Eric Swanson

ericsw@umich.edu
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Department of Philosophy

[ home · research · cv · teaching · family · links ]

I’m an associate professor of philosophy at Uni­ver­sity of Mich­igan, Ann Arbor, and I work on ‘might,’ ‘may,’ ‘should,’ ‘must,’ ‘cause,’ ‘be­lieves,’ ‘sus­pects,’ ‘if,’ ‘would,’ and ‘knows.’

I’m interested in these words be­cause I think that in­ves­tigating them can shed light on more gen­eral features of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. My work on them has led me to de­velop con­straint sem­an­tics, a frame­work according to which sen­tences ex­press not prop­o­si­tions but con­straints, and a given asser­tion is like ad­vice to con­form to a par­tic­ular con­straint. I think con­straint sem­an­tics can be fruit­fully applied to many of the as­pects of our dox­astic, affec­tive, and con­ative lives that we com­mun­i­cate to others.

My work on these words has also led me to devel­op or­dering super­val­uation­ism. Like tra­ditional super­val­uation­ism, or­dering super­val­uation­ism han­dles cases in which some interpretations of an ex­pres­sion are tied for best. But or­dering super­val­uation­ism also de­liv­ers attractive results when for each of the pos­sible interpretations of an ex­pres­sion, an­oth­er interpretation is better. I’m currently working out treat­ments of such cases in se­mantics, formal epis­temology, and metaphysics.

Over the last several years Franz Huber, Jonathan Weisberg, and I or­gan­ized three Formal Epis­tem­ology Fes­tivals, on con­di­tionals and ranking functions, causal decision theory and scoring rules, and learning from experience and defeasible reasoning. Ezra Keshet and I organized an inter­disciplinary con­ference and sem­i­nar on dis­course con­straints on anaphora in 2009.

My son Liem likes kayaking, books about kayaking, and Zoar Gap. His favorite class two rapids for kayaking are Barking Dog and Highway on the South Fork of the American River, and Hangover Helper, Freight Train, Pinball I and II, Krutiak, and Slamdance on the Fife Brook section of the Deerfield River in Massachusetts. He thinks the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum is pretty cool, too.