Sarah Moss

office: 32-d940
77 massachusetts avenue
cambridge ma  02139

moss@mit.edu
309-824-9898 (m)
617-253-2639 (o)

  I'm a fourth-year graduate student in the Linguistics and Philosophy department at MIT. Before coming here, I was a math major at Harvard, and a BPhil student at Oxford.

Research interests

I work mainly in philosophy of language, metaphysics, and formal epistemology. My dissertation is on the dynamics of probabilistic knowledge and belief. It discusses conditions under which complex properties of an agent's credence distribution can amount to knowledge, formal models for compromise between agents with different credence distributions, and procedures for updating credence distributions over de se propositions.

I am also currently working on the pragmatics of counterfactuals, the semantics of hyperintensional contexts, and the stage theory of persistence. For more information, please see my c.v. here.

Recent papers and presentations

On the Pragmatics of Counterfactuals
              Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference, August 2008
              First Formal Epistemology Festival: Conditionals and Ranking Functions, July 2008
              University of California, Berkeley, May 2008
              University of Michigan, April 2008
              NYU Philosophy Department Colloquium, October 2007
              Massachusetts Bay Philosophy Alliance, October 2007

Scoring Rules and Epistemic Compromise
              Formal Epistemology Workshop, May 2008
              MITing of the Minds Philosophy Conference, January 2008

Rational Updating and De Se Belief
              Eminees Reading Group, April 2008

Desire Cancellation as Presupposition Failure: Comments on "Desires" by Ben Bradley and Kris McDaniel
              Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference, August 2007

Reverse Sobel Sequences and the Semantics of Counterfactuals
              Princeton-Rutgers Graduate Philosophy Conference, March 2007

'That'-Clauses in Specificational Copular Sentences: Comments on "Reasons and That-Clauses" by Jim Pryor
              SOFIA XVII Conference, January 2007

Comments on "Ethics as a Guide to Metaphysics" by Liz Harman
              Arizona Ontology Conference, January 2006