PhD, University of Montreal
Professor
Director of Graduate Admissions
Moral Responsibility, Metaphysics, Metaethics, Philosophy of Language, Epistemology
Office: Dale Hall Tower 626
Email: montminy@ou.edu
I have worked on several topics in different areas of philosophy.
Moral responsibility
Most of my recent work concerns various facets of moral responsibility. I recently co-authored an essay with Layla Williams (OU PhD student) arguing against Susan Wolf’s asymmetry thesis, according to which while blameworthiness requires the ability to do otherwise, praiseworthiness does not. A few years ago, I wrote an essay with Daniel Tinney (OU student) defending compatibilism about responsibility against Derk Pereboom’s manipulation argument. I have also written essays about derivative (indirect) responsibility, libertarian control and ultimate responsibility, moral luck involved in character formation, excuses, quality of will, and praiseworthiness (moral worth).
Metaphysics
My work in metaphysics has concerned personal identity, causation and vagueness. My former PhD student Andrew Russo and I have co-authored a few essays on personal identity. We defend a version of four-dimensionalism, a view according to which a person has temporal parts in addition to spatial ones. On our version, when ordinary speakers talk about persons, they may refer to instantaneous person-stages, longer person-segments or person-worms (which are maximal aggregates of person-stages), depending on the context. We also defend four-dimensionalism against the objection that its commitment to potentially infinitely many person-like beings (personites) introduces intractable moral problems. Andrew and I also co-authored an essay arguing against causal contextualism (contrastivism), the view that causation is a four-place relation of the form ‘c rather than c* caused e rather than e*.’ I have also written a few essays on vagueness. In my view, the vagueness of our terms gives rise to a kind of context sensitivity. Given that, speakers have the discretion to judge borderline cases of vague predicates as they wish. In addition to offering a plausible treatment of the most puzzling features associated with vagueness, this contextualist account, I argue, has interesting consequences. It can be used to dissolve the debate between content individualism and anti-individualism, and to solve Kripke’s puzzle about belief.
Metaethics
I have examined a few different issues in metaethics. Jinhui Wang (OU MA student) and I co-authored an essay challenging Michael Smith’s constitutivist account, according to which moral norms are grounded in rational requirements. I have also proposed an original comparative account harm, according to which an act is harmful to a person just in case there is a relevant alternative act that would leave the person overall better off. I argue that relevance depends in part on moral norms. I am also interested in the philosophy of action. In her book Intention, Elizabeth Anscombe remarks that if she failed to execute an intention to perform a certain action, the mistake would be “in the performance” rather than “in the judgment.” She also notes that her knowledge “would be the same,” whether she fulfills her intention or not. I recently co-authored an essay with Joshua McKeown (OU PhD student) trying to elucidate these puzzling remarks. I have also written about the nature of omissions.
Philosophy of language
I have worked on a few different topics in philosophy of language. I have a long-standing interest in meaning and analyticity. Recently, I wrote a pair of essays on Quine’s ill-understood criticisms of analyticity and indeterminacy of translation thesis. Contrary to what is commonly said, Quine did not hold that there are no analytic truths. In my view, Quine’s position is better construed as the claim that no sentence is determinately analytic. I have also proposed my own construal of the thesis of indeterminacy of translation. This thesis, which is tied to Quine’s rejection of analyticity, is based on the inextricability of meaning and belief. I explain why this construal should be favored over Quine’s own statements of the thesis. I’m also interested in the speech act of assertion. I argue that although assertion is the expression of belief, an assertion that p is appropriate only if the speaker knows that p. I also hold that in some contexts, knowledge does not suffice for epistemically appropriate assertion. I am also interested in the context-sensitivity of language. Specifically, how is the content conveyed by an utterance in a given context related to the literal meaning of that utterance? It turns out that there are several possible answers, depending on the case. I also hold that contrary to what many authors assume, the conversational context plays an evidential role rather than a constitutive one regarding context-sensitive content.
Epistemology
I have authored a series of articles on epistemic contextualism. Roughly, this view holds that the content expressed by ‘know’ may change dramatically, depending on the context. Skeptics associate very strict epistemic standards with ‘know.’ However, their claim that we ‘don’t know’ anything is compatible with our ordinary knowledge claims that ‘we know’ many things. This is because we associate ‘know’ with more relaxed epistemic standards. Hence, despite appearances, skeptics and ordinary speakers don’t disagree with each other. A few years ago, I co-authored an essay with Wes Skolits (OU MA student), defending contextualism against the accusation that it has incoherent implications. I have also written a pair of essays on a different issue in epistemology. According to a number of authors, a subject may acquire knowledge from a false belief. I argue that in the cases invoked by these authors, either the subject lacks knowledge (it’s a Gettier-like case), or the subject has knowledge but this knowledge is based on some relevant implicit knowledge rather than a false belief.
