James A. Woodbridge

I am an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at University of Nevada Las Vegas. Before coming to UNLV, I was a reluctant academic nomad, teaching at such institutions as Yale University (2005-6), The University of Michigan (2004-5), The College of William and Mary (2001-4), and New York University (1999-2001).

I grew up in Glastonbury, CT but managed to escape the suburbs of nowhere every year at a summer camp in NH, where I spent most of my time hiking in the White Mountains. I did my undergraduate studies at Amherst College, graduating with a double major in philosophy and physics. After college and a year backpacking around the world, I lived in Boston for two years and worked as a research technician at the Harvard School of Public Health, making computer models of human and dog rib cages for use in the study of respiratory mechanics. From Boston I moved to Ann Arbor to pursue a graduate degree in philosophy at the University of Michigan. I lived in Brooklyn while writing my dissertation, then began my nomadic years after receiving my Ph.D. in 2001. Now I have put down roots in the middle of a desert, in the craziest city on earth.

My philosophical interests include the philosophy of language and mind, metaphysics, and philosophical logic. I mainly focus on the topic of truth and have developed (most recently, in collaboration with Bradley Armour-Garb) a novel analysis of truth-talk (the fragment of language that employs the notion of truth). The view has connections with deflationism about truth (a general approach that also is really more an analysis of truth-talk than one of truth itself, although it has implications for that more traditional issue). According to deflationism, the only purposes truth-talk really serves are certain logical or pragmatic ones. The related analysis of truth-talk that I have developed is a kind of fictionalism about truth-talk, one that sees this way of talking as part of an established, rule-governed semantic pretense. Truth-talk is a pretense-based figure of speech that we employ in order make certain non-semantic claims (in particular, a certain kind of general claim) we could not otherwise make. Brad and I have extended this idea in our book Pretense and Pathology: Philosophical Fictionalism and its Applications.