May 2013
2 posts
Workshop Monday, May 13th: Katrina Przyjemski on...
Our last speaker of this semester will be Katrina Przyjemski, who is a PhD student in NYU’s philosophy department. Katrina will present some work in progress in which she gives a relational pragmatic solution to Frege’s puzzle. Here is her abstract:
Kit Fine has recently proposed a new solution to Frege’s puzzle on behalf of the Millian. According to Fine, co-referential proper...
Workshop Monday, May 6th: Will Starr on Dynamic...
Our speaker this monday is Will Starr, who is an Assistant Professor of philosophy at Cornell. Will will present a paper called ‘Dynamic Expressivism about Deontic Modality’. You can view a long abstract of Will’s paper at this link. Here is a shorter abstract:
I will present an expressivist semantics for deontic ‘may’ and ‘must’ using the resources...
This Friday at the CUNY Graduate Center: Lectures...
A special announcement: this Friday at the CUNY Graduate Center, there will be a conference in honor of Ruth Barcan Marcus, organized by Rachel McKinney and Jessica Keiser for the New York Society for Women in Philosophy. See the poster below, and find more details and the schedule here. The conference will be packed with great philosophy of language!
April 2013
6 posts
Workshop Monday, April 29: Jessica Keiser on...
Our speaker this Monday will be Jessica Keiser, who is a PhD student in philosophy ay Yale. Jessica will present some work in progress about linguistic convention. Here is the abstract:
Many of the proposals for a convention-based account of language use have taken the relevant convention to involve assertion. I argue that framing the convention according to which a certain population may be...
Workshop Monday, April 22: Jennifer Carr on...
This Monday’s speaker will be Jennifer Carr, who is a PhD student in philosophy at MIT (and who will be a postdoc at the University of Leeds beginning next year). Jennifer will present some of her work on possible worlds semantics and modals. Here’s the abstract:
Possible worlds semantic accounts of modals, combined with the widely accepted restrictor analysis of conditionals,...
Workshop Monday, April 15th: Cory Nichols on...
Our speaker this Monday will be Cory Nichols, a PhD student in philosophy at Princeton. Cory will present some work in progress on counterfactuals. Here is his abstract:
There are two major problems (at least) with traditional philosophical approaches to conditionals, especially the traditional Lewis-Stalnaker account. One of these is familiar from subsequent literature on the topic, while the...
Donkey Sentence Monday
In addition to Monday’s workshop on Conditional Donkey Sentences, which will be delivered by Arancha san Ginés at 6:30 in NYU’s third floor seminar room, we’d like to bring even more fun with donkey sentences to your attention.
On Monday from 4–6, Jim Pryor will be presenting a paper called ‘Donkey Anaphora, Dynamic Semantics, and State Monads’ to the New York...
Workshop Monday, April 8th: Arancha San Gines on...
Note: The original post said that the workshop would take place on “Monday, April 7th”, which is not a real day. The workshop will actually take place this Monday, April 8th.
Our speaker on Monday, April 8th will be Arancha San Ginés, of Columbia University. Arancha will present a work in progress on conditional donkey sentences that is co-authored with María José Frápolli. Here...
March 2013
4 posts
Workshop Monday, April 1st: Christoph Pfisterer on...
Our speaker on Monday, April 1st will be Christoph Pfisterer, who is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zürich. Christoph will present a work-in-progress with the title, ‘Frege on Judgment and Truth. Here is the abstract:
Frege famously distinguishes between thinking and judging: to think is to grasp a thought, whereas to judge is to acknowledge its truth. But what does it...
Workshop Monday, March 25th: Jack Woods on...
NOTE: This week’s workshop will take place at 7:45pm.
Our speaker this week will be Jack Woods, a PhD student at Princeton University. Jack will be presenting a paper that he has been working on with Derek Baker of Lingnan University. Here is the abstract:
Inconsistency of Content and Inconsistency of Attitude: A Defense of B-type Inconsistency
Sometimes we have inconsistent...
Workshop Monday, March 11th: Daniel Harris on...
Our speaker on Monday will be Daniel Harris, a PhD Student in philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. Daniel will present a work in progress called ‘Grice as an Act-Theoretic Semanticist’. Here is the abstract:
Grice’s contribution to semantics has been indirect: he showed us which kinds of linguistic phenomena should fall under the purview of pragmatics, and thereby delimited the scope of...
Workshop Monday, March 4th: Daniel Fogal on The...
Our speaker this week will be Daniel Fogal, a PhD student in philosophy at NYU. Daniel will present a work in progress called, ‘The Non-Fundamentality of Reasons’. Here’s the abstract:
Many philosophers, such as Scanlon (1998) and Parfit (2011), take the notion of a normative reason to be primitive, and take reasons to be the fundamental units or determinants of normativity....
February 2013
2 posts
Workshop Monday, February 25th: Philipp Koralus on...
Our speaker on Monday will be Philipp Koralus, who is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Wash U. St. Louis and a Visiting Fellow at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. Philipp will present a work in progress called, ‘Questions, Conditionals, and Cognition’. Here is the abstract:
My aim will be to present a new and formally rigorous account of the psychology of reasoning...
Workshop Monday, February 11th: Daniel Greco on...
Our speaker this Monday will be Daniel Greco, who is a Bersoff Fellow in NYU’s philosophy department and an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale. Daniel will present some work in progress on the implications of expressivism for for first-oder normative theorizing. Here is the abstract:
It’s commonly held that the best metaethical account of our normative thought and language...
January 2013
5 posts
Workshop Monday, February 4th: Ulf Hlobil on the...
Our speaker next week will be Ulf Hlobil, a PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh. Ulf will present a work in progress called, ‘What Does “Therefore” Mean?’. Here is the abstract:
I am going to argue that Bach’s view about the meaning of “therefore” is wrong. It is essential to the meaning of “therefore” that is expresses a mental act, namely the act of...
Workshop Monday, Jan. 28th: Ian Olasov on...
Our first speaker of the Spring 2013 semester will be (at long last) Ian Olasov, who is a PhD student in philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. Ian will present a work in progress called ‘A Corpus-Based Approach to Sociolinguistic Variation in Moral Speech: Some Preliminary Results’. Here is his abstract:
While moral language has been the focus of a great amount of discussion in...
Announcing the NYPLW Spring 2013 Speaker Schedule
Our workshops during the spring of 2013 will take place on Monday evenings at 6:30 in NYU’s third floor seminar room, starting next week, on January 28th.
Here is our lineup of speakers:
January 28th:
Ian Olasov (CUNY)
February 4th:
Ulf Hlobil (Pittsburgh)
February 11th:
Daniel Greco (NYU/Yale)
February 25th:
Philipp Koralus (Wash U)
March 4th:
Daniel...
Workshop Friday Jan. 18 at 3:00: David...
The speaker at our second mid-winter workshop will be David Pereplyotchik, who is a visiting assistant professor at Hamilton College. David will present some of his work in progress on the metaphysics of linguistic entities. Here’s is David’s abstract:
Any plausible metaphysics of linguistic expressions must fit with the methodology and the results of current linguistic theory....
Bonus Workshop this Friday (Jan. 11th): Josh...
Because winter break is long and insufficiently philosophical, we’ll be holding a couple of mid-winter bonus workshops on the next two Friday afternoons!
Up first is Josh Armstrong, a graduate student in philosophy at Rutgers. Josh will present a work in progress called ‘Loose Assertions and Actual Languages’. Here’s the abstract:
It is a familiar fact that our...
December 2012
1 post
Workshop this Tuesday (Dec. 4th): Michael...
Our speaker this week will be Michael Schweiger, a PhD student in NYU’s philosophy department. Michael will present a work in progress called ‘The Status of Metaphysical Modality’. Here’s the abstract:
The central theme of my talk is the status of discourse involving the notion of metaphysical necessity (and cognate notions). What should we theorists make of such...
November 2012
4 posts
Workshop Cancelled Today (Nov. 27th)
Unfortunately, Carla Merino Rajme has had to cancel her talk. Join us next week!
*CANCELLED* Workshop this Tuesday (Nov. 26th):...
UPDATE: Unfortunately, Carla has had to cancel the talk due to illness. We’ll be back next week.
Our speaker this Tuesday will be Carla Merino Rajme, a PhD student in philosophy at Princeton. Carla will present a work in progress called ‘A Theory of the Experience of Duration’. Here is her abstract:
How do we experience time? What is it to experience an event as taking...
Workshop this Tuesday (Nov. 20th): Ben Phillips on...
Our speaker this week will be Ben Phillips, a PhD student in philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. Ben will present a work in progress called ‘Speaker Meaning and Audienceless Utterances’. Here’s the abstract:
According to Grice’s basic account of speaker meaning, in uttering x, S meant that p just in case in uttering x, S had a certain communicative intention. In...
Workshop this Tuesday (Nov. 13th): Carlotta Pavese...
NOTE TIME CHANGE: The workshop will take place at 7:00 this week.
Our speaker on Tuesday will be Carlotta Pavese, a PhD student in philosophy at Rutgers. Carlotta will present a work in progress called ‘Questions and the Structure of Content’. Here’s the abstract:
I first raise a puzzle for the standard view of the content of interrogatives. I argue that no extant view of...
October 2012
4 posts
Today's Workshop (Oct. 30th) Cancelled due to...
In case you hadn’t guessed already, tonight’s workshop is cancelled. We hope you’re somewhere safe and dry!
*CANCELED* Workshop this Tuesday (Oct. 30th): Ian...
NOTE: THIS WORKSHOP HAS BEEN CALLED OFF DUE TO HURRICANE SANDY AFTERMATH!
Our speaker this Tuesday will be Ian Olasov, a PhD student in philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. Ian will present his work in progress, ‘A Corpus-Based Approach to Sociolinguistic Variation in Moral Speech: Some Preliminary Results’. Here is the abstract:
While moral language has been the focus of a...
Workshop this Tuesday (Oct. 23rd): Nate Bulthuis...
Our speaker this Thursday will be lead by Nate Bulthuis, a PhD student in Cornell’s Sage School of Philosophy. Nate will talk about some of his work on theories of the proposition in the late medieval period. Here is the abstract:
One of the central roles that propositions are said to fulfill is that of being the objects of belief. The suitability of propositions to fulfill such a role...
Workshop this Tuesday, Oct. 9th: Dirk Kinderman on...
Our speaker this Tuesday will be Dirk Kinderman, a recent graduate of St. Andrews’ PhD program in philosophy, and currently a Visiting Postdoctoral Researcher at Rutgers. Dirk will present his paper, ‘Varieties of Centering and the Common Ground’ (click the link to download a PDF). Here’s the abstract:
What is the role of centered content in communication? It is popular...
September 2012
5 posts
Workshop this Tuesday, Oct. 2nd: Justin Khoo on...
Our speaker this Tuesday will be Justin Khoo, a graduate student in philosophy at Yale. Justin will present his paper, ‘On Indicative and Subjunctive Conditionals’. You can download a copy of the paper here. The abstract follows.
At the center of the literature on conditionals lies the division between indicative and subjunctive conditionals, and Ernest Adams’ famous minimal...
Workshop this Tuesday, Sept. 25: Ashley Atkins on...
Our speaker this Tuesday will be Ashley Atkins, a graduate student in philosophy at Princeton. Ashley will talk about some work in progress on past tenses and the progressive aspect. Here is the abstract of her talk:
It seems unimpeachable to infer that something was happening from the fact that it actually happened. If I truly report that I crossed the Atlantic, surely, it seems, it is also...
Workshop this Tuesday, Sept. 18: Alex Anthony on...
Our speaker this Tuesday will be Alex Anthony, a graduate student in philosophy at Rutgers. Alex will be talking about some work in progress on Predicates of Personal Taste. Here’s the abstract:
Predicates of personal taste (PPTs) like fun give rise to a number of problems for semantics and pragmatics, and recent work on them has coalesced around the question of whether or not these problems...
Workshop this Tuesday, Sept. 11: Karen Lewis on...
Our speaker this Tuesday will be Karen Lewis, an assistant professor at Barnard College/Columbia’s philosophy department. Karen will be talking about some of her work on the differences between static and dynamic semantics. Here’s the abstract:
I’m interested in the question of how adopting a static or dynamic semantic framework constrains one’s answers to central semantic...
Fall 2012 Schedule
We’re pleased to announce our lineup of speakers for the fall.
September 11th
Karen Lewis (Columbia)
September 18th
Alex Anthony (Rutgers)
September 25th
Ashley Atkins (Princeton)
October 2nd
Justin Khoo (Yale)
October 9th
Daniel Fogal (NYU)
October 16th
No Workshop (NYU Fall Break)
October 23rd
Nate Bulthuis (Cornell)
October 30th
Ian Olasov (CUNY)
November...
May 2012
1 post
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
...
April 2012
3 posts
This Week's Workshop: Lisa Miracchi on...
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...
This Week's Workshop: Eliot Michaelson on...
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...
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...
March 2012
4 posts
This week's workshop: Paolo Bonardi on Semantic...
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...
This Thursday: Elmar Unnsteinsson on Unarticulated...
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...
Thursday's Talk: Han Wezenberg on Propositions and...
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...
February 2012
5 posts
This Week's Workshop: Jesse Rappaport on...
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...
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...
This Thursday: Cory Nichols on Counterfactuals
Our speaker this week (Thursday, Feb. 16th) will be Cory Nichols of Princeton University’s philosophy department. Cory will be giving a talk called ‘Counterfactuals: Strict Conditional vs. Variably Strict Conditional Approaches’. The abstract follows:
The standard approach to counterfactuals, due to Lewis and Stalnaker, analyzes counterfactuals as variably strict...
Thursday Bonus Feature: Liz Camp on Slurs at...
All you philosophers of language will also be interested in a talk that Liz Camp of UPenn’s philosophy department is giving to the New York Society for Women in Philosophy’s Worship (SWIPshop) this Thursday immediately before our workshop.
Liz will be presenting a paper on the semantics and pragmatics of slurs called ‘Slurring Perspectives’, which you can download a copy...
Thursday, Feb. 9th: Ariadna Pop on Expressivism,...
Our next meeting will take place this Thursday, February 9th. Please note: the meeting will begin at 7:30 (a half hour later than our normal meeting time this semester).
Our speaker will be Ariadna Pop, a PhD student in philosophy at Columbia. She’ll present a draft of a paper she’s working on called Expressivism, Disagreement, and Speech Act Theory. The abstract follows:
I begin...
January 2012
2 posts
Thursday's Meeting: Nate Bice on Frege
Our first speaker of the semester will be Nate Bice, a PhD student in Columbia’s philosophy department, who’ll be presenting some work-in-progress on Frege’s conception of content, entitled “Thoughts on Thoughts”. You can download a draft of Nate’s paper here.
In this paper, I will trace Frege’s evolving conception of content through the Begriffsschrift, the...
Spring 2012 Schedule
Hello! The Workshop is all set to begin meeting again. During the Spring 2012 we’ll meet on Thursdays at 7:00 in the NYU philosophy building’s third floor seminar room (the same place as last semester, but a different day and time).
Our first meeting will take place this Thursday evening. The speaker will be Nate Bice of Columbia, who’ll be speaking about his recent work on...
December 2011
1 post
Tuesday's Meeting: Yu Guo on Expressivism
Our speaker on Tuesday, December 6th will be Yu Guo, a PhD student in NYU’s philosophy department. You may remember that Yu’s talk was originally scheduled for about a month ago, but was cancelled because Yu had lost his voice. We’re very glad that we’ve been able to reschedule.
Yu will talk about some work he’s doing on expressivism. He’s provided this...
November 2011
5 posts
Tuesday's Meeting: Nemira Gasiunas on...
Next week’s meeting will take place on Tuesday, November 29th at 7:30pm in the third floor seminar room at NYU’s philosophy building. Our speaker will be Nemira Gasiunas, a student in Columbia’s PhD program in philosophy. Nemira will be talking about her work on representationalist theories of perceptual experience. Specifically, she’ll be discussing a puzzle for such...
