Philosophy of generative linguistics Ludlow's work in
generative linguistics has revolved around three basic themes. The first theme is that generative linguistics at its best is concerned with
understanding and
explanation, and not just with
observation and
data gathering. To this end, generative linguistics is interested in underlying mechanisms that give rise to language related
phenomena, and this interest will often trump the goal of accumulating more data. The second theme is what he calls the "Ψ-language hypothesis". It is the hypothesis that the underlying mechanisms (the more basic elements) posited by generative linguists are fundamentally psychological mechanisms and that generative linguistics is a branch of
cognitive psychology, but against
Noam Chomsky's I-Language hypothesis Ludlow argues that it doesn't follow that cognitive psychology must therefore be interested in
mental states individuated solely by what happens inside the language user's head. It is consistent with the Ψ-language hypothesis that psychological states (and indeed syntactic states) are individuated in part by the embedding environment. The third theme is what Ludlow calls the principle of "methodological minimalism". It is the thesis that best theory criteria like
simplicity and
formal rigor cannot be given theory neutral definitions, and thus must really come down to one thing: seek methods that help linguists to do their jobs with the minimum of cognitive labor.
Foundations of semantics Ludlow's earliest work in
semantics was an attempt to combine work in the theory of
meaning with contemporary work in generative linguistics, but using resources that are more
parsimonious than those typically used in semantic theory—for example without using the
higher-order functions and
intensional objects deployed in
Montague grammar. The resources were largely limited to primitives like
truth and
reference to individuals. His subsequent work has explored ways of formalizing alternative approaches to semantic theory—including the possibility of
formalizing a
Wittgensteinian use theory or
expressivist semantics for natural language, which is to say a theory in which the building blocks of a semantic theory are expressions of
attitudes rather than primitives like truth and reference.
Philosophy of language Intensional transitive verbs Ludlow's PhD dissertation defended a proposal dating back to the medieval logician
Jean Buridan, and revived by
W.V.O. Quine in philosophy and
James McCawley in linguistics, according to which so-called "intensional transitive verbs" like "seek" and "want" are really
propositional attitudes in disguise. He has subsequently developed these ideas in collaboration with the linguists Richard Larson and Marcel den Dikken.
Interpreted logical forms Ludlow's paper with the semanticist Richard Larson, "Interpreted Logical Forms", advocated a quasi-sententialist view of propositional attitude verbs (a view that has been criticized by
Scott Soames in Chapter 7 of his book
Beyond Rigidity). Ludlow's response to Soames involves the idea that
propositional attitude reports are not supposed to correspond to some fact about what is going on inside the agent's head but rather are created by a speaker S, for the benefit of a hearer H, to help H form some theory about the agent being reported on. Crucial to this account is the idea that the
lexicon is dynamic and that speakers engaged in conversation will negotiate the coinage of terms "on the fly" in constructing attitude reports.
The dynamic lexicon Ludlow's work on interpreted logical forms has led to the development of a view of
linguistic meaning according to which meaning shifts are much more common than intuition suggests. He rejects the "common coin" view of word meaning, and argues that word meanings are negotiated on the fly as conversational partners build little microlanguages together. These ideas have subsequently been applied to controversies in epistemology (see below).
Implicit comparison classes In his article "Implicit Comparison Classes" Ludlow argues for the
syntactic reality of comparison class variables in adjectival constructions. That is, when one says "the elephant is small", there is an implicit variable for the comparison class (in this case elephants, as in "small for an elephant"), and that variable is represented by the language faculty. That work was influential in subsequent work on the context sensitivity of language by
Jason Stanley and Zoltán Gendler Szabó, and has played a role in debates about
contextualism in contemporary
epistemology.
Contextualism in epistemology Recent work in
epistemology has pushed back against
skepticism by arguing that knowledge attributions are context sensitive—our standards of knowledge vary from context to context. So, while in a philosophy class I may not know I have hands, in other contexts (for example, chatting in a bar) I do. Ludlow initially argued that there were implicit argument positions for standards of knowledge. In response to criticism from
Jason Stanley in his book "Knowledge and Practical Interests", Ludlow has advanced a doctrine that he calls "Cheap Contextualism". The idea is that on the dynamic lexicon view, shifts in word meaning are ubiquitous, and the meaning of the term "know" is not an exception. Contextualism in epistemology is just a consequence of these garden variety shifts in meaning.
Natural logic Ludlow has written a series of papers on the
logical form of
determiners (words like "all", "some", and "no") and has pursued the idea that their most interesting properties can be given purely formal or syntactic accounts. The work borrows from one of the central ideas of
medieval logic—the hypothesis that all the key logical inferences can be reduced down to just two basic inferences that are sensitive to whether the syntactic environment was
dictum de omni or dictum de nullo—classical notions that are basically equivalent to the contemporary notions of upward and
downward entailing environments. To explain, in an upward entailing (de omni) environment a superset can be substituted for any set. In a downward entailing environment a subset may be substituted for a set. Ludlow revives the medieval project by combining it with the descriptive tools of contemporary Chomskyan linguistics and recent technical work in
formal logic.
Perspectival Properties Ludlow's first book,
Semantics, Tense, and Time, was devoted to arguing that
presentism, a metaphysical thesis that denies the reality of past and future events, is consistent with the intuitive truth of much of our tensed discourse. More recently, he has argued that while tense is an ineliminable feature of reality, the resulting position (called "tensism") does not force us to be presentists. He has extended this basic idea to argue that perspectival properties (properties that are not universal, but rather are tied to a person’s perspectival point of view) are ubiquitous and ineliminable, both from physics and from our attempts to explain human action and emotion. More radically, he has argued that even the theories of information and computation traffic in perspectival properties.
Conceptual issues in cyberculture Criticizing the Greek god model of governance Most of Ludlow's work on cyberculture has centered on the question of governance for virtual worlds and he has been critical of what he calls the "Greek god model" of virtual world governance. This is a model in which virtual world platform owners do not have coherent systematic policies to deal with in world disputes, but rather reach in and dabble as suits their dispositions at the moment. In an e-book entitled "Our Future in Virtual Worlds" Ludlow argues that as our lives continue to move online, the Greek god model becomes ever more dangerous. This critique has been extended to social networking platforms more generally.
Online gaming chronicles Ludlow founded
The Alphaville Herald on October 23, 2003. It was the unofficial newspaper for the Alphaville server of
The Sims Online, where Ludlow used the avatar Urizenus Sklar. Its stories uncovered in-game scams and cyber-prostitution, and highlighted
Electronic Arts' indifference to the social problems in their game. In a controversy, reported in the
New York Times and elsewhere (including law journals), Ludlow was kicked out of
The Sims Online after some editorials criticized Electronic Arts Corporation for their failures at managing and policing the gamespace. The newspaper subsequently migrated to another virtual world,
Second Life, in June 2004. The Herald has been written about in
Wired and the
Columbia Journalism Review. Ludlow (in the voice of Urizenus Sklar) is currently a contributing editor, while the avatar Pixeleen Mistral, revealed by Ludlow in 2010 to be Internet pioneer
Mark P. McCahill, is the newspaper's managing editor. Ludlow and Mark Wallace wrote a book about
The Herald and its exploits called
The Second Life Herald: the Virtual Tabloid that Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse (MIT Press, 2007). The book received the American Association of Publishers, Professional/Scholarly Publishing award for "Best Book in Media and Cultural Studies, 2007", was named a
Choice "Outstanding Academic Title, 2008", and
Library Journal honored it as a "Top Sci-Tech Book, 2007," (they ranked it one of top 39 science books of 2007 and top book in category of Computer Science).
MTV.com has described Ludlow as the "Unwelcome Guest" in the "10 most influential video game players of all time" because of his chronicles about online video games. In particular MTV wrote that
EA revoked Ludlow's "online citizenship" in
The Sims Online, allegedly because the "offense was Ludlow's publication of a
TSO-centric newspaper that chronicled creative and sometimes troublesome behavior of other gamers in the world, including allegations that under-age players were involved in virtual-sex-related activities. EA claimed Ludlow's newspaper violated the terms of service for playing
TSO" and that Ludlow later similarly chronicled the game
Second Life with his
The Second Life Herald. ==Controversies==