I am a philosopher at the University of Guelph, in the very pleasant city of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. (It’s pronounced “gwelf.”) My academic training was at the University of Toronto and the University of Pittsburgh where I completed my PhD under the direction of Robert Brandom and John McDowell.
I encourage students in my courses to consult my resources for students page.
Fall 2025
On Study/Research leave
Winter 2026
In addition to normal departmental service responsibilities I am the Editorial Board Coordinator of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy. In this capacity I do an initial review of each of the 450 or so submissions we receive each year (of which we publish about 7%), advise the 16-member board of Executive Editors who are responsible for the rest of their handling, and manage the journal’s operations.
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.
Recent publications:
Inferentialism and collaged assertions. Synthese, forthcoming.
Pulling down the hierarchy. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, forthcoming.
Interpretative modesty. Journal of Philosophy 120 (2023): 42–59.
Explaining substitution failures. Southwest Philosophy Review 39 (2023): 121–28.
Distributed utterances. In The Architecture of Context and Context-sensitivity, edited by Tadeusz Ciecierski and Paweł Grabarczy, 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.
Full list of publications, with abstracts
Email: mmcculla@uoguelph.ca
Mail: Dept of Philosophy, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON Canada N1G 2W1
Offfice: 332 MacKinnon Building. (How to find the Department of Philosophy)