About

Justin Bledin is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, where he also holds a secondary appointment as Associate Professor of Cognitive Science. He is an active member of the JHU Foundations of Mind Group and contributes to the academic community as a co-organizer of the New York Philosophy of Language Workshop. Bledin completed his graduate studies in the Logic Group at the University of California, Berkeley. His professional activities include writing scholarly papers and teaching courses. Beyond his academic pursuits, he enjoys running and biking on trails and engages in artistic activities.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Natural Language Processing
• Programming language
• Philosophy
• Linguistics
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Descriptive As Ifs

  Linguistics and Philosophy · 2022 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Linguistics
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• About 'What About': Topicality at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2021-05-09

  otherSenior author
  Publisher

• About 'What About': Topicality at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface

  2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Computer Science
  Publisher

• Exclamatory As Ifs

  Movebank · 2020-09-17

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In this paper, we investigate the meaning of exclamatory as if utterances. One of the main interpretive challenges raised by these constructions is to explain how they function to express incredulous denial of the as if complement despite the absence of any overt negating element. After rejecting a negation ellipsis account that assimilates exclamatory as if s to plain negative assertions, we develop an exclamation-based analysis that integrates Grosz’s (2011) “EX-Op” account of optatives and polar exclamatives with our earlier hypothetical comparative semantics for descriptive uses of as if in Bledin and Srinivas (2019).

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• Spinozian Model Theory.

  Advances in Modal Logic · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science

  his paper is an excerpt from a larger project that aims to open a new pathway into Spinoza's Ethics by formally reconstructing an initial fragment of this text. The semantic backbone of the project is a custom-made Spinozian model theory that lays out some of the formal prerequisites for more ne-grained investigations into Spinoza's fundamental ontology and modal metaphysics. We implement Spinoza's theory of attributes using many-sorted models with a rich system of identity that allows us to clarify the puzzling status of such logical principles as the Substitution of Identicals and Transitivity of Identity in Spinoza's thought. The intensional structure of our Spinozian models also captures his proposal that states of a airs can be necessitated or excluded by the essences of particular things, an essence-relative modality that should be of interest to philosophers who have sought to rehabilitate the concept of essence in contemporary analytic metaphysics.

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• What ifs

  Semantics and Pragmatics · 2019-11-15 · 13 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We develop a dynamic account of what if questions on which they re-pose questions inside local contexts introduced by their if-clauses subject to the felicity constraint that the resulting context is inquisitive. While this analysis is directly motivated by cases where a what if questioner challenges another speaker’s attempt to answer a current question under discussion (QUD) by seeming to re-ask this question over a more restricted contextual domain, it can also explain the flexibility of what if since other uses trigger accommodation with new QUDs to ensure that the post-suppositional inquisitivity condition is met. While QUD accommodation is a complex phenomenon that isn’t specific to just what if constructions, the pragmatic flexibility of what if furnishes a nice range of examples for investigating such repair. In the latter part of the paper, we focus on practical what if questions which trigger accommodation with QUDs that subserve the real-world domain goals of the speakers. We offer a systematic working theory of this accommodation within a formal model of discourse that involves goal stacks populated with both questions and decision problems tethered together by relevance. The larger contribution of this paper is to add to the understanding of how discourse felicity and update conditions at the level of speech acts can be encoded in natural languages. EARLY ACCESS

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• Fatalism and the Logic of Unconditionals

  Noûs · 2018-07-10 · 14 citations

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  Abstract In this paper, I consider a variant of the ancient Idle Argument involving so‐called “unconditionals” with interrogative antecedents. This new Idle Argument provides an ideal setting for probing the logic of these close relatives of if ‐conditionals, which has been comparatively underexplored. In the course of refuting the argument, I argue that contrary to received wisdom, many unconditionals do not entail their main clauses, yet modus ponens is still unrestrictedly valid for this class of expressions. I make these lessons precise in a formal system drawing on recent work in inquisitive semantics. My larger aim is to challenge standard truth preservation accounts of logic and deductive argumentation.

  PublisherDOI

• Rigid and Flexible Quantification in Plural Predicate Logic

  Proceedings from Semantics and Linguistic Theory · 2017-10-22 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access

  Noun phrases with overt determiners, such as some apples or a quantity of milk, differ from bare noun phrases like apples or milk in their contribution to aspectual composition. While this has been attributed to syntactic or algebraic properties of these noun phrases, such accounts have explanatory shortcomings. We suggest instead that the relevant property that distinguishes between the two classes of noun phrases derives from two modes of existential quantification, one of which holds the values of a variable fixed throughout a quantificational context while the other allows them to vary. Inspired by Dynamic Plural Logic and Dependence Logic, we propose Plural Predicate Logic as an extension of Predicate Logic to formalize this difference. We suggest that temporal for-adverbials are sensitive to aspect because of the way they manipulate quantificational contexts, and that analogous manipulations occur with spatial for-adverbials, habituals, and the quantifier all.

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• Closure and Epistemic Modals

  Philosophy and Phenomenological Research · 2017-04-17 · 29 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  According to a popular closure principle for epistemic justification, if one is justified in believing each of the premises in set Φ and one comes to believe that ψ on the basis of competently deducing ψ from Φ—while retaining justified beliefs in the premises—then one is justified in believing that ψ . This principle is prima facie compelling; it seems to capture the sense in which competent deduction is an epistemically secure means to extend belief. However, even the single‐premise version of this closure principle is in conflict with certain seemingly good inferences involving the epistemic possibility modal ♢. According to other compelling principles concerning competent deduction and epistemic justification, one can competently infer ¬♢ φ from ¬ φ in deliberation even though there are cases in which one can justifiably believe ¬ φ but would be unjustified in believing ¬♢ φ . Thus, as we argue, philosophers must choose between unrestricted closure for justification and the validity of these other principles.

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• Epistemic Resistance Moves

  Proceedings from Semantics and Linguistic Theory · 2016-10-15 · 23 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper introduces and analyzes a new kind of non-acceptance, non-disagreeing move: resistance. We focus in particular on attention-targeted resistance facilitated by epistemic possibility claims. In this response type, we suggest, an agent draws attention to some subsidiary issue that they think might cause an interlocutor to withdraw a previous commitment. We develop a granularity model of attention where drawing attention in discourse can refine the space of possibilities under consideration and consequently lead to changes in view.

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Frequent coauthors

• Kyle Rawlins

  Johns Hopkins University

  3 shared

• Sharon Shewmake

  Western Washington University

  3 shared

• Sadhwi Srinivas

  Johns Hopkins University

  1 shared

• Tamar Lando

  Columbia University

  1 shared

• Yitzhak Y. Melamed

  1 shared

• Sadhwi Srinivas

  William & Mary

  1 shared

• Lucas Champollion

  New York University

  1 shared

• Haoze Li

  Harbin Institute of Technology

  1 shared