Much of my research examines fragments of natural language in an effort to elucidate the general features of communication. To this end I have been studying attitude ascriptions, evidentials, and the language of subjective uncertainty. My main focus here is the development of 'constraint semantics,' which is predicated on the thought that sentences express not propositions but constraints. By design the semantic framework is extremely catholic about the nature of constraints; I think it can be fruitfully applied to many of the aspects of our doxastic, affective, and conative lives that we communicate to others.

I'm also investigating causal talk, to better understand how such talk affects philosophical theorizing about causation. I suspect that the role of events in causal talk is easy to exaggerate, and that their most important role is the representation of causal paths. If this is right then many alleged counterexamples to theories of causation can be plausibly explained away as linguistic artifacts. Someday I'll work on the apparent parallels in explanation and explanatory talk, and on the possibility of taking causal paths to be the fundamental causal relata.

You can learn more about my research here, and you can view my curriculum vitae here.

My son Liem likes space, books about space, and the Kalamazoo Air Zoo. And he thinks the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum is pretty cool, too.

You can email me at ericsw@umich.edu.