Kids These Days

A few weeks ago, a student at Brown, Lauren Black, interviewed me for a podcast she was doing about children's beliefs about the universe. The result is here, at Now Here This. The one I'm in is titled The Conference Room in the Sky.

Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett

A wonderful email I got from a past student reminded me of how much I miss my old BPhil supervisor, Sir Michael Dummett. I won't say much about him here. Philosophically, my work speaks to his influence, I hope, and I had my say, among many others, in the remembrances that Ernie Lepore assembled when Michael died. I also wrote about his impact on philosophy of mathematics for Philosophia Mathematica.

Michael was way ahead of his time, in so many ways. To mention just a few: His distinction between ingredient sense and assertoric content; his emphasis on indefinitely extensible concepts; his insistence, way back, that theories of meaning (for natural languages) must be theories of truth; that both must be theories of understanding; and that those in turn must be theories of what competent speakers know. Dummett, despite himself, was a neo-Davidsonian a decade or more before James Higginbotham, another of my teachers, would bring that sort of view into the center of philosophy of language and, for that matter, natural language semantics.