Nate Charlow
Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto
Jackman Humanities Building, 170 St. George St.
Toronto, ON, Canada M5R 2M8
Email: first dot last at gmail		  
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Personal
I'm an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. Before that I was a Ph.D. Student at the University of Michigan, from 2006 until 2011, where I wrote a dissertation on imperatives. I grew up in Omaha, and I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Nebraska (from which I graduated in December 2005).

You can click here for a picture of me chatting with a pony in Oslo.

My brother, Simon, is a talented semanticist in NYU's Department of Linguistics. I'm fond of Morrissey/The Smiths, 90s Scottish Alt Pop, running, Twin Peaks, Hitchcock movies, basketball, and my five year-old cat Rori. I've skydived, and yet I'm afraid of airplanes.

I write a very occasionally updated blog.

Research
I work on meta-ethics, the philosophy of language, semantics and pragmatics, and (especially) their overlap and interaction with linguistic, epistemological, and decision-theoretic concerns. My dissertation involved developing a broadly expressivist approach to theorizing about of the meaning of practical (e.g. imperative and normative) language, and that's where the bulk of my research interests lie at the moment. I am also working on a host of more specialized topics in the semantics and conversational dynamics of imperatives, various kinds of root modals (especially deontic modals), and environments, like indicative conditionals, in which they embed.

You can click here for my recent (February 2012) curriculum vitae.

Papers

published

  1. What We Know and What To Do (forthcoming in Synthese). DOI: 10.1007/s11229-011-9974-9   Abstract
    Abstract: This paper discusses an important puzzle about the semantics of indicative conditionals and deontic necessity modals (should, ought, etc.): the Miner Puzzle (Parfit, ms; Kolodny and MacFarlane, 2010). Rejecting modus ponens for the indicative conditional, as others have proposed, seems to solve a version of the puzzle, but is actually orthogonal to the puzzle itself. In fact, I prove that the puzzle arises for a variety of sophisticated analyses of the truth-conditions of indicative conditionals. A comprehensive solution requires rethinking the relationship between relevant information (what we know) and practical rankings of possibilities and actions (what to do). I argue that (i) relevant information determines whether considerations of value may be treated as reasons for actions that realize them and against actions that don't, (ii) incorporating this normative fact requires a revision of the standard ordering semantics for weak (but not for strong) deontic necessity modals, (iii) an off-the-shelf semantics for weak deontic necessity modals, due to von Fintel and Iatridou, which distinguishes "basic" and "higher-order" ordering sources, and interprets weak deontic necessity modals relative to both, is well-suited to this task. The prominence of normative considerations in our proposal suggests a more general methodological lesson: formal semantic analysis of natural language modals expressing normative concepts demands that close attention be paid to the nature of the underlying normative phenomena. Hide abstract
  2. Restricting and Embedding Imperatives (2010), Proceedings of the 17th Amsterdam Colloquium, M. Aloni et al. (eds.), Springer-Verlag, 223–33. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-14287-1_23   Abstract
    Abstract: We use imperatives to refute a naive analysis of update potentials (force-operators attaching to sentences), arguing for a dynamic analysis of imperative force as restrictable, directed, and embeddable. We propose a dynamic, non-modal analysis of conditional imperatives, as a counterpoint to static, modal analyses. Our analysis retains Kratzer's analysis of if-clauses as restrictors of some operator, but avoids typing it as a generalized quantifier over worlds, instead as a dynamic force operator. Arguments for a restrictor treatment (but against a quantificational treatment) are mustered, and we propose a novel analysis of update on conditional imperatives (and an independently motivated revision of the standard ordering-semantics for root modals that makes use of it). Hide abstract

unpublished. please inquire before citing/quoting.

  • Practical Language: Its Meaning and Use (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Michigan, 2011). Abstract
    Abstract: I demonstrate that a speech act theory of meaning for imperatives is, contra a dominant position in philosophy and linguistics, theoretically desirable. I do this by showing that speech act accounts are capable of giving explanations of phenomena which fans of static accounts have alleged them unable to give. Indeed, for a variety of absolutely fundamental phenomena having to do with the conventional meaning of imperatives (and other types of practical language), speech act accounts provide natural and theoretically satisfying explanations, where a representational account provides none. Hide abstract
  • Meaning for Expressivists (2012, down for revision). Abstract
    Abstract: In this essay, I defend and develop Expressivism as a serious, empirically plausible theory of the meaning of normative language. I do not, however, defend any extant form of Expressivism. Rather, I identify, and ultimately reject, a latent presupposition ("Meaning Reductionism") about the relationship between a theory of meaning and a semantic theory -- one routinely made by both Expressivists and their critics (in particular, advocates of Frege-Geach trouble for Expressivism). According to Meaning Reductionism, if things of kind K are fundamental in a theory of meaning for a language, we must explain any fact about the meaning of expressions of that language by appeal to properties of K's. I show how Meaning Reductionism leads to unpalatable consequences when applied to theorizing about the meaning and semantics of imperative clauses. Namely, it seems to generate specious Frege-Geach trouble for non-propositional treatments of imperative clauses. So I suggest replacing it with a new view of the meaning/semantics interface -- one on which theorizing about meaning is theoretically prior to semantic theorizing, but which allows semantic explanations a kind of theoretically autonomous status. I use this new orientation to develop a non-propositional account of imperatives which avoids Frege-Geach trouble, but which is recognizably Expressivist in motivation and substance. I show how this sort of account can serve as a blueprint for an account of normative language. Finally, I argue that, while this account is importantly different from extant Expressivist treatments, it is, nevertheless, a clear-cut form of Expressivism. Hide abstract
  • On the Linguistic Basis for Noncognitivism (February 2010). Abstract
    Abstract: We clarify and expand on the connection, suggested by Andrew Alwood in his recent commentary (Analysis, 2010) on Mark Schroeder's Being For (2008), between recent linguistic work on conventionalized illocutionary force and noncognitivism. We show one way to leverage this work in resolving a version of the embedding problem for noncognitivism. We also argue that it supplies some rather strong pressure for noncognitivists to abandon "pure" varieties of their meta-ethic for a "hybrid" variety. We close with some remarks on how to understand the relevance of imperatives to theorizing about the meaning of normative language. Hide abstract
  • The Varieties of Expressivism (January 2010). Abstract
    Abstract: This essay comprises a novel development of expressivism as a proposal about the meaning of normative language. We show, by example, how to discharge expressivism's linguistic commitments (particularly as they relate to the Frege-Geach problem), while avoiding some pitfalls of earlier attempts. We also try to characterize how, precisely, expressivism's commitments regarding the meaning and communicative function of normative language are to be understood--how, by the same token, expressivism's critics (with not infrequent assistance from expressivists themselves) may be misinterpreting those commitments. We thus gain a fuller understanding of the empirical content of expressivist treatments of meaning--within, but also outside of, the normative realm. Hide abstract
  • Imperative Statics and Dynamics (2009). Abstract
    Abstract: You could think of this as a much more formal version of Directives. Particular attention is paid to formalizing the semantics and pragmatics of an imperative language built on top of the language of Propositional Dynamic Logic (PDL). Hide abstract
Selected Talks

Teaching

as primary instructor

as assistant instructor

  • Advanced Symbolic Logic (Fall 2008)
  • Problems of Philosophy (Winter 2008, Fall 2007)
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