Recanati talks – November 9-13
Oct 8th, 2009 by bochnak
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.