My name is Henry Ian Schiller.
I’m a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Philosophy at The University of Sheffield.h.i.schiller (at) sheffield (dot) ac (dot) uk
Curriculum Vitae
About Me
My research addresses the following issues:
︎How creatures like us go around confronting the world and adjusting our minds to it.
︎How we use linguistic tools to induce those adjustments in others.
︎The normative significance thereof.
I completed my PhD at the University of Texas at Austin under the supervision of Josh Dever and Mark Sainsbury. My dissertation investigates linguistic interventions in rational decision making: explaining how we are rationally able to adjust our mentation and behavior in light of others telling us what to do, and what sorts of normative demands this makes on us as participants in a linguistic practice.
In May of 2022 I took up a 3-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Sheffield. My project, “The Rationality of Preference Change”, is about how our minds change in response to new evidence in ways that go beyond the acquisition of new beliefs.
Outside of philosophy, I have an ongoing experimental music project called Physical Fitness. My recordings are sometimes used as background music on the NPR show Invisibilia.
Published Writing
forthcoming
︎What’s your opinion? Negation and ‘Weak’ Attitude Verbs - Philosophical Quarterly
︎Directing Thought - Ergo
︎Genericity and Inductive Inference - Philosophy of Science
︎Meaning and Responsibility w/ Ray Buchanan - Mind & Language
2022
︎Pragmatic Particularism w/ Ray Buchanan - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
2021
︎A Hole in the Box and a Pain in the Mouth w/ Laurenz Casser - Philosophical Quarterly
︎This Paper Might Change Your Mind w/ Josh Dever - Noûs
︎Illocutionary Harm - Philosophical Studies
︎Acts of Desire - Inquiry
︎Is that a threat? - Erkenntnis
2020
︎Phenomenal Dispositions - Synthese
2019
︎The Nyaya Argument for Disjunctivism - History of Philosophy Quarterly
2018
Work in Progress
under review [email for drafts]
︎Two papers about relief w/ Casey O’Callaghan
︎A paper about rational learning and imperatives
︎A paper about what desires it’s rational to have w/ Daniel Drucker
in progress [email to confirm existence of drafts]
︎A paper about the fundamental nature of rational learning
︎A paper about rational learning and Jeffrey conditionalization w/ Josh Dever
︎A paper about how desires represent motivations
︎A paper about how imperatives motivate w/ Shaun Nichols
︎A paper about practical questions, and their relationship to imperatives
︎A paper about practical questions, and their relationship to planning states w/ Dan Harris
︎A paper about quantifier domain restriction and discourse structure
︎A paper about quantifier domain restriction and cognitive defaults w/ Katherine Ritchie
︎A paper about quantifier domain restriction and moral learning
Recent and Upcoming Talks
01/2023: “What’s your opinion? Negation and ‘Weak’ Attitudes”, APA Eastern
01/2023: “Context and Implicit Content”, Washington University in St. Louis
02/2023: “Directing Thought”, APA Central
02/2023: “Informational Chauvinism”, Oxford Metaphysics and Epistemology Group
05/2023: “The Meaning of ‘Wants’ in a Theory of Rational Planning”, London Mind Group
06/2023: “The Meaning of ‘Wants’ in a Theory of Rational Planning”, Iceland Communication Workshop
11/2023: TBD, The Center for Philosophy of Science