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 have been spending a lot of time lately debugging some influential work on modals and counterfactuals by Bas van Fraassen, Angelika Kratzer, and David Lewis. I see this as a prerequisite to applying constraint semantics to the language of subjective uncertainty and to counterfactuals.

You can learn more about my research here, you can view my curriculum vitae here, and you can email me at ericsw@umich.edu. You can find my PGP public key here.

My son Liem likes kayaking, books about kayaking, and Zoar Gap. And he thinks the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum is pretty cool, too.