parameter are perfectly compatible with the existence of monsters (in the interesting sense). We explain and defend these claims by contrasting two kinds of semantic theory: Kaplan's (1989) and Lewis's (1980). In an unpublished supplement to the paper, we give a detailed description of Stalnaker's account of content and use of this account to resist the idea that there are monsters in English.

I consider attempted analyses which attempt to revise, rather than describe, ordinary and expert belief and linguistic usage, notably including Sally Haslanger's analysis of gender terms. Typical proponents of "conceptual ethics" and "conceptual engineering" claim that such revisionary analyses involve replacing one word or concept with another. I disagree: this view cannot explain the way we argue about such analyses. I develop a notion of analyticity -- metasemantic analyticity -- on which analyses fix the meaning of our words (as we have always used them) even when they emerge late in a conversation as the result of discussion and debate.

What are we doing when we do semantics? I develop a framework for answering this question according to which semantic theorising is much like developing a way of measuring an ill-understood phenomenon. The framework explains the role of set theoretic abstracta in formal semantics, the possibility of progress in semantics despite deep theoretical disagreement, and how semantics is possible despite the plausibility of the observations that motivate radical contextualism.

Contemporary relativists often see their view as contributing to a semantic/post-semantic account of linguistic data about disagreement and retraction. I offer an independently motivated metasemantic account of the same data, that also treats a number of cases that are problematic for the relativist. The key idea is that the content of assertions and beliefs is determined in part by facts about other times, including times after the assertion is made or the belief is formed. On this temporal externalist view, speaker behaviours such as retraction of previous assertions play a role in making it the case that a past utterance has a given meaning.

I describe various approaches to the nature of linguistic context sensitivity, and issues arising from these, with a focus on the questions of what we represent when we let particular set-theoretic entities play the role of context in our theories, or when we assign an expression a particular character.

The main aim of this paper is to highlight the need to address the conceptual problem of 'implicit knowledge' or 'implicit cognition' -- a notion especially important in the study of the nonverbal minds of animals and infants. We review some uses of the term 'implicit' in psychology and allied disciplines, and conclude that conceptual clarification of this notion is not only lacking, but largely avoided and reduced to a methodological problem. We propose that this elusive notion is central in the study not only of animal and infant minds, but also the human adult mind. Some promising approaches in developmental and evolutionary psychology towards innovative conceptualization of implicit knowledge remain conceptually underdeveloped and in need of reconsideration and re-elaboration. We conclude by suggesting that the challenge of implicit cognition and nonverbal minds will only be solved through a concerted interdisciplinary approach between psychology and other disciplines.

The hard problem of consciousness is to explain why certain physical states are conscious: why do they feel the way they do, rather than some other way or no way at all? Arthur Reber (2016) claims to solve the hard problem. But he does not: even if we grant that amoebae are conscious, we can ask why such organisms feel the way they do, and Reber's theory provides no answer. Still, Reber's theory may be methodologically useful: we do not yet have a satisfactory theory of consciousness, but perhaps the study of simple minds is a way to go about finding one. A reply by Reber can be found here.

I attack the idea that our concepts are indexical, and that they are transparent. To appear as a contribution to a book symposium on Francois Recanati's Mental Files (OUP, 2013), with a reply by Recanati.

This paper develops and critiques the two-dimensionalist account of mental content developed by David Chalmers. I first explain Chalmers's account and show that it resists some popular criticisms. I then argue that the main interest of two-dimensionalism lies in its accounts of cognitive significance and of the connection between conceivability and possibility. These accounts hinge on the claim that some thoughts have a primary intension that is necessarily true. In this respect, they are Carnapian, and subject to broadly Quinean attack. The remainder of the paper advances such an attack. I argue that there are possible thinkers who are willing to revise their beliefs in response to expert testimony (in a way familiar by Burge's famous cases), and that such thinkers will have no thoughts with necessary primary intensions. I even suggest that many actual humans may well be such thinkers. I go on to argue that these possible thinkers show that the two-dimensionalist accounts fail.

Millians about proper names typically claim that it is knowable apriori that Hesperus is Phosphorus. We argue that they should claim instead that it is knowable only aposteriori that Hesperus is Hesperus, since the Kripke-Putnam epistemic arguments against descriptivism are special cases of Quinean arguments that nothing is knowable apriori, and Millians have no resources to resist the more general Quinean arguments.

I question Pereboom's idea that introspection might be radically mistaken, and his constitution-based physicalist metaphysics.

Torin Alter attempts to rescue phenomenal concepts and the knowledge argument from the critique of Ball 2009 by appealing to conceptual mastery. I show that Alter's appeal fails, and describe general features of conceptual mastery that suggest that no such appeal could succeed.

Many physicalists about the mind are committed to claims about property identities. Following Kripke's well-known discussion, modal arguments have emerged as major threats to such claims. This paper argues that modal arguments can be resisted by adopting a counterpart theoretic account of modal claims, and in particular modal claims involving properties. Thus physicalists have a powerful motive to adopt non-Kripkean accounts of the metaphysics of modality and the semantics of modal expressions.