Anthony S. Gillies
· Sherwin Scott Professor of Philosophy, Core FacultyVerifiedUniversity of Arizona · Philosophy
Active 1961–2021
About
Anthony S. Gillies, also known as Thony Gillies, is the Sherwin Scott Professor of Philosophy and a core faculty member in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. His work focuses on how rational(ish) but imperfectly informed agents communicate about and operate within an unpredictable world filled with other agents. His research spans topics in formal semantics, philosophical logic, formal epistemology, and various parts of the decision sciences. Gillies has a notable academic background, having previously been a member of the philosophy department at Rutgers for 11 years and holding appointments at the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and the University of Texas at Austin. He is known for his engagement with complex issues related to communication, decision-making, and the nature of rationality in social contexts.
Research topics
- Computer Science
- Mathematics
- Linguistics
- Statistics
- Social psychology
- Epistemology
- Psychology
- Philosophy
Selected publications
Philosophers Imprint · 2021
1st authorCorresponding- Computer Science
- Computer Science
- Mathematics
Obligation describing language (here: “ought”) is hooked up with preference, a relation of what-is-better-than-what. But ordinary situations underdetermine such relations of what-is-better-than-what. Even so, there are plainly true sentences describing our obligations in those situations. This mismatch is trouble-making and getting out of the trouble requires either giving up the easy link between “ought” and preference or re-thinking the kind of things preferences can be.
Natural Language Semantics · 2021 · 15 citations
Senior authorCorresponding- Epistemology
- Philosophy
- Linguistics
Plausible Deniability and Cooperation in Trust Games
Review of Behavioral Economics · 2019-04-16 · 2 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingWhat motivates agents to choose pro-social but dominated actions in principal-agent interactions like the trust game? We investigate this by exploring the role higher-order beliefs about payoffs play in an incentivized laboratory experiment. We consider a variety of ways of distributing higher order information about payoffs, including an asymmetrical distribution that generates “plausible deniability”: one agent (B) knows the other (A) doesn’t know that B knows how A’s payoffs are impacted by B’s actions. Agents, in turn, exploit this: otherwise trustworthy types are tempted into defecting when they have plausible deniability.
Mind · 2018-03-16 · 30 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This paper has three main goals. First, to motivate a puzzle about how ignorance-expressing terms like maybe and if interact: they (surprisingly) iterate, and when they do they exhibit scopelessness. Second, to argue that there is an ambiguity in our theoretical toolbox, and that exposing that opens the door to a solution to the puzzle. And third, to explore the reach of that solution (it turns out to do work in unexpected places). Along the way, the paper highlights a number of pleasing properties of two elegant semantic theories (data semantics and update semantics), explores some meta-theoretic properties of dynamic notions of meaning, dips its toe into some hazardous waters (epistemic contradictions and presupposition projection), and offers characterization theorems for the space of meanings an indicative conditional can have.
Plausible Deniability and Cooperation in Trust Games
SSRN Electronic Journal · 2017-01-01 · 4 citations
articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding2017-02-18 · 4 citations
other1st authorCorresponding2015-02-17 · 23 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding2013-05-07 · 5 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingSometimes philosophy gets started by pointing. Setting out the target for theories of indicative conditionals is a case in point. So some examples to point at:(1) a. If the gardener didn’t do it, (then) it was the butler. b. If your blue marble is in the box, then your red one might be under the couch.
On Groenendijk and Stokhof’s “Dynamic Predicate Logic”
Studies in linguistics and philosophy · 2012-02-24 · 1 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingOxford University Press eBooks · 2011-06-23 · 191 citations
book-chapterSenior authorAbstract The simplest story about modals is also the canon: modals are context-dependent quantifiers over a domain of possibilities. Epistemic modals quantify over possibilities compatible with what is known. Just whose knowledge, or whose information state, is relevant is something decided by the context. The canon is simple and elegant but not quite right. The problem with the canon is that it is weighed down by the fiction that there is a determinate context in which an utterance of a bare epistemic modal is issued. On the story of this chapter, it is indeterminate just which group, or just which aggregated information state, is quantified over by such bare epistemic modals. This chapter explores how a story that exploits this contextual indeterminacy can explain what needs explaining without departing from what's right about the canon and so without positing anything semantically peculiar about bare occurrences of epistemic modals.
Frequent coauthors
- 6 shared
Mary L. Rigdon
University of Arizona
- 5 shared
Kai von Fintel
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- 2 shared
Eric Dietrich
- 2 shared
John L. Pollock
- 1 shared
G. A. Wells
Ottawa Hospital
- 1 shared
Nicholas Asher
Education
- 2001
PhD, Philosophy
University of Arizona
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