After earning my B.A. at Reed College and my Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh, I came to Kansas State University in the fall of 2002. I work in the philosophy of language and philosophical logic, with interests also in ancient philosophy and various topics in epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind. My primary effort in the last couple of years has been to develop an account of linguistic understanding that resolves the semantic paradoxes by establishing that competent speakers of natural languages understand them in accord with semantic theories that the paradoxes show to be false. Currently I am at work on a series of papers on semantic competence and a monograph on Alfred Tarski. In upcoming work I intend to consider problems about set theory, vagueness and universal quantification. I also have work planned on definition, empty reference, the semantics of fiction and possible worlds conceptions of content. I am editor of a collection of articles on Tarski, an issue of Inquiry on inconsistency theories of understanding, and was organizer of a conference on whether linguistic understanding is a kind of knowledge held at the Center for Cognitive Sciences and Semantics at the University of Lativia in Riga in August 2009.