Mark McCullagh

Description

My academic training was at the University of Toronto and the University of Pittsburgh where I completed my PhD in 1997 under the direction of Robert Brandom.

Research

I work mostly in philosophy of language. I’m interested in some non-central ways in which we use words, because understanding these illuminates what is going on in more central uses. So I’m interested in scare-quoting, a device that challenges some received claims about the nature of assertion, e.g. that one should believe what one asserts. And I’m interested in how we use words to paraphrase others. In stating what someone thinks or believes, we defer to their uses of words even if we wouldn’t use those words in the same way ourselves. I think that this “interpretative modesty,” as I call it, is deeply baked into the business of interpreting others.

Publications

Recent publications:

Pulling down the hierarchy. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (2025).

Inferentialism and collaged assertions. Synthese 206 (2025).

Interpretative modesty. Journal of Philosophy 120 (2023): 42–59.

Distributed utterances. In The architecture of context and context-sensitivity, edited by Tadeusz Ciecierski and Paweł Grabarczyk, 113-24. Dordrecht: Springer, 2020.

Kinds of monsters and kinds of compositionality. Analysis 78 (2018): 657–66.

Russellianism unencumbered. Philosophical Studies 174 (2017): 2819–43.

Scare-quoting and incorporation. In The semantics and pragmatics of quotation, edited by Paul Saka and Michael Johnson, 3–34. Dordrecht: Springer, 2017.

For full list see my PhilPeople page.