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Herman Cappelen

About Me

I’m a philosopher. I currently work as a Chair Professor of philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. Before I moved to Hong Kong, I worked at the Universities of Oslo, St Andrews, and Oxford. My first job was at Vassar College.

I’ve spent a lot of my time running big research projects and centres. I’m currently director of AI&Humanity-Lab@HKU, the co-director of ConceptLab at the University of Oslo and ConceptLab Hong Kong. I’m also on the Steering Committee of the Institute of Data Science, at the University of Hong Kong. I was the director of Arché Philosophical Research Center in St Andrews for several years. For 10 years I was a Research Director of CSMN at the University of Oslo. I have been a co-investigator of two 4-year AHRC projects: Contextualism and Relativism (with Crispin Wright) and Intuitions and Philosophical Methodology (with Jessica Brown).

Since 2008 I am an elected fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Since 2018 I am an elected member of the Academia Europaea. I’m a permanent member of the Institut International de Philosophie.

My current research focus is on the philosophy of AI, Conceptual Engineering, the conceptual foundations of political discourse, externalism in the philosophy of mind and language, and the interconnections between all of these. However, my philosophical interests are broad - they cover more or less all areas of systematic philosophy. I spend quite a bit of my time writing books, often co-authored and my eleven monographs provide a good overview of the kinds of issues I have been - and still am - interested in:

  • The Concept of Democracy (OUP 2023) is an essay on the concept of democracy, and conceptual amelioration and abandonment.
  • Making AI Intelligible (w. Josh Dever, OUP 2021, Open Access) is a book about how to use externalist theories in metasemantics to interpret and communicate with AI.
  • Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering (OUP 2018, Open Access) develops an account of how externalists should think of conceptual engineering, argues that all of philosophy involves conceptual engineering, and also shows that conceptual engineering is almost impossibly difficult.
  • Josh Dever and I have written a series of three introductory books to philosophy of language. The series is called Contemporary Introductions to Philosophy of Language. The three books are called: Context and Communication (OUP 2016), Puzzles of Reference, (OUP 2018), and Bad Language, (OUP 2019).
  • The Inessential Indexical (w. J. Dever, OUP 2014) is an exploration and defense of the view that perspectivality is a philosophically shallow aspect of the world. We argue that there are no such things as essential indexicality, irreducibly de se attitudes, or self-locating attitudes. Our goal is not to show that we need to rethink these phenomena, to explain them in different ways. Our goal is to show that the entire topic is an illusion—there's nothing there.
  • Philosophy without Intuitions (OUP 2012) is about the nature of philosophy and philosophical methodology. The book argues that contemporary meta-philsophers go wrong by assuming that appeals to intuitions play an important role in philosophy: it is not true that philosophers rely extensively (or even a little bit) on intuitions as evidence. At worst, analytic philosophers are guilty of engaging in somewhat irresponsible use of 'intuition'-vocabulary. While this irresponsibility has had little effect on first order philosophy, it has fundamentally misled meta-philosophers: it has encouraged meta-philosophical pseudo-problems and misleading pictures of what philosophy is.
  • Relativism and Monadic Truth (w J. Hawthorne, OUP 2009) is an argument against relativism about truth and in favor of the view that truth is a monadic property.
  • Language Turned on Itself (w. E. Lepore, OUP 2007) is about meta-linguistic discourse and various form of quotation – how language can be used to talk about language.
  • Insensitive Semantics (w. E. Lepore, Blackwell 2004) is about the ways in and extent to which meaning and interpretation is context sensitive. It is also about what contexts are and what it is to be in on. The book develops and defends two now influential theories: semantic minimalism and speech act pluralism.