Dr. Michael McCourt
Dr. McCourt joined the UHP as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Honors in Spring 2024. He has taught two semesters of the Honors first-year seminar course, Origins and Evolution of Modern Thought, and will be offering a course in Arts and Humanities for upper-level Honors students beginning Spring 2025.
Dr. McCourt studies questions about the individuation of word meaning (what makes a word mean what it means) and the relationship between language and thought. He’s also interested in the scientific study of language, including the psycholinguistic investigation of the moment-by-moment processing of speech and text. He has run psycholinguistic experiments concerning the processing of anaphoric expressions, as reported in two publications (2015, 2020). He also studies the history of ideas about language and mind, with ongoing research projects in Greek and Roman philosophy.
McCourt, M. & Vogel, C. (2024). Slurs, truth conditions, and semantic internalism. Forthcoming in Grazer Philosophische Studien.
McCourt, M. (2021). Semantics and Pragmatics in a Modular Mind. (Doctoral Thesis)
Green, J.J., McCourt, M., Lau, E., & Williams, A. (2020). Processing adjunct control: Evidence on the use of structural information and prediction in reference resolution. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 5(1):112.
McCourt, M., Green, J.J., Lau, E., and Williams, A. (2015). Processing implicit control: evidence from reading times. Frontiers in Psychology 6:1629.
BA Philosophy, BA English, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
MA Philosophy, Northern Illinois University
PhD Philosophy, University of Maryland, College Park