Mark McCullagh

Mark McCullagh is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Guelph. He holds a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh (1997) and completed his academic training at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on non-central uses of language and concepts, particularly scare-quoting and the distinction between direct and content-specifying uses of concepts. He has contributed to debates in philosophy of language, semantics, and inferentialist theories of meaning.

Education: PhD in Philosophy (University of Pittsburgh, 1997), advanced training at the University of Toronto. Research Interests: Conceptual analysis, quotation semantics, attitude ascriptions, and inferentialist accounts of meaning.

Recent work explores how non-central linguistic practices challenge traditional views of assertion and concept possession. His articles address contextual shifts, mixed quotation mechanisms, and the role of modesty in interpretation. He has edited volumes on Timothy Williamson's modal logic and contributed to discussions on Wittgenstein, Aristotle, and functionalist theories of mind.

Key themes across his publications include the relationship between inferential roles and semantic content, compositionality, and the philosophical implications of self-knowledge failures. His work often bridges analytic philosophy's technical rigor with broader methodological reflections on linguistic practice and conceptual engineering.