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.
Teaching
Service
In addition to chairing the department I am an Executive
Editor (there are 12) of the Canadian Journal of
Philosophy.
Research [publications]
These days I’m interested in (and collaborating with
Juhani Yli-Vakkuri on) the semantics and
pragmatics of distributed utterances: utterances that
are (more than usually) spread out in time or space, or made partly by one
speaker and partly by another. (The simplest example is a slow utterance of
“Now I’m starting my sentence, and now I’m finishing
it.”) From the standpoint of formal semantics, a change in time or
location is handled the same as a change in speaker: as an intra-sentential
change in a context parameter. Kaplan’s “Logic of
Demonstratives” can be modified to handle such phenomena, although there
are interesting issues that arise in the modified system concerning validity and
utterance-truth. As concerns pragmatics, however, a change in speaker is a very
different thing from a change in time or location. My view is that we use
so-called “scare quotes” to mimic the effect of such a change.
These cases challenge our conception of assertion in some interesting ways.
Aside from that work, I continue to pursue my interest in the theory of concept possession, in particular the challenges to it posed by the phenomena first highlighted in Benson Mates’s famous examples of multiple embeddings in attitude verbs.
Email
mmcculla@uoguelph.ca
Phone
(519) 824–4120 ×53221
Fax
(519) 837–8634
Mail
Dept of Philosophy
University of Guelph
Guelph, ON
Canada N1G 2W1
Office
347
MacKinnon Bldg. This room is behind the departmental staff
offices [directions]
Office hours
TBA for Fall 2016