Samuel Wolf Cantor

Thank you for checking out my site. 

I am a sixth year graduate student in the philosophy department of the University of Texas at Austin. 

My research interests are primarily in the philosophy of language and philosophical logic. My dissertation is on privative adjectives like fake. The main question is how "the fruit in the bowl is fake" entails "there is no fruit in the bowl". There is some bonus material on the contrastive meaning of indexical adjectives like actually and really, which are derived from the redundant adjectives real and actual (the counterparts of privative adjectives). Another chapter tries to explain why "the men's room on the fourth floor of Waggener hall doesn't exist" suggests there is such a bathroom in myth or folklore, rather than merely denying the existence of such an entity. 

My graduate work is supervised by Josh Dever. I recently completed an MA in linguistics here at UT under the supervision of David Beaver and Ashwini Deo. My thesis was on epistemic adverbs, primarily certainly. 

Apart from my studies, I organize with Juan Diego Rodriguez Sasha Boguraev and Sampada Deshpande the South By Semantics Workshop, which Venkat and I founded in 2023 to enable and encourage more collaboration in research on natural language meaning across various departments here at UT. 

Before moving to Austin I lived in Seattle, where I studied philosophy and linguistics at the University of Washington.