I'm currently finishing my Ph.D. in philosophy at Northwestern. The dissertation is entitled "The Absolute Conception of Reality and the Metaphysics of Color." The "absolute conception" of reality is a name made up by Bernard Williams for a perfectly objective view of reality, in one sense of 'objective.' Linguistics comes into my work because several of the arguments I criticize and defend have a semantic dimension to them. For example, conceivability-possibility arguments, like the inverted spectrum argument or Frank Jackson's "Mary" argument, are central to the metaphysics of color. These arguments have been attacked by Kripke, Putnam, and others on semantic grounds, in particular, based on the semantics of natural kind terms and proper names. Thus defending these arguments against Putnam and Kripke demands defending a semantic view of natural kind terms. The view I am looking at the most right now is called "two-dimensionalism," and is a modal extension of the basic Fregean semantic picture.