Short abstracts of some articles that I am currently working on. For full drafts, please send me an email. My email address is my first name followed by my surname followed by @outlook.com. (I am not sure if this (now) common trick will keep a data mining algorithm from figuring out my email address, though.)

[What’s Left of Rigidity?]

This article argues that given some plausible assumptions about natural language and philosophical methodology, the following theses about names cannot be true together: (a) the same (‘proper’) name can be borne by distinct objects/individuals, and (b) names of natural language are rigid designators but definite descriptions are not. The main assumptions that the argument appeals to are: (i) fragments of language (e.g., names) do not themselves refer, but can be used to refer, and (ii) every assumption involved in assessing whether names are (or are not) rigid designators must be preserved in the corresponding assessment for definite descriptions.

[Title Suppressed]

In recent years, some hitherto ignored uses of proper names — particularly, uses of names other than their use to refer to objects — have received increased attention from semantic theorists. However, the lack of a principled basis for drawing the distinction between uses that a semantic theory of names must account for (‘literal’ uses) and uses that are not relevant for semantic theorizing about names (‘non-literal’ uses) represents an important deficiency in the debate. A prominent objection (‘Sceptic’s Challenge’) raised by some theorists against semantic views that take the predicative uses of names (e.g., uses like the use of the name ‘Alfred’ in ‘Some Alfreds are crazy’) to be relevant in semantic theorizing exemplifies the kind of problem that can result from this deficiency. This article proposes a general manner of drawing the line between literal and non-literal uses of names and by doing so, also provides a response to the Sceptic’s Challenge.

[Title Suppressed]

Metalinguistic views of proper names are sometimes written off on the ground that such views are ‘blatantly circular’ (Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity, p. 72). This article exonerates metalinguistic views from the charge of circularity. I begin by distinguishing a word from its associated form: while words have semantic properties, forms—which are types of sounds, inscriptions, or signs—do not. Quotation marks can be used to form a quote-name of either a word or its associated form. I argue that the impression of circularity in metalinguistic views results from the decision to resolve the ambiguity of quotation in the metalinguistic specification of the meaning of a proper name in one way rather than the other—i.e., by taking quotation as forming quote-names of words. Metalinguistic views, however, are not committed to this understanding of quotation.

[Method-Selection Ability and Its Implications for General Intelligence]

In this paper we introduce a formal description of one of a human ability necessary for general intelligence. Then we use this description to argue that it is not possible to create an Artificial General Intelligence, within the current Computer Science paradigm. The ability in question is the ability to identify what method to use for solving some task, and we create a minimally necessary set of variables to represent the ability. Then we show that letting any one of the variables be fully general, fully unrestricted, leads to infinity. This shows that while specialized AI is possible, anything resembling general AI will be either non-autonomous, biased, or non-computable.