About

I am an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina. I also taught at the University of Rochester and Brandeis University. My areas of research specialization are philosophy of language and epistemology.

My current research project explores the connection between open questions and modality. Specifically, I am working on a monograph, Openness and Possibility, in which I develop and defend the idea that possibilities are candidate answers to open questions.

I am also interested in understanding the context in which expressions are used and interpreted, and in understanding how various linguistic expressions are defined in terms of the context. The work stemming from my dissertation defends a position that I call Context Constructivism. According to this position, the context relative to which an indexical gets its content is constructed by the conversational participants.

In epistemology, I am primarily interested in the connection between what we know and what we trust to be the case. I have argued that what we know depends on what we trust, and that the normativity of knowledge is fundamentally centered on trust. Further, I am interested in exploring the connections between my views about knowledge and my views about modality and context. Specifically, I believe that knowledge concerns matters that are settled, whereas epistemic possibility and necessity arise only for matters that are open.

My CV can be found here: Sherman-CV