Hayden Kajercline

My research centers around a basic question in the philosophy of language and mind: in virtue of what do words and sentences have the meanings they do? More specifically, how do our practices of using linguistic expressions manage to imbue those expressions with meanings? My dissertation, “The Discursive Foundations of Meaning,” is a systematic attempt to answer this question in naturalistic terms. From this core philosophical project, my research expands outward to encompass a variety of issues in the foundations of meaning and content, as well as some specific topics in semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of cognitive science.