Jill Khoo
Biographic Data
| ID | 886808 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jill Khoo |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jill |
| FAMILY NAME | Khoo |
| SIGNATURE | KHOO J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8696-0771 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 28 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Uncertainty in the absence of fact
Knives out: Response to critics
Writing a book can feel like a solitary endeavor. You labor for (in my case) years, sometimes talking about parts of the project with others, but mostly toiling alone to work out the consequences of commitments you made months and years prior. I'm grateful for the opportunity to engage with three brilliant interlocutors about these ideas, which for so long seemed to matter to no one besides myself (and maybe my publisher)
Seeing the Fictional
When we see a movie or a play, do we see the fictional entities and events depicted? On the one hand, it seems incredibly natural to think we do. For instance, it seems obvious that one thing that differentiates Smith, who watches Star Wars , from Bob, who merely reads the novelization of Star Wars , is that Smith, but not Bob, has seen Darth Vader kill Obi‐Wan Kenobi. Yet, no philosophers working on fiction think this is literally true. And they…
Judging for ourselves
Suppose I hear from a trusted friend that The Shining is scary. Believing them, I decide not to watch the film. Later, we're talking about the movie and I say, “ The Shining is scary!” My assertion here is misleading and inappropriate—I misrepresent myself as having seen the film and judged whether it is scary. But why is this? In this paper, I clarify the scope of the observation, discuss existing explanations of it, and argue that they are all …
Navigating ‘safe’ and ‘non-safe’ queer spaces: A study of style-shifting in Singapore
It is well documented that gay people adopt behavioural strategies to navigate the heteronormative expectations and norms of social space. These practices are likely to be particularly pronounced in socially conservative countries which have seen less progress for LGBTQ+ rights. This study examines how two gay men (Rui and Kenni) stylistically negotiate their sexual identities in a socially conservative country – Singapore – by analyzing the vari…
No fact of the middle
A middle fact is a true proposition about what would have happened had A been true (where A is in fact false), whose truth isn't entailed by any non‐counterfactual facts. I argue that there are no middle facts; if there were, we wouldn't know them, and our ignorance of them would result in ignorance about whether regret is fitting in cases where we clearly know it is. But there's a problem. Consider an unflipped fair coin which is such that no no…
Coordinating If s
Accounting for the behavior of conjoined and disjoined if-clauses is not easy for standard theories of conditionals that treat if as either an operator or restrictor. In this paper, I discuss four observations about coordinated if-clauses, and motivate a semantics for conditionals that reorients the compositional structure of the restrictor theory. On my proposal, if-clauses provide restrictions on modal domains, but they do so by way of a higher…
Disjunctive antecedent conditionals
Counterfactuals and Probability
Book Review| July 01 2020 Counterfactuals and Probability Schulz, Moritz, Counterfactuals and Probability. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. x + 236 pp. Justin Khoo Justin Khoo Massachusetts Institute of Technology Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2020) 129 (3): 489–495. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-8311486 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site C…
Quasi Indexicals
I argue that not all context dependent expressions are alike. Pure (or ordinary) indexicals behave more or less as Kaplan thought. But quasi indexicals behave in some ways like indexicals and in other ways not like indexicals. A quasi indexical sentence φ allows for cases in which one party utters φ and the other its negation, and neither party's claim has to be false. In this sense, quasi indexicals are like pure indexicals (think: “I am a docto…
Code Words in Political Discourse
I argue that code words like "inner city" do not semantically encode hidden or implicit meanings, and offer an account of how they nonetheless manage to bring about the surprising effects discussed in Mendelberg 2001, White 2007, and Stanley 2015 (among others).Political discourse in America and countries throughout the world is full of duplicity: insincere promises, outright lies, misleading statements, and so on.Recently, a more subversive phen…
Conditionals, Indeterminacy, and Triviality
This paper discusses and relates two puzzles for indicative conditionals: a puzzle about indeterminacy and a puzzle about triviality. Both puzzles arise because of Ramsey's Observation, which states that the probability of a conditional is equal to the conditional probability of its consequent given its antecedent. The puzzle of indeterminacy is the problem of reconciling this fact about conditionals with the fact that they seem to lack truth val…
Operators or restrictors? A reply to Gillies
According to operator theories, "if" denotes a two-place operator. According to restrictor theories, "if" doesn't contribute an operator of its own but instead merely restricts the domain of some co-occurring quantifier. The standard arguments (Lewis 1975, Kratzer 1986) for restrictor theories have it that operator theories (but not restrictor theories) struggle to predict the truth conditions of quantified conditionals like (1) a. If John didn't…
Code Words in Political Discourse
I argue that code words like "inner city" do not semantically encode hidden or implicit meanings, and offer an account of how they nonetheless manage to bring about the surprising effects discussed in Mendelberg 2001, White 2007, and Stanley 2015 (among others).Political discourse in America and countries throughout the world is full of duplicity: insincere promises, outright lies, misleading statements, and so on.Recently, a more subversive phen…
Quasi Indexicals
I argue that not all context dependent expressions are alike. Pure (or ordinary) indexicals behave more or less as Kaplan thought. But quasi indexicals behave in some ways like indexicals and in other ways not like indexicals. A quasi indexical sentence φ allows for cases in which one party utters φ and the other its negation, and neither party's claim has to be false. In this sense, quasi indexicals are like pure indexicals (think: “I am a docto…
Operators or restrictors? A reply to Gillies
According to operator theories, "if" denotes a two-place operator. According to restrictor theories, "if" doesn't contribute an operator of its own but instead merely restricts the domain of some co-occurring quantifier. The standard arguments (Lewis 1975, Kratzer 1986) for restrictor theories have it that operator theories (but not restrictor theories) struggle to predict the truth conditions of quantified conditionals like (1) a. If John didn't…
Conditionals, Indeterminacy, and Triviality
This paper discusses and relates two puzzles for indicative conditionals: a puzzle about indeterminacy and a puzzle about triviality. Both puzzles arise because of Ramsey's Observation, which states that the probability of a conditional is equal to the conditional probability of its consequent given its antecedent. The puzzle of indeterminacy is the problem of reconciling this fact about conditionals with the fact that they seem to lack truth val…
Code Words in Political Discourse
I argue that code words like "inner city" do not semantically encode hidden or implicit meanings, and offer an account of how they nonetheless manage to bring about the surprising effects discussed in Mendelberg 2001, White 2007, and Stanley 2015 (among others).Political discourse in America and countries throughout the world is full of duplicity: insincere promises, outright lies, misleading statements, and so on.Recently, a more subversive phen…
Quasi Indexicals
I argue that not all context dependent expressions are alike. Pure (or ordinary) indexicals behave more or less as Kaplan thought. But quasi indexicals behave in some ways like indexicals and in other ways not like indexicals. A quasi indexical sentence φ allows for cases in which one party utters φ and the other its negation, and neither party's claim has to be false. In this sense, quasi indexicals are like pure indexicals (think: “I am a docto…
Counterfactuals and Probability
Book Review| July 01 2020 Counterfactuals and Probability Schulz, Moritz, Counterfactuals and Probability. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. x + 236 pp. Justin Khoo Justin Khoo Massachusetts Institute of Technology Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2020) 129 (3): 489–495. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-8311486 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site C…
Coordinating If s
Accounting for the behavior of conjoined and disjoined if-clauses is not easy for standard theories of conditionals that treat if as either an operator or restrictor. In this paper, I discuss four observations about coordinated if-clauses, and motivate a semantics for conditionals that reorients the compositional structure of the restrictor theory. On my proposal, if-clauses provide restrictions on modal domains, but they do so by way of a higher…
Disjunctive antecedent conditionals
No fact of the middle
A middle fact is a true proposition about what would have happened had A been true (where A is in fact false), whose truth isn't entailed by any non‐counterfactual facts. I argue that there are no middle facts; if there were, we wouldn't know them, and our ignorance of them would result in ignorance about whether regret is fitting in cases where we clearly know it is. But there's a problem. Consider an unflipped fair coin which is such that no no…
Seeing the Fictional
When we see a movie or a play, do we see the fictional entities and events depicted? On the one hand, it seems incredibly natural to think we do. For instance, it seems obvious that one thing that differentiates Smith, who watches Star Wars , from Bob, who merely reads the novelization of Star Wars , is that Smith, but not Bob, has seen Darth Vader kill Obi‐Wan Kenobi. Yet, no philosophers working on fiction think this is literally true. And they…
Judging for ourselves
Suppose I hear from a trusted friend that The Shining is scary. Believing them, I decide not to watch the film. Later, we're talking about the movie and I say, “ The Shining is scary!” My assertion here is misleading and inappropriate—I misrepresent myself as having seen the film and judged whether it is scary. But why is this? In this paper, I clarify the scope of the observation, discuss existing explanations of it, and argue that they are all …
Navigating ‘safe’ and ‘non-safe’ queer spaces: A study of style-shifting in Singapore
It is well documented that gay people adopt behavioural strategies to navigate the heteronormative expectations and norms of social space. These practices are likely to be particularly pronounced in socially conservative countries which have seen less progress for LGBTQ+ rights. This study examines how two gay men (Rui and Kenni) stylistically negotiate their sexual identities in a socially conservative country – Singapore – by analyzing the vari…
Knives out: Response to critics
Writing a book can feel like a solitary endeavor. You labor for (in my case) years, sometimes talking about parts of the project with others, but mostly toiling alone to work out the consequences of commitments you made months and years prior. I'm grateful for the opportunity to engage with three brilliant interlocutors about these ideas, which for so long seemed to matter to no one besides myself (and maybe my publisher)
Uncertainty in the absence of fact
Epistemology (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Linguistics (6 works) · Mathematics (6 works) · Philosophy and Theoretical Science (6 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (5 works) · Logic, Reasoning, and Knowledge (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Psychology (4 works)