Eric Swanson

Dr. Eric Swanson is a professor of philosophy and linguistics at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Swanson started teaching here in 2006, after receiving his PhD from MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.

Most of his current work is in social and political philosophy of language and metaethics, and pays special attention to relationships between language, context, and ideology. Swanson is especially interested in the ways in which the force of language goes beyond the information that is apparent to or shared amongst discourse participants.

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.’