PhLing: The Philosophy & Linguistics Workgroup
The philosophy and linguistics working group is devoted to the discussion of contemporary issues that lie at the intersection of linguistics and philosophy. The group meets quarterly to discuss a pre-circulated paper or research developed by a member of the working group. The workgroup is open to both faculty and graduate students.
For more information or to be placed on our mailing list, contact Daniel Skibra.
Spring 2012
Friday, May 25
12:00- 2:00pm
Kresge 2-345
Johannes Schmitt (University of Southern California)
Abstract: In 'Conditionals and Uncertainty-friendly Arguments' I discuss the role of indicativeconditionals in reasoning, especially reasoning from uncertain premises. Some valid arguments (aka paradoxes of material implication) containing conditionalsas conclusions have the interesting feature that even though they preserve certainty, they fail to preserve (high) levels of confidence. One desideratum for a semantic theory of conditionals is that it predicts this very puzzling 'uncertainty-unfriendliness' of arguments containing conditionals. Another desideratum is that it predicts thatconditionals can embed in at least some basic truth-functional and non-truth-functional contexts. I notice a tension between these two desiderata for semantic theories of conditionalsand review two prominent theories that each fail
to satisfy one of the two desiderata. I then argue that a dynamic theory of conditionalsthat incorporates both epistemic modals and probability operators can make good on both desiderata in so far as it represents agents' high levels of confidence in the object language.
Friday, May 18
12:00- 2:00pm
Kresge 2-345
Sarah Paul (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
Title: Diachronic incontinence is a problem in moral philosophy
Abstract: Is it irrational to abandon a previously-formed intention without taking one's reasons to have changed, or to have been misapprehended in the first place? In other words, does rationality enjoin some distinctive, irreducible form of "diachronic continence" with respect to one's intentions? In reflecting on incontinence in implementing one's best judgment at a time, Donald Davidson observed that incontinence "is not essentially a problem in moral philosophy, but a problem in the philosophy of action." With respect to continence over time, I will argue that we do have reasons to be diachronically stable in our intentions, but that these reasons are grounded in the forms of life that we value and not in the nature of agency as such. Diachronic incontinence is a problem in moral philosophy, not in the philosophy of action.
Friday, May 11
Igal Kvart (Hebrew University)
Title: "Rational Assertibility, the Steering role of Knowledge, and Pragmatic Encroachment"
Abstract: In this paper, I lay out an account of the pragmatics of Knowledge, and use it to argue against pragmatic encroachment into the semantics of 'know'. In the past couple of decades, there have been a couple of major attempts to establish the thesis of pragmatic encroachment. Contextualism and Subject-Sensitive Invariantism offered accounts of knowledge in which standard and/or stakes play a major in the semantics of 'know'. These accounts were propelled by examples that seemed to require a pragmatic component in the truth-conditions of knowledge ascriptions in order to be accounted for. The pragmatic account I propose explains the admittedly pragmatic character of the examples in question within the pragmatic field, obviating the need for pragmatic encroachment into the semantics. The main pragmatic components I employ are that of rational assertibility as well as a specific pragmatic role of the use of knowledge in deliberative setups that resorts to practical inference. It accounts for the intuitions associated with the paradigmatic examples, and offers new insight about the methodology of using intuitions as semantic evidence, with a variety of repercussions into other issues.
Friday, April 20
2:00- 3:30pm
Kresge 2-345
Rachel Goodman (University of Chicago)
Title: Against the Tracking Assumption for Attitude Ascriptions
Abstract: There is a traditional approach that theorises about singular thought by attempting to balance a set of commitments about, on the one hand, the nature of singular thought and, on the other, the relationship between these thoughts and the natural language expressions we use in ordinary contexts to ascribe and talk about psychological states. Traditionalists are committed to the idea that singular thought is both a semantic and an epistemic category: singular thoughts are attitudes to singular contents, but it is a requirement on entertaining such attitudes that the thinker bears a special epistemic access relation—call it acquaintance—to the object of her thought. They are, however, also committed to what I call the tracking assumption: that an attitude ascription which states that s Φs that P is true iff s has an attitude of Φ-ing, which involves *entertaining* the content P. However, the behaviour of attitude ascriptions poses a problem for this traditional approach: If, as the tracking assumption entails, attitude ascriptions that relate an agent to a singular content are true only in cases in which that agent entertains that content, then it appears that there is little to be said in the way of a unified theoretical account of acquaintance. I argue that the lesson we ought to learn from this is not, as the traditionalist tends to think, that acquaintance is a looser and more diverse phenomenon than we might have originally thought or, as her opponent (the liberal) suggests, that singular thought does not require acquaintance at all, but rather that we should reject the tracking assumption for attitude ascriptions. I do this by showing that there are reasons independent of considerations concerning singular thought to think that the tracking assumption is false.
Friday, April 6
2:00- 4:00pm
Kresge 2-345
Michael Caie (University of Rochester)
Title: Vagueness and Metasemantics
Abstract: It is has been thought that attention to metasemantics can help provide insight into the nature of vagueness and indeterminacy. In the first part of the talk I'll consider an argument that tries to show that plausible metasemantic theses lead to a supervaluationist treatment of vagueness. I'll argue that the metasemantic theories that have been appealed to in support of supervaluationism all involve ad hoc, theoretically unmotivated, stipulations, and so should be rejected. I'll argue that, nonetheless, there are plausible motivations for parts of these theories and that, shorn of the ad hoc stipulations, these metasemantic accounts lead to a view according to which the facts themselves may be vague or indeterminate.
Friday, March 30
4:00- 5:30pm
Kresge 2-345
Friederike Moltmann (Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques, Paris)
Title: "Intensional Relative Clauses and the Notion of a Variable Object"
Abstract: In this talk I will discuss noun phrases as in the sentences below:
(1) The number of people that can fit into the bus exceeds the number of people that can fit into the car.
(2) The impact of the book that John needs to write must be greater than the impact of the books he has so far written.
It is a common view that an NP like 'the impact of the N' refers to a trope with 'the N' denoting its bearer, and so for 'the number of N', which arguably stands for a number trope. But in (1) and (2) such NPs seem to refer to tropes without actual bearers. Given standard semantics, it is tempting to take the bearers of such tropes to be individual concepts (functions from worlds to (pluralities of) individuals). I will argue that such an approach faces a range of serious difficulties. I will instead propose an account based on notions of a variable object and a variable trope, notions closely related to Kit Fine's notion of a variable embodiment. This account also allows for an explanation why a modal is required in (2), but not in (1).
Winter 2012
Friday, February 24, 2012
2:00-4:00pm
Kresge 2-345
David Etlin (University of Groeningen, NL)
Title: Conditionals, Goodness, and Desire
Abstract: David Lewis argued that evaluative judgments could not be connected with rational desires. The evaluative judgments turn out to implicitly be conditional judgments about instrumental goodness, which fall prey to the triviality results against the Ramsey Test for conditionals. In this paper I will present a simple, strengthened proof of the triviality theorem, and explain one route to evading it in connection with recent discussions (Dreier, Kolodny and MacFarlane) about abandoning modus ponens for conditionals with normative consequents.
Friday, January 27
2:00- 4:00pm
Kresge 2-345
Aidan Gray (University of Chicago)
Title: Prospects for a Predicate View of Names
Abstract: The idea that a name N is interpreted as equivalent to a definite description of the form `the individual who bears the name N' has a long, if somewhat marginalized, history in analytic philosophy. The proposal has received something of a revival among linguists, partly due to cross-linguistic considerations about the syntax of proper names. In this paper I outline two central challenges to this approach: 1) making sense of name-bearing properties 2) responding to the thought, familiar from Kripke and others, that names and definite descriptions embody different modes of reference. I argue that the challenges are related, and sketch a solution to them.
Fall 2011
Wednesday, November 16
12:00- 1:30pm
Kresge 2-345
Eric McReady (Aoyama Gakuin University)
Title: "Coordination in Expressive Meanings Abstract: Natural language contains many expressions with underspecified emotive content."
Abstract: After reviewing a range of linguistic items which have such content, focusing on expressive items with positive and negative meanings, this talk proposes a way for an interpreter to determine what a speaker has in mind when she uses such an expression. Nonmonotonic logic and a notion of normality is used to derive an expected interpretation for emotive expressions in a particular context. This normative meaning is then used as a base to coordinate interpretations between speaker and hearer. If certain conditions are satisfied, coordination on this kind of `unexpressed content' becomes possible. Finally, some other areas in which this kind of analysis could be useful are discussed.
Friday, October 28
2:00-4:00pm
Kresge Hall, 2-345 Conference Room
Mark Alfano (Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study)
Title:
"An Empirically Informed Theory of Desire, Contentment, and Aversion."
Abstract: Both conceptual analysis and neuroscientific research suggest a systematic approach to desire, contentment, and aversion through an intentional logic not unlike those for knowledge and belief. In particular, ‘a desires that’ can be formalized as a modal operator whose dual is ‘a would be content with’, while ‘a is averse to’ can be independently formalized as a modal operator whose dual is ‘a would be left cold by’. Section 2 lays out some of the key properties of duals and illustrates them with the alethic modality. Section 3 demonstrates how to formalize the ‘a desires that’ idiom, argues that ‘a would be content with’ is an adequate dual for desire, and maps out the desiderative square of opposition thus generated. Section 4 presents neuroscientific evidence about the reward and punishment systems in the brain; this evidence supports the argument of section 3 and suggests that the desire/contentment system, which is keyed to rewards, should be supplemented with an aversion/left-cold system, which is keyed to punishments. Section 5 attempts to defuse some potential objections. The article concludes by pointing to some philosophically interesting applications of the logic of desire, including a taxonomy of the emotions, a formal approach to higher-order desire, and some potential constraints on practical rationality.
Thursday, September 22
2:00-4:00pm
Kresge Hall, 2-345 Conference Room
Mitchell S. Green (University of Virginia)
Title: "Organic Meaning"
Abstract: Recent years have seen a surge of interest in the evolution of natural language, but most of that work is carried on in ethology, evolutionary biology, linguistics and computer modeling, and very little within philosophy. One aim of this paper is to reveal some of the rich issues that arise when philosophers engage with the aforementioned literature. Another aim is to develop conceptual machinery to aid progress in understanding language evolution. Many leading researchers concerned with language evolution (T. Fitch, M. Tomasello, D. Cheney, R. Seyfarth, etc.) assume that natural language can only evolve among creatures possessing a theory of mind, and take this requirement to be mandated by Grice’s notion of non-natural meaning. I will develop a notion of meaning--“organic meaning”--that sits between natural and non-natural meaning and can serve as a vehicle for the institution of semantics without requiring a theory of mind. A competitor is Millikan’s notion of an “intentional icon”, but I show organic meaning to be superior, not least because it fits naturally within the constraints of evolutionary game theory. Another competitor is Skyrms’ notion of a signal, which I show to be inadequately elaborated to bear explanatory weight. I close with an overview of how organic meaning can serve not only as an explanatory device for language evolution, but also as a framework for understanding aspects of human communication such as facial expression, vocal intonation, and conversational implicature.
