Matthew Mandelkern





I am associate professor in philosophy at NYU. From 2017-20, I was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. I received a PhD in philosophy at MIT in 2017. I work on philosophy of language and its intersections with neighboring fields.

I am director of undergraduate studies at NYU. Do you have a question about the undergraduate program? It might be answered here. If not, please email me or come to my office hours on Wednesdays, 10-12, in 403, 3-5 Washington Square Place. No appointment is needed (or possible).

In fall 2024, I am teaching a seminar at NYU on ability.

My publications (except some superseded proceedings papers), plus some drafts and lecture notes, are linked below, and (mostly) archived at PhilPeople.

You can reach me at mandelkern-at-nyu.edu.


Book

Bounded meaning: The dynamics of interpretation. 2024. Oxford University Press. Preface.


Papers

Conditional and modal reasoning in large language models (with Cedegao Zhang and Wesley H. Holliday). 2024. Proceedings of EMNLP. [abstract] [archive]

The conjunction fallacy: Confirmation or relevance? (with WooJin Chung, Kevin Dorst, and Salvador Mascarenhas). 2024. Thinking & Reasoning. [abstract] [archive]

Do language models' words refer? (with Tal Linzen). To appear. Computational Linguistics. [abstract] [archive]

Chance, ability, and control. 2024. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. [abstract] [archive]

The orthologic of epistemic modals (with Wesley H. Holliday). 2024. Journal of Philosophical Logic. [abstract] [archive]

Good guesses (with Kevin Dorst). 2022. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. [abstract] [archive]

Compatibility, compossibility, and epistemic modality (with Wesley H. Holliday). 2022. Proceedings of the Amsterdam Colloquium. [abstract] [archive]

Witnesses. 2022. Linguistics and Philosophy. [abstract] [archive]

Assertion is Weak (with Kevin Dorst). 2022. Philosophers' Imprint. [abstract] [archive]

If p, then p! 2021. The Journal of Philosophy. [abstract] [archive] Reprinted in the 2021 Philosopher's Annual

Practical Moore sentences. 2021. Noûs. [abstract] [archive]

Roads to necessitarianism (with Daniel Rothschild). 2021. Journal of Philosophical Logic. [abstract] [archive]

Eavesdropping: What is it good for? (with Jonathan Phillips). 2020. Semantics and Pragmatics. [abstract] [archive]

A counterexample to modus ponenses. 2020. The Journal of Philosophy. [abstract] [archive]

Definiteness projection (with Daniel Rothschild). 2020. Natural Language Semantics. [abstract] [archive]

Dynamic non-classicality. 2020. Australasian Journal of Philosophy. [abstract] [archive]

What's not to like (with Jacopo Romoli). 2020. Linguistic Inquiry. [abstract] [local file]

Import-Export and ‘And’. 2020. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. [abstract] [archive]

How to do things with modals. 2020. Mind & Language. [abstract] [archive]

We've discovered that projection is asymmetric (and it is!) (with Jérémy Zehr, Jacopo Romoli, and Florian Schwarz). 2020. Linguistics and Philosophy. [abstract] [archive]

Talking about worlds. 2019. Philosophical Perspectives. [abstract] [archive]

Modality and expressibility. 2019. Review of Symbolic Logic. [abstract] [archive]

What ‘must’ adds. 2019. Linguistics and Philosophy. [abstract] [archive]

Bounded modality. 2019. The Philosophical Review. [abstract] [archive]

Against Preservation (with Justin Khoo). 2019. Analysis.[abstract] [archive]

Triviality results and the relationship between logical and natural languages (with Justin Khoo). 2019. Mind. [abstract] [archive]

Independence day? (with Daniel Rothschild). 2019. Journal of Semantics [abstract] [archive]

The case of the missing ‘If’: Accessibility relations in Stalnaker's theory of conditionals. 2018. Semantics and Pragmatics. [abstract] [archive]

Sticky situations: Force and quantifier domains (with Jonathan Phillips). 2018. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory. [abstract] [archive]

Hurford conditionals (with Jacopo Romoli). 2018. Journal of Semantics [abstract] [archive]

Agentive modals (with Ginger Schultheis and David Boylan). 2017. The Philosophical Review. [abstract] [archive]

Parsing and presuppositions in the calculation of local contexts (with Jacopo Romoli). 2017. Semantics and Pragmatics. [abstract] [archive]

A solution to Karttunen’s Problem. 2017. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung. [abstract] [archive]

Hierarchical structure and local contexts (with Jacopo Romoli). 2017. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung. [abstract] [local file]

Dissatisfaction theory. 2016. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory. [abstract] [archive]

A note on the architecture of presupposition. 2016. Semantics and Pragmatics. [abstract] [archive]

I believe I can φ (with Ginger Schultheis and David Boylan). 2015. Proceedings of the Amsterdam Colloquium. [abstract] [archive]



Drafts

Disjunction and possibility 2024. [abstract] [archive]

The logic of sequences (with Cian Dorr). 2024. [abstract] [local file]



Lecture notes

Notes from a 2024 ESSLLI course on conditionals and decision theory taught with Melissa Fusco.

Notes from a 2022 ESSLLI course on conditionals and information sensitivity taught with David Boylan.

Notes from a 2017 ESSLLI course on dynamic semantics taught with Daniel Rothschild.



Handbook chapters

Trivalence and anaphora. 2024. Handbook of Trivalent Logics, MIT Press. [abstract] [local file]

Modals and conditionals. 2022. Linguistics meets philosophy, Cambridge University Press. [abstract] [local file]