Current Projects
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Demystifiying Conversational Relevance
Relevance is a key part of some of our most basic tools in analytic philosophy of language, like Gricean inference and the Stalnakerian common ground. However, pinning down exactly what it means for an utterance to be relevant has proved elusive. Thus far, there have been approaches to relevance which work for contexts of inquiry (QUD, discourse goals) or for casual conversations (SDRT, coherence relations), but none that can explain conversational relevance as a more general phenomenon. In this work in progress, I propose that we can combine approaches based on discourse goals and on coherence relations in order to get an account of conversational relevance which is independently motivated, can explain some of our intuitions, and can fill the necessary role in conversational mechanisms like the common ground.
Machine Translation Across Political Divides
Can a pre-trained transformer intended for machine translation, like BERT, be fine-tuned to “translate” between the styles of news sources with different political slants? With Ari Chivukula, ari@chivuku.la
Conversation, Repetition, and the Naturalization of Ideology
In this paper, I sketch out a method for understanding everyday conversations as material ideological practices which strengthen the ideologies to which they pertain. I contend that one way in which ideologies create truths about the world is that they make possible the expression of propositions which reference their interpretive frameworks. Hence, depictions of the world created by conversations that presuppose such ideology-requiring propositions are inextricable from the ideologies they contain. My thesis is that in repeatedly holding conversations which are specifically compatible with ideologies in this way, we come to see the ways of looking at the world the presupposed ideologies entail as accurate and obvious. I argue that the ubiquity of an ideology within conversations thus motivates speakers to see its interpretive framework as a natural way of understanding the world, based on the information speakers can gain from doing so, the communicative efficacy it demonstrates, the authority which other speakers convey in presupposing it, and the difficulty of resisting. I end by using gender ideologies as a case study, considering connections to gender performativity and the question of ideological conflicts.