Professor, Course Scheduler
About
Eric Swanson is a professor of philosophy and linguistics at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He started teaching here in 2006, after receiving his PhD from MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.
Professor Swanson is currently working on a few papers on language and normativity. One extends semantic theories for normative modals like ‘must,’ ‘ought,’ and ‘may,’ paying special attention to indeterminacy and incomparability. Another refines Joseph Raz’s distinction between committed, detatched, and external utterances, developing a rigorous empirical theory that helps explain their behavior. A third paper argues that pro tanto reasons and commitments play crucial semantic and pragmatic roles in linguistic communication. He also has some nascent related projects in the philosophy of artificial intelligence.
Professor Swanson has also worked on the interfaces between language and epistemology (epistemic modals and conditionals), language and metaphysics (causal talk and the logic of causation), language and ethics (deontic modals), and on two frameworks for linguistic theorizing that bear on the above—‘constraint semantics’ and ‘ordering supervaluationism.’
