Samuel Wolf Cantor

Thanks for checking out my site. I am a 5th year graduate student in the philosophy department of the University of Texas at Austin.

Research

My research interests are primarily in the philosophy of language and philosophical logic. My graduate work is supervised by Josh Dever. I am presently completing a masters degree in linguistics under the guidance of David Beaver and Ashwini Deo. 

Here are some projects I am presently working on, at various stages of completion.

• A theory of the acquaintance requirement on assertions of personal taste, which predicts the evidential features of taste claims on the basis of a general but source-sensitive norm of assertion.

• An account of the variation in meaning between the adjectival and adverbial forms of epistemic operators (possible & possibly, certain & certainly, probable & probably), with the aim of interpreting the adverbial forms as illocutionary operators defined over assertoric (as opposed to propositional) content. 

• A puzzle about privative (fake) and redundant (real) adjectives and their capacity for non-trivial application, and the difficulties accounting for this phenomenon using existent theoretical technology. 

I also have strong interests in epistemology and the philosophy of mind, and in the history of philosophy (primarily early modern philosophy & early analytic philosophy). 

Apart from my studies, I organize with Juan Diego Rodriguez Sasha Boguraev and Sampada Deshpande the South By Semantics Workshop, which I founded alongside Venkat in 2023.