“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.

“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.

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.

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.”

- 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.

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

See you there.

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

The meeting will be a special joint meeting with the Wittgenstein Workshop

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Scales of Probability

Paul Portner

Expressions of necessity and possibility are standardly analyzed as operators with meanings of the kind familiar from modal logic, that is as quantifiers over possible worlds, and Kratzer (1981) extends this treatment to a wider variety of expressions.  In particular, she is able to give an account not only of It is necessary that and It is possible that, but also such forms as It is probable that, There is a good possibility that, and There is a slight possibility that.  However, as pointed out by Portner (forthcoming), it seems that the formal theory she develops – involving two paramters of interpretation, the modal base and ordering source, and multiple modal forces defined in terms of these – is unable to explain the open-ended nature of the distinctions:  there is no limit to the number of grades of probability we need to recognize:

possible, somewhat possible, quite possible, entirely possible, probably, extremely probable, 60% probability that, 61% probability that, chance, slight chance, good chance, really good chance, incredibly good chance, two in three chance, necessary, somewhat necessary, completely necessary, absolutely necessary ….

Another feature these Probability and Possibility Expressions (PPEs) is that they are more or less normal adjectives, adverbs, and nouns;  as such most (if not all) of them are gradable.  Thus somewhat possible stands in need of an analysis parallel to somewhat tall.  (In this, they differ from modal auxiliaries and modal particles.)  Whatever deep account we give of the meanings of PPEs, whether it involves possible worlds or some other device, it must fit into the syntactic and semantic mechanics of the theory of gradable expressions (e.g. Kennedy 2007).  In particular, gradale PPEs must be given analyses using scales.

I will briefly describe two approaches to developing a scale-based semantics for PPEs.  The first is based on probability theory:  scales for PPEs are constructed out of the probability scale, i.e. the interval [0,1].  The second is based on modal semantics;  in particular, we derive scales of propositions from the modal base/ordering source framework of Kratzer, as sketched in Portner (forthcoming;  see also Villalta 2007).  In this talk, I’ll spend more time developing the ideas behind the second approach, working out the theoretical details to the extent that time permits.