Workshop in Semantics and Philosophy of Language

Chris Kennedy (Linguistics, UofC) will give a talk at the workshop on Friday February 19. Title and abstract below:

“Where does relativity come from?”

Focusing on different classes of scalar predicates (dimensional, evaluative, aesthetic, normative), I will explore and document the variable appearance of relativistic behavior (primarily as indicated by the ‘faultless disagreement’ phenomenon) in different forms of these predicates (positive,comparative, nominal, verbal) in an effort to pinpoint the source of relativity, and address the following questions: What determines whether a predicate is relative or merely context dependent? Is relativity (in this domain) a uniform phenomenon, or does this class of predicates display different kinds of relativity? Is relativity a semantic phenomenon, a pragmatic one, or something else?

Kai von Fintel (MIT) will be joining us on Friday January 29, 2010. Title and abstract below:

Title: The subjectivity of conditionals in a new light

Abstract: In this talk, I will explore whether recent advances in the semantics of epistemic modality (Stephenson, von Fintel & Gillies, and others) and in the compositional structure of conditionals (Huitink, Gillies, and others) can shed new light on the semantics and pragmatics of (mostly indicative) conditionals and can deliver us from the specter of radical subjectivity (“no truth-value”, “assessment relativity”). Precedents include Stephenson 2007 and Weatherson 2009.
References:
Stephenson, Tamina. 2007. Indicative conditionals have relative truth conditions. Chicago Linguistic Society 43. 231–242.
Weatherson, Brian. 2009. Conditionals and indexical relativism. Synthese 166. 333–357.

Our very own Nat Hansen (Philosophy) will presenting at the workshop this week, Friday November 6, 2009.  As usual, the meeting will take place from 11am-1pm in the seminar room of the Karen Landahl Center (Social Sciences basement).  Title and abstract below:

“A Slugfest of Intuitions: Contextualism and Experimental Design”

Evidence for contextualism consists of intuitions generated in response to a variety of thought experiments. I argue that features of experimental design influence the intuitions generated by contextualist thought experiments. Unless these features are controlled for, contextualists are not justified in drawing semantic conclusions from these intuitions. I offer several methodological recommendations for improving contextualist methodology.

Peter Klecha, a graduate student in Linguistics, will present at the workshop this Friday October 23 at 11am in the Landahl Center (Social Sciences 004). Title and abstract below:

“The Meaning of Predictions”
A long-contested issue has been whether future terms like “will” are modals or simple tenses. Most recently, Kissine (2008) has argued “will” to be a tense. In the first part of my talk I argue against his analysis and in favor of one which treats predictions as modal expressions, and offer a new analysis of temporal/modal interaction. In the second part I examine different ways the terms “will” and “gonna” interact with context. I argue these terms are semantically identical, except in their interaction with context, providing support for a semantic, and not pragmatic, view of contextual enrichment of meaning.

François Recanati (CNRS, Paris) will be giving a series of talks at the University of Chicago during the week of November 9-13, 2009.  The talks on November 9-11 will each be held at 4.30 pm at the Franke Institute for the Humanities (Regenstein Library).  The fourth talk will be part of the Workshop on Perspectival Thought, which will be taking place November 12-13 at the Franke Institute.  The titles and abstracts for Recanati’s talks are given below.

Francois Recanati’s visit is made possible  through the generous support of the Chicago-France Center, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, The Departments of Linguistics and Philosophy, and the Workshop on Semantics and the Philosophy of Language.

November 9: “Varieties of context-dependence” - In addition to indexicality (which itself comes in several varieties) I will argue that we need to make room for other forms of context-dependence such as modulation and relativization.

November 10: “Relativization: what it is and why it matters” - I will argue that the complete content of a representation, whether linguistic or mental, is made up of two things: the explicit content of the representation and the situation with respect to which that content is to be evaluated. I will show how, using this framework, we can account for implicit aspects of content and provide a more satisfactory analysis of a number of phenomena.

November 11: “Egocentricity and shiftability” - According to some authors (e.g. Lewis), the situation with respect to which an autonomous representation is evaluated has got to be the situation in which the representation is tokened. Alternatively, one may draw a distinction between a variety of representational modes, and construe the egocentric mode (i.e. the mode of thought or discourse such that the situation of evaluation is the situation of tokening) as a special case. I will spell out the contrast between these two views and discuss some of their consequences.

November 13: “De se thought and immunity to error through misidentification” - For many authors, de se thoughts are a species of de re thought. In this talk, I argue that de se thoughts come in two varieties : explicit and implicit. While explicit de se thoughts can be construed as a variety of de re thought, implicit de se thoughts cannot : their content is thetic, while the content of de re thoughts is categoric. The notion of an implicit de se thought will be shown to play a central role in accounting for the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification, though not quite the role that is ascribed to it in Perspectival Thought.

Robin Jeshion (Department of Philosophy, UC Riverside) will be giving a talk on Thursday October 15 at 6pm in Cobb 115 (*NOTE special time, date and place*).

Title: “Singular Thought: Names, Descriptions, and Discourse Representation Theory”

Abstract: “I will discuss the semantic and cognitive roles that names and descriptions play in initiating and sustaining singular thought about individuals.”

Welcome back, linguists and philosophers. We have a number of exciting events in the works for this quarter, centered around our theme for this year, “Contextualism.” Here are some of the preliminary details:

- Robin Jeshion (UC Riverside) Thursday October 15 @ 6pm (note special time)

- Workshop on Perspectival Thought, Thursday and Friday November 12-13 – including talks by François Recanati (CNRS, Paris), Pranav Anand (UCSC), Michael Glanzberg (UC Davis), Peter Lasersohn (UIUC) and John McFarlane (Berkeley)

- Jason Stanley (Rutgers)

Stay tuned for more details on our events this quarter.

Here’s a quick recap of workshops we’ve held that never got advertised here:

Winter Quarter:

January 30, 2009. Stefan Kaufmann (Northwestern). “Unconditionals are Conditionals”

February 13, 2009. Itamar Francez. “Making it implicit: The dynamics of context sensitivity in existentials”

February 20, 2009. Aidan Gray. “What do Alfreds have in common?”

February 27, 2009. Chris Kennedy. “On ‘Average’ ”

March 6, 2009. Thony Gillies (Michigan). “Iffiness”

Spring Quarter:

April 3, 2009. Palle Leth. “Predicate Terms in Context”

April 24, 2009. Tommy Grano. “English embedding verbs and the semantics of nonfinite complementation”

May 1, 2009. Peter Hylton (UIC). “The Idea of a Logically Perfect Language in Analytic Philosophy” (joint meeting with Wittgenstein Workshop)

And here is our schedule for the remainder of the quarter:

May 22, 2009. Gillian Russell (Washington University). “Necessity and the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction”

May 29, 2009. Jasmin Urban. Title TBA

June 2, 2009. Peet Klecha. Title TBA (joint meeting with Formal Philosophy Workshop)

June 5, 2009. Angelika Kratzer (Massachussetts). Title TBA

June 12, 2009 (Finals Week). Keir Moulton (Wisconsin). Title TBA

On Dec 5 from 11:00am-1:00pm in the Landahl Linguistics Research Center, Sara Bosworth – a graduate student in the Philosophy Department – will give a presentation entitled  “Meaning Internalism and Content Externalism”.

See you there.

This Friday Nov 21, from 11:00am-1:00pm, the Workshop in Semantics and Philosophy of Language will host a talk from Delia Graff Fara (Dept of Philosophy, Princeton University). The talk is entitled: “De-re Modality: Identity Theory versus Counterpart Theory”: the abstract is below. It will talk place in the Landahl Linguistics Research Center, which is in the basement of Social Sciences.

It is likely that Prof Fara will have time to meet with interested graduate students on Friday afternoon. Please let me know if you are interested in meeting with her.

Many philosophers deny certain intuitively eminently plausible identity claims: e.g., that a person is identical to her body, that a person's body is identical to the matter that makes it up, and that artifacts such as paper books and clay statues are identical to the  paper and clay that compose them.

I present a counterpart-theory semantics for de-re modality that's devised in order to support certain metaphysical view about identity that many philosphers reject.  I argue that the semantics is preferable to Lewis's version of counterpart theory in that it avoids many of the purely semantic (as opposed to metaphysical) problems with the theory