A Different Philosophy of Language Workshop

We’ve reached the end of our second semester, and we’d like to thank the speakers and other participants who made the Workshop fun over the last nine months.

Also, consider heading over to NYU on May 21st for a different Philosophy of Language Workshop featuring Stephen Neale, Stephen Schiffer, and Friederike Moltmann. Here are the details:

NYU Philosophy of Language Workshop

Monday, May 21, 2012

NYU Philosphy Department 2nd floor, Room 202 5 Washington Place

1.30 - 2.15 Stephen Neale ‘What is said’

2.15 - 2.45 discussion

2.45 - 3.00 break

3.00 - 3.45 Stephen Schiffer: ‘Unspeakable reference’

3.45 - 4.15 discussion

4.15 - 4.30 break

4.30 - 5.15 Friederike Moltmann: ‘Quotation and the composition of linguistic acts’

5.15 - 5.45 discussion

This Week’s Workshop: Lisa Miracchi on Propositions

Our last speaker of the semester, this Thursday evening (May 3rd at 7pm) will be Lisa Miracchi, a PhD student in philosophy at Rutgers. Lisa will present a work-in-progress called ‘Predication, Perception, and the Unity of the Proposition’. The abstract follows:

One of the most important roles propositions have been supposed to play is to explain what it is for subjects to grasp a way the world might be—what it is for subjects to understand sentences and think thoughts. Davidson (1967) argued that if propositions are to satisfactorily play this role, they must illuminate predication. I argue that Davidson is correct here, and that it is the problem of predication that underlies the problem of the unity of the proposition in its most urgent form. As such, a recent trend in attempting to solve the problem of the unity of the proposition by grounding propositions in the cognitive activities of subjects (e.g. those of Jeff King and Scott Soames) prohibits them from playing one of their main roles, and brings into question the centrality of propositions in theories of meaning. I then defend Davidson’s further claim that propositions cannot help us understand predication, but reject Davidsonian proposals as unsatisfactory. If we are to illuminate predication, we must instead investigate how this competence is grounded in a subject’s more primitive cognitive states and processes. I present an account of perceptual experience, and argue that it allows us to understand how perceptual experience grounds our ability to predicate.

As background reading, Lisa suggests ‘Truth and Meaning’ by Donald Davidson, and ‘Propositional Unity: What’s the Problem, Who has it, And Who Solves It’ (forthcoming) by Jeff King.

As usual, we’ll meet on Thursday evening at 7pm in the third floor seminar room at NYU’s philosophy building. We hope to see you there!

This Week’s Workshop: Eliot Michaelson on Indexicals

We have a slight change of plans for this week’s workshop. Our previously-scheduled speaker can’t make it, but we’re lucky enough to have Eliot Michaelson, a PhD student in philosophy at UCLA, visiting New York this week, and he’s been gracious enough to volunteer on very short notice. To accommodate Eliot’s schedule, we’ll also be moving the workshop’s time back to 8:00pm.

Eliot will present some of his recent work-in-progress on indexicals. His paper is called ‘Shifty Characters’; you can download a draft of it here. The abstract follows.

In “Demonstratives,” Kaplan introduced a simple and remarkably robust semantics for indexicals. Unfortunately, Kaplan’s semantics is open to a number of apparent counterexamples, many of which involve recording devices. The classic case is the sentence “I am not here now” as recorded and played back on an answering machine. In this essay, I argue that the best way to accommodate these data is to conceive of recording technologies as introducing special, non-basic sorts of contexts with accompanying non-basic sets of conventions governing the use of indexicals in those contexts. The idea is that recording devices allow us to use indexicals in new and innovative ways to coordinate on objects — and that, given sufficient regularity in how we use indexicals recorded on such devices, linguistic conventions will, over time, come to reflect this innovation. I consider several alternatives, but none is able to account for the data as well at my preferred ‘character-shifting’ theory. In addition, some of these alternatives face worrisome theoretical objections. I conclude by explaining how the character-shifting theory not only retains many of the virtues of Kaplan’s original semantics, but also coheres with a plausible view on the nature of semantic theorizing more generally.

As usual, we’ll meet at the NYU philosophy department’s third floor seminar room. But please note the unusual time: we’ll meet at 8pm instead of our usual 7.

We look forward to seeing you on Thursday night!

This Week’s Meeting Cancelled

Because of a conflict with CUNY’s Philosophy Graduate Student Conference, this week’s workshop meeting is cancelled. But we’ll be back again next week with a talk by Katrina Przyjemski. We hope to see you then!

This Week: Guillermo Del Pinal on Compositionality

Our speaker this Thursday (April 5th) will be Guillermo Del Pinal, a PhD student in Columbia University’s philosophy program. Guillermo will be presenting some of his recent work on compositionality. The abstract follows.

What explains our capacity to systematically understand an unbounded number of novel complex expressions of natural languages? The traditional answer appeals to the notion of compositionality, according to which the meanings of complex expressions are determined by the meanings of their (immediate) constituents, the way they are combined, and nothing else besides.

Recently, some prominent linguists and philosophers have extensively criticized the view that natural languages are compositional; in particular, that we need this assumption to explain our capacity to systematically understand an unbounded number of novel complex expressions. If successful, these criticism are quite consequential. For the assumption that natural languages are compositional shapes the way we theorize about basically every other central aspect of language—-from issues about language acquisition and production, to issues about the nature and structure of word and sentence meaning.

In this talk I will defend the view that natural languages are compositional. The argument I present is a refined version of the traditional argument that assuming compositionality is part of the best explanation of our capacity to systematically understand an unbounded number of novel expression of natural languages. As some critics argue, there are other explanations of our capacity to understand novel expressions. But the compositional explanation, I will argue, is the one that coheres best with other basic properties of natural languages and their speakers.

As background reading, Guillermo suggests Zoltán Szabó’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Article on Compositionality.

As usual, we’ll meet on Thursday evening at 7:00 in the third floor seminar room of NYU’s philosophy building. We hope to see you there!

This week’s workshop: Paolo Bonardi on Semantic Relationism

Our speaker this Thursday, March 29th, will be Paolo Bonardi, a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Geneva and Visiting Scholar at Columbia University. Paolo will be presenting a work in progress entitled ‘Relational Semantics and Belief Ascriptions’.

In his book Semantic Relationism, Kit Fine propounds an original and sophisticated semantic theory called ‘semantic relationism’ or ‘relational semantics’, whose peculiarity is the enrichment of Kaplan’s, Salmon’s and Soames’ Russellian semantics – more specifically the Russellian content of simple sentences and the truth-conditions of belief reports – with coordination, “the very strongest relation of synonymy or being semantically the same” [2007, p.5].

The goal of my talk is to shed light on an undesired result of semantic relationism: a report like “Tom believes that Cicero is bald and Tom does not believe that Tully is bald” is correct according to the provided truth-conditions of belief reports, but its semantic content is (very likely) a contradiction. As I shall argue in the paper, even the resort to the notion of token proposition, introduced by Fine in his recent article “Comments on Scott Soames’ ‘Coordination Problems’”, does not suffice to eliminate the contradiction; moreover, it raises new difficulties.

References

Fine, K. [2007]. Semantic Relationalism. Oxford: Blackwell.

——— [2010]. “Comments on Scott Soames’ ‘Coordination Problems’”. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 81: 475-84.

As usual, the workshop will take place on Thursday evening at 7pm, in the third floor seminar room of NYU’s philosophy building. We hope to see you there!

This Thursday: Elmar Unnsteinsson on Unarticulated Constituents

Our speaker this Thursday (March 22nd) will be Elmar Unnsteinsson, a PhD student in the CUNY Graduate Center’s philosophy program. Elmar will present a work in progress called ‘Propositions and Unarticulated Constituents’. The abstract follows:

In a recent paper, Adam Sennet poses an interesting problem for theorists who wish to postulate unarticulated constituents (UCs) of propositions. He takes note of sentences, such as (1), that seem not to be captured by standard definitions of UCs.

(1) Brooke comes to Vancouver when it snows.

On Sennet’s construal, the snow-location is a constituent of the proposition expressed by (1). But in contexts where the snow-location is Vancouver the constituent cannot be unarticulated since ‘Vancouver’ occurs in (1). Thus, Sennet argues, the UC-theorist must introduce occurrences of constituents in propositions and each occurrence must be coordinated with some bit of the sentence (hidden or not). Yet a central motivation for believing in UCs in the first place is that, syntactically speaking, they come for free. If Sennet is right, UC-theorists need to posit hidden syntactic structure just as much as anyone else.

In this paper I argue that Sennet’s argument fails. His examples don’t give rise to UCs at all. Most importantly, Sennet is conflating, like most others seem to do, the phenomena of linguistic underspecification and constituent unarticulation. Further, if one considers analogous cases his examples shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Thus the issue of ‘occurrences’ is independent of whether one accepts UCs or not.

I also develop a Quinean argument against accepting occurrences. It seems almost impossible to find evidence showing that the same exact thing should occur twice in a single proposition. And this is especially pertinent with respect to Sennet’s examples, since one of the occurrences is not supposed to correspond to any linguistic expression. How can we be sure in such a case that the UC and the articulated constituent aren’t just co-instantiated, rather than identical? I give reasons to think that this possibility should be ruled out and conclude that occurrences should, at least in this case, be avoided.

Elmar has suggested that we may want to look at Sennett’s paper, ‘Unarticulated Constituents and Propositional Structure’, as background. You can download a copy here.

As usual, the workshop will take place at 7:00 in the third floor seminar room of NYU’s philosophy building.

Thursday’s Talk: Han Wezenberg on Propositions and Content

Our speaker this Thursday (March 8th) will be Han Wezenberg. Han is a doctoral student at the Institut für Philosophie at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, and this year he is a visiting student at NYU’s philosophy department. He’ll talk about some of his research on the relationship between propositions and content.

In this talk, I address the question whether we need propositions as contents, or whether we can consider them bearers of content. The view that propositions are objectified contents is unquestionably the standard view in philosophy, but the alternative is at least suggestive in the well-known work of Fodor. Yet even though this usually suffices to raise a controversy, the question whether propositions must be considered contents has attracted surprisingly little attention.

I start by outlining the bearer view and by providing some very general motivation for it. I then briefly present the main assumptions against the background of which I raise the issue about propositions. Roughly speaking, I adopt a Fodorian approach to linguistic understanding and the mind more generally, augmented by Fine’s Semantic Relationism as the adequate theory of content for the Language of Thought. Next, I spell out the main roles propositions as contents are generally taken to play, with a view to arguing how those roles might be played just as well by propositions as bearers. This includes the role of propositions as primary truth-bearers and in propositional attitudes. The overarching aim is not to show that propositions must be taken to be bearers, but to argue for the weaker claim that as far as these roles are concerned, they can be. I conclude by highlighting some potential advantages of the advocated approach to propositions, for instance with regard to questions concerning their structure or their representational nature.

As usual, our meeting will take place on Thursday evening at 7:00pm, in the NYU philosophy building’s third floor seminar room.

This Week’s Workshop: Jesse Rappaport on Millianism

Our speaker this Thursday (March 1st), is Jesse Rappaport, a student in CUNY’s PhD program. Jesse will be presenting some of his recent work on proper names.

I present a methodological defense of the Millian theory of proper names, which holds that the semantic content of a name is simply its referent. Within a framework of Gricean communication theory (or “Linguistic Pragmatism”), I argue that Millianism is really a much more plausible position than it may appear to some, and we ought to hold it as the “default” view unless counter-examples force us to abandon it. I then address some of the common counter-examples (“Frege cases”). Objections to current Millian theories often impugn them for invoking a dubious ontology of propositional “guises.” I show how the standard counter-examples to Millianism can be accommodated strictly using the resources of Gricean theory and without invoking guises. In particular, I argue that anti-substitution intuitions are explained by conversational implicature. My position is that if the apparent counter-phenomena can be explained using resources available from a broader theory of communication, this undercuts any motivation for deviating from a naive Millian semantics.

As usual, we’ll meet in the third floor seminar room of NYU’s philosophy building at 7:00pm. We hope to see you there!

This Week’s Meeting: Lars Dänzer

Our meeting this Thursday (February 23rd) will be led by Lars Dänzer, a PhD student at the University of Cologne who is visiting NYU’s philosophy department this year. Lars will present some of his work on language understanding, entitled ‘Understanding a Sentence of a Language’. Here is his abstract:

What is it to understand a sentence of a language? There are two traditional kinds of answers to this question. According to the first, understanding a sentence requires having propositional knowledge of some sort about the sentence or its components. According to the second, understanding a sentence does not require any such knowledge, but merely the possession of a certain ability or disposition. In the talk I’ll argue in favour of an account of the first sort, according to which understanding a sentence is (roughly) a matter of being in a state which, in one way or another, realizes possession of the information about the kind of speech act typically performed by speakers of the language in uttering the sentence. I’ll argue that this account emerges as the best way to resolve an apparent dilemma: On the one hand, the fact that understanding a sentence can be realized by different cognitive mechanisms in different subjects seems to force us towards an account in terms of abilities or dispositions. On the other, it appears that our only way to make sense of how we manage to understand the utterances of others is in inferential terms, which strongly counts in favour of some kind of propositional knowledge view after all.

As usual, the meeting will take place on Thursday evening at 7:00 in the third floor seminar room of NYU’s philosophy building. We hope to see you there!