I am a professor of philosophy at UT Austin. Until 2022, I was an assistant professor, and then a professor of philosophy at Princeton. You can view my CV here.
I have broad interests in contemporary philosophy and in the history of philosophy, especially Chinese neo-Confucianism. A full list of my published and working papers can be found below.
Much of my work has centered on propositional attitudes like belief, desire, hope, and fear. I have worked on the nature of these attitudes and their contents (with papers on the consistency of structured propositions, and on the consequences of rejecting Leibniz's Law). I have also worked on the semantics of propositional attitude reports, with particular attention to logical omniscience, Frege's puzzle, and the connection between them (I've developed versions of Russellianism, Fregeanism, and a third option with elements of each). I recently participated in a podcast which introduces some of these ideas.
My work on these topics has been motivated by questions about the nature of human rationality and the explanation of our actions. I came to questions about the metaphysics of content after working on the rationality of group decisions, and in particular on whether common knowledge is required for rational coordination in groups. I developed a new argument that people never have common knowledge, showed that common knowledge is not required for rational coordination, and described how implausibly strong assumptions about common knowledge are key to the famous agreement theorem. While working on this project, I became dissatisfied with the theory of content inscribed in standard formal models of decision-making, and hoped to find a better one. (An early attempt was in a paper on models of awareness in economic theory.)
Recently, I have approached questions about rationality from a different perspective, with a pair of papers on incomplete preferences in decision theory: one focusing on philosophical questions about the rationality of such preferences; the other focusing on relevant mathematical results.
My main current projects include: a paper on trying in the philosophy of action (with Ben Holguín), a paper on whether modern LLMs can produce meaningful text (with Kyle Mahowald), and a new interpretation of the moral metaphysics of the great Ming dynasty philosopher Wang Yangming (1472-1529), in particular his slogan "mind is principle'' (心即理). This last paper grows out of a longstanding interest in Wang's philosophy, including papers on his moral psychology, moral epistemology, and more broadly, on his doctrine of the "unity of knowledge and action".
In the past, I have also worked on interpersonal well-being comparisons (and a related version of Arrow's theorem), on non-classical and modal set theories, and on a notion of ontological dependence Aristotle develops in his discussions of blood and of time. In another life, I wrote a paper on DNA computing (and contributed to a second).
In January 2024, together with Johan Gustafsson, I organized a conference on completeness and incompleteness of preference and value. The website for this event is here.
In March 2022, together with P. J. Ivanhoe and Snow Xueyin Zhang, I organized an international conference on Wang Yangming, Wang Yangming and Ming Thought. You can view photos from the event on the "Highlights" page. A report on the conference, which also tells the story of how I started working on Wang Yangming, was published in 国际儒学.
In 2018, 2019 and 2020, I organized the Princeton Talks in Epistemology and Metaphysics (TEAM) conference series. You can find the programs for these three conferences here.
Work in Progress:
Unpublished Short Pieces:
Publications:
- Trying without fail (with Ben Holguín). Philosophical Studies (2024).
- Are Language Models More like Libraries or like Librariarians? Bibliotechnism, the Novel Reference Problem, and the Attitudes of LLMs (with Kyle Mahowald). Transactions of the Association of Computational Linguistics (TACL) (2024).
- Remarks on Method for Chinese Philosophy. Published in a Chinese translation by Chi-keung Chan 陳志強, Newsletter of Chinese Literature and Philosophy 中國文哲研究通訊 (2024). (Earlier featured on Leiter Reports and Daily Nous.)
- Of marbles and matchsticks. Oxford Studies in Epistemology, forthcoming. Winner of the Marc Sanders Prize in Epistemology (2023).
- “一念发动处,便即是行了”——王阳明心理行为论简议. 哲学分析. 14 (2023) 80.4: 191-5. English version; Chinese preprint.
- Higher-order metaphysics and propositional attitudes. Higher-order Metaphysics ed. Peter Fritz and Nick Jones (2024).
- Conceptions of Genuine Knowledge in Wang Yangming. Oxford Studies in Epistemology, 7 (2023): 134-175.
- Fregeanism, sententialism, and scope. Linguistics and Philosophy, 45 (2022): 1235-1275.
- The Introspective Model of Genuine Knowledge in Wang Yangming. The Philosophical Review,131.2 (2022): 169-213.
- What is the "Unity" in the "Unity of Knowledge and Action"? Dao, 21 (2022): 569-603. (Winner, Dao Best Essay Award 2022.)
- Closed Structure (with Peter Fritz and Gabriel Uzquiano). Journal of Philosophical Logic, 50, (2021): 1249-1291.
- Fine-grained semantics for attitude reports. Semantics and Pragmatics, 2021. Preprint with appendices.
- Revisionist Reporting (with Kyle Blumberg). Philosophical Studies 178 (2021): 755-783. (29 pages)
- Perspectivism (with Jeremy Goodman). Noûs, 55.3 (2021): 623-648 (26 pages). Preprint with footnotes instead of endnotes.
- Classical Opacity (with Michael Caie and Jeremy Goodman). Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 101.3 (2020): 524-566. (43 pages)
- Sense, Reference and Substitution (with Jeremy Goodman). Philosophical Studies 177 (2020): 947-952. (6 pages)
- Uncommon Knowledge. Mind 127.508 (2018): 1069-1105. (37 pages)
- Two Paradoxes of Common Knowledge. Noûs 52.4 (2018): 921-945. (25 pages)
- Can Modalities Save Naive Set Theory? (with Peter Fritz, Tiankai Liu, and Dana Scott). The Review of Symbolic Logic 11.1 (2018): 21-47. (27 pages)
- Extended Preferences and Interpersonal Well-Being Comparisons (with Hilary Greaves). Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 96.3 (2018): 636-667 (32 pages)
- Aggregating Extended Preferences (with Hilary Greaves). Philosophical Studies 174.5 (2017): 1163-1190. (27 pages)
- Prospects for a Naive Theory of Classes (with Hartry Field and Tore Fjetland Øgaard). Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 58.4 (2017): 461-506. (46 pages)
- People with Common Priors Can Agree to Disagree. The Review of Symbolic Logic 8.1 (2015) 11-45. (35 pages)
- ho pote on esti and Coupled Entities: A Form of Explanation in Aristotle's Natural Philosophy. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 46 (Summer 2014) 109-164. (56 pages)
Conference Proceedings:
Handbook Article:
- Common Knowledge. In Marija Jankovic and Kirk Ludwig eds. Handbook of Collective Intentionality. Routledge. 2018. Pages 181-195.
Dissertation Chapters, not currently in progress:
- A theory of common ground. (Chapter 2 of my 2014 Oxford DPhil (PhD) thesis. The rest of the thesis (with the exception of Chapter 5, below) has been superseded by published papers. Someday I would like to return to these ideas, but I have no active plans to do so.)
- Agreement and equilibrium with minimal introspection. (Chapter 5 of my 2014 Oxford DPhil (PhD) thesis. The chapter contains one small observation that I believe was new at the time, but I do not expect to work further on this topic.)
Older Papers:
- H. Lederman, J. Macdonald, D. Stefanovic, and M. N. Stojanovic, Deoxyribozyme-Based Three-Input Logic Gates and Construction of a Molecular Full Adder. Biochemistry, 45, 4 (2006) 1194 - 1199.
- J. Macdonald, Y. Li, M. Sutovic, H. Lederman, K. Pendri, W. Lu, B. L. Andrews, D Stefanovic and M. N. Stojanovic. Medium Scale Integration of Molecular Logic Gates in an Automaton. Nano Letters (Letter); 6, 11 (2006) 2598-2603.