Eric Swanson

Eric Swanson


ericsw@umich.edu
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Departments of Philosophy and Linguistics



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I’m a professor of philosophy and linguistics at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Most of my current work is in social and political philosophy of language and metaethics. It pays special attention to relationships between language, context, and ideology, to the particularities of speech situations, and to the norms governing language use. I’m especially interested in how the force of language can go beyond the information that is apparent to or shared amongst discourse participants.

Recently I’ve been thinking about how the above makes trouble (a.k.a. interesting but sometimes scary new things to think about) for work on artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence, and automated content moderation and promotion.

I’ve also worked on the interfaces between language and epistemology (epistemic modals and conditionals), language and metaphysics (causal talk and the logic of causation), language and ethics (deontic modals), and on two frameworks for linguistic theorizing that bear on the above—‘constraint semantics’ and ‘ordering super­valua­tionism.’