Mandy Simons

Mandy Simons is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University's Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, with an adjunct appointment in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh. She serves as Director of CMU's Program in Linguistics, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration across philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science.

Her research centers on linguistic pragmatics and philosophy of language, with core expertise in presupposition, conversation without common ground, embedded implicature, nominal bridging, and disjunction. She has developed foundational frameworks for projective content taxonomy and conversational dynamics, significantly advancing the semantics-pragmatics interface through rigorous theoretical analysis and empirical investigation.

Recent publications reveal deep engagement with computational approaches to pragmatic phenomena, including large language model analysis of presupposition judgments and cognitive mechanisms underlying bridging inferences. Her work consistently bridges theoretical linguistics with philosophical inquiry, examining how context shapes linguistic meaning across diverse discourse environments.

In her leadership role directing CMU's Linguistics Program, she cultivates an intellectual hub connecting formal semantics with cognitive and computational approaches to language, hosting workshops and facilitating cross-departmental research initiatives.