New York Philosophy of Language Workshop

Workshop Monday, May 13th: Katrina Przyjemski on Pragmatic Relationism

Wed, 08 May 2013 23:25:08 -0400

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 names like ‘Cicero’ and ‘Tully’ have the same intrinsic semantics, but different relational semantics. Fine is right that an adequate solution to Frege’s puzzle must be relational in character, but wrong about the semantic and logical roles of relational values. Relational values are not semantic values, but instead pragmatic values associated with speakers’ uses of expressions. Furthermore, while relationism has consequences for informal, pragmatic notions of validity tied to justified or proper reasoning, it does not motivate the kinds of revisions to the ordinary notions of logical form and validity that Fine suggests. An adequate solution to Frege’s puzzle will be both relational and pragmatic.

This workshop will take place on Monday, May 13th at 6:30 in the third floor seminar room at NYU’s philosophy building. We hope to see you there!

Workshop Monday, May 6th: Will Starr on Dynamic Expressivism about Deontic Modality

Wed, 01 May 2013 14:07:54 -0400

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 of dynamic semantics. While empirical issues in the semantics of deontic modality will be briefly discussed and used to bolster this semantics, the main focus will be on a philosophical issue: the Frege-Geach problem. To acheive empirical adequacy, any semantics that posits non-truth-conditional meaning must explain how this kind of meaning can be integrated into a semantics which is not only compositional but captures truth-conditional meaning as well. To achieve philosophical clarity, the interpretation of the semantics must be clear about the nature of the non-truth-conditional meaning and how it features into the explanatory project of semantics. In the dynamic semantics presented here, the meaning of a sentence is the characteristic role that sentence plays in changing agents’ mental states. Agents’ mental states are divided into two familiar types: cognitive (e.g. belief) and conative (e.g. desire). The paper builds on familiar models of these attitudes in decision theory and modal logic. These ideas lead to a simple dynamic semantics for ‘must p’: it tests whether some salient body of beliefs and desires regards p as a live option which is at least as good as any other. How is this semantics expressivist? How do meanings of this kind cohere with the explanatory project of semantics and how do they compositionally interact with truth-conditional meaning? Where does truth fit into this picture in general? How does this approach compare to recent work by Charlow, Rothschild, Schroeder and Yalcin? What does this work in semantics have to say about the expressivist position in metaethics? These are the questions I aim to explore, and hopefully answer, here.

The workshop will take place on Monday, May 6th at 6:30 in the third floor seminar room of NYU’s philosophy building. We hope to see you there!

This Friday at the CUNY Graduate Center: Lectures in Honor of Ruth Barcan Marcus

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 23:12:01 -0400

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!

Workshop Monday, April 29: Jessica Keiser on Linguistic Convention

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 19:57:10 -0400

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 said to speak a certain language in terms of assertion yields an account of language use that is overly restrictive and subject to counterexamples. I propose a new theory that analyses the relevant convention in terms of a notion of speaker meaning that does not involve assertion. In addition to being able to handle the cases that are problematic for assertion-based theories, the new proposal offers a more intuitive account of what is essentially involved in communication.

The workshop will take place on Monday, April 29th at 6:30 in the third floor seminar room of NYU’s philosophy building. We hope to see you there!

Workshop Monday, April 22: Jennifer Carr on Possible Worlds Semantics, Conditionals, and Modals

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 14:02:00 -0400

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, validate the following schema: ‘If φ, ought φ.’ This is a terrible thing to validate! I consider two inadequate solutions to this problem and show how they can be combined to generate a more adequate solution. Then I offer a puzzle case for the new account which suggests that we might need a less conservative amendment to the standard semantics.

The workshop will take place at 6:30 on Monday, April 22nd in the third floor seminar room at NYU’s philosophy building. We hope to see you there!

Workshop Monday, April 15th: Cory Nichols on Counterfactuals

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 09:55:47 -0400

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 other, as far as I know, has been ignored. The more familiar problem is that the emphasis on the very closest antecedent-worlds, rather than, say, the close enough worlds, or perhaps the relevant worlds (somehow otherwise determined), yields counterintuitive results. The less familiar problem is that various kinds of modal claims can interact with each other in ways that suggest that traditional philosophical accounts of conditionals have mischaracterized some general features of modal discourse as features specific to the semantics of conditionals. In response to these problems I propose my own positive account of conditionals, and to some extent of modal talk in general, which combines: (i) an emphasis on speakers’ referential intentions and other contextual features over world closeness; and (ii) a kind of general purpose modal base or domain similar in nature to those familiar from accounts of conditionals and modality more popular amongst linguists.

As usual, the workshop will be at 6:30 in the third floor seminar room at NYU’s philosophy building. We hope to see you there!

Donkey Sentence Monday

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 10:25:00 -0400

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 Philosophical Logic group. Here is Jim’s abstract:

I’ll review some core elements of why donkey anaphora is puzzling, and puts pressure on theorists to propose novel semantic structure. I’ll survey why some modest attempts to accommodate these pressures are inadequate; then focus on one of the more promising more radical responses, the Amsterdam-style dynamic approach. I’ll argue we should think of the semantics of programming languages as continuous with the semantics for natural language, and talk through several different versions of how the fundamental idea of the dynamic approach would be implemented in programming terms. We’ll then talk through the most familiar linguists’ formulation of a dynamic theory of anaphora. My hope is that by going through what is fundamentally the same semantic novelty in a variety of superficially different forms, you’ll better understand the essence of the proposal, independently of the accidents of how it’s presented.

Jim’s talk will be on Monday, April 8th, 4pm-6pm, in the second floor seminar room of NYU’s philosophy building. After that, come upstairs to the third floor for Arancha’s talk.

Workshop Monday, April 8th: Arancha San Gines on Conditional Donkey Sentences

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 10:57:00 -0400

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 is the abstract:

Introduction:

Classical predicate logic and the philosophy that supports it have shown to be powerful tools in the task of analyzing how language works. Nevertheless, even the best tools have their limitations, and the predicate calculus is no exception. Frege, in Begriffsschrift compared the contrast between natural languages and his proposed logical calculus with the contrast between the eye and the microscope. Even if the microscope is indispensable for some purposes, some others require a wider perspective. First order predicate calculus has its weaknesses to account for the complexities of natural languages. This is no news, but the background in which extended and non-standard logics find their rationale. The aim of our proposition will be to focus on a particular kind of sentences widely discussed by philosophers, linguists, and logicians for over fifty years, the so-called donkey sentences. We will analyze one problematic example of donkey sentence, and will propose a new fresh interpretation for it that will eventually allow us to face successfully the often called proportion problem.

Donkey sentences:

Donkey sentences were introduced in the philosophical debate by Peter Geach in the sixties, a debate that Geach brings in from the Middle Age. These sentences have proved to be particularly reluctant to logical treatment, being their trademark the co-existence’ of logical operators, i.e., connectives and quantifiers, together with anaphoric links. The following is the typical example of donkey sentence:

(1) If a farmer owns a donkey, he beats it.

Dynamics semantics such as DRT or GTS have been able to provide a satisfactory interpretation of this kind of sentence. However, they have failed to extend their explanations to the following one:

(2) Usually, if a farmer owns a donkey, he beats it.

Our proposal

The intuition that conditionals represent some general transition from some kind of occasion to some other (kind of) occasion is pervasive in the bibliography. The intuition includes two separable claims: that the conditionals involved encode general transitions, and that they quantify over occasions. Besides, situation semantics asserts that ‘[…] speech, writing, thought, and inference are situated activities. That is, they are activities carried out by intelligent, embodied, limited agents, agents situated in a rich environment, an environment that can be exploited in various ways’ (Barwise, 1989: xiii). This three ingredients constitute the core of our proposal.

On the one hand we accept the generalized quantifier approach to conditionals (van Benthem, 1984), and on the other hand we take seriously the active role of the agent in reading the environment (Barwise, 1989). In order to put to work van Benthem’s and Barwise’ s intuitions we will provide occasions (van Benthem’s terminology) with weights, according to their configuration. That is, for us, conditionals give information not only about isolated occasions (or number of occasions) but also about the configuration of these occasions.

References:

Barwise, J. (1989), The Situation in Logic. Stanford, Center for the Study of Language and Information.
Geach, P.T. (1962), Reference and Generality. An Examination of Some Medieval and Modern Theories. Cornell University Press.
van Benthem, J. (1984), “Foundations of conditional logic”. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 13, no. 3, 303-349.

The workshop will take place in the third floor seminar room of NYU’s philosophy building at 6:30 on Monday, April 8th. We hope to see you there!

Workshop Monday, April 1st: Christoph Pfisterer on Frege on Judgment and Truth

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 13:41:00 -0400

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 mean to acknowledge the truth of a thought? Is it possible to acknowledge the truth of a false thought, or does Frege not allow for the possibility of false judgments? Sure enough, judgment and truth are intertwined, but what is the relation between judgment and truth? In my talk I will try to answer these questions.

In the first section I shall examine the function of the judgment-stroke in Frege’s logical system. I will argue that judgments for Frege are essentially embedded in chains of inference. In the second section I shall try to make sense of judgments beyond logicism. I will address two major misconceptions: judgment as truth-predication and judgment as a cumulatively compound activity. In the last section I will offer a new interpretation, which hopefully succeeds in overcoming these difficulties.

As usual, the workshop will take place at 6:30pm in the third floor seminar room at NYU’s philosophy building. We hope to see you there!

Workshop Monday, March 25th: Jack Woods on Inconsistency of Attitude

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 14:02:00 -0400

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 attitudes. Our desires, evaluations, credences, preferences, goals, and of course our beliefs can be and often are inconsistent. Sometimes an explanation of this inconsistency can be traced to some feature of the content of the attitudes. Beliefs, for example, may be inconsistent because the propositions believed may be logically or semantically inconsistent. However, it is by no means obvious that all inconsistency of attitude can be explained in this way. On the face of it, there is no common logically or semantically inconsistent content which could explain why approving of fracking and disapproving of fracking is inconsistent. Likewise, though the proposition Steve went to the store is inconsistent with Steve did not go to the store, there is nothing inconsistent in wondering whether Steven went to the store and wondering whether Steve did not go to the store. So inconsistency of attitude is not simply definable in terms of having a pair of attitudes with inconsistent contents.

Many theorists have taken this seriously and introduced an unreduced notion of inconsistency of attitude to account for how attitude can be inconsistent with one another. We view this strategy as promising, whatever the fate of particular instances of it. However, Mark Schroeder has recently offered an argument against this strategy. He has argued that inconsistency of a set of attitudes must be explained by the semantic inconsistency of their contents. Since accounts utilizing unreduced notions of inconsistency of attitude do not offer such an explanation, they cannot be correct. We regard this argument as unsound and, moreover, dangerous. Fruitful research into the nature of the attitudes and their interrelations should not be hobbled by the hasty closure of a promising avenue of research. Our goal is thus rehabilitation of this avenue of research.

We will show that this argument relies on a false premise as there are many cases of inconsistency in attitude that cannot be explained in terms of the inconsistency of the contents of these attitudes. We will present evidence, moreover, that Schroeder, along with Mark van Roojen, another critic of expressivism, have assumed that the semantic properties of sentences must mirror the semantic properties of the entities expressed by those sentences. We do not think this is a desideratum any expressivist theory–including Schroeder’s own–could or should meet. Schroeder’s objection is important for a number of reasons, but most of all because it offers an opportunity to investigate why it is reasonable for an expressivist such as Simon Blackburn or a philosopher of logic like Greg Restall, or, indeed, any theorist engaging with the attitudes to appeal to an unreduced notion of inconsistency of attitude.

In order to accommodate Jack’s teaching schedule, this week’s workshop will take place at 7:45pm (on Monday, March 25th). It will be at our usual location, the third floor seminar room of NYU’s philosophy building. We hope to see you there!

Workshop Monday, March 11th: Daniel Harris on Grice and Act-Theoretic Semantics

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 15:45:00 -0500

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 semantic explanation. According to the current orthodoxy, one of the chief benefits of a Gricean conception of the semantics/pragmatics interface is that it leaves the aims and methodology of semantics more or less intact. The job of a semantic theory, on this view, is to show how the semantic contents of sentences depend systematically on their syntactic structures, the denotations of their parts, and some modest contributions from context.

My aim is to show that this picture embodies untenable assumptions about the semantics/pragmatics interface, and that we should look to Grice’s positive views about the goals and methodology of semantics for the solution to this problem. I begin by arguing that the semantic reference/speaker reference distinction cannot survive careful attention to the meanings of context-sensitive expressions. It follows that there is no explanatory role for the notion of semantic content to play, and that the orthodox picture stands in need of significant revision. Next, I argue that we should interpret Grice as advocating a version of act-theoretic (or actic) semantics, which identifies the semantic values of expressions with types of speech acts. On Grice’s theory, for example, the semantic values of sentences are types of illocutionary acts, the semantic values of names are types of acts of referring, and the semantic values of verb phrases are types of acts of predicating. I then show how Grice’s act-theoretic semantics allows for a semantics/pragmatics interface the avoids the problems facing the orthodox picture. I close with a brief sketch of some of the other benefits of act-theoretic semantics.

The workshop will take place on Monday, March 11th at 6:30, in the third floor seminar room of NYU’s philosophy building. We hope to see you there!

Workshop Monday, March 4th: Daniel Fogal on The Non-Fundamentality of Reasons

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 10:30:00 -0500

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. I think this is a mistake. Although we can clean up and systematize our thought and talk about normative reasons, and our use of ‘reason’ more generally, I don’t think reference to normative reasons should play an ineliminable role in our epistemological and practical theorizing.

To see why, I’ll begin by investigating the relationship between the the count noun ‘reason(s)’ (in its normative sense) and the mass noun ‘reason’, and argue that we should take the mass noun to be conceptually and/or explanatorily prior to the count noun. I’ll then present new data concerning the contextual variability of reasons-talk—data which poses a serious challenge to the reasons-are-fundamental thesis, but which can be easily accounted for otherwise. I’ll conclude by considering some of the implications of the conceptual and metaphysical non-fundamentality of reasons. In particular, I’ll explain how my account undermines the otherwise promising neo-Humean theory of practical reasons offered by Schroeder (2007) and reveals what’s right as well as what’s wrong with a key issue in the debate over moral particularism—i.e. “holism about reasons”.

The workshop will take place at 6:30pm on Monday, March 4th, in NYU’s third floor seminar room. We hope to see you there!

Workshop Monday, February 25th: Philipp Koralus on Questions, Conditionals, and Cognition

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 14:29:00 -0500

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 that provides opportunities for connecting one of the most exciting branches of cognitive psychology with one of the most exciting branches of philosophy (and, indeed, linguistics). The presentation divides into two 30 minute parts. The first part will introduce the Erotetic Theory of Reasoning (developed in joint work with Salvador Mascarenhas). The presentation will be kept non-technical (for the technically minded, the underlying formal system can be found at www.koralus.net). The second part of the presentation will describe how the psychologically motivated machinery of the Erotetic Theory can be used to construct an attractive account of the linguistic meaning of the indicative conditional.

Part 1:

The capacity to reason and draw inferences is as crucial to everyday thought and talk as it is to modern science and philosophy. Some of the most interesting work in cognitive psychology in recent decades has made the case that our natural capacity for reasoning is subject to systematic fallacies in many domains, ranging from reasoning about what is and what might be the case, to reasoning about probabilities, often in ways that are strikingly predictable (inter alia, Tversky & Kahneman 1983; Johnson-Laird 2008). Equally remarkably, the reasoning capacity of our species is powerful enough to make possible science and formal logic. A satisfactory theory of our reasoning capacity must ultimately account for both the remarkable successes of this capacity and its systematic failures. I propose that with a toolbox of philosophical innovations from unlikely sources, including C.L. Hamblin and Kit Fine, a satisfactory theory of our natural reasoning capacity for the propositional case can be constructed: the Erotetic Theory of Reasoning. They key idea is that naïve reasoning proceeds by treating information we reason from as questions and maximally strong answers. If we learn to ask enough questions as we reason, the fallible mechanisms that underwrite naïve reasoning become bound by classical validity.

Part 2:

Relying on Part 1, we can construct an account on which interpreting “if … then” involves entertaining a supposition, where the machinery of supposition appealed to is independently motivated in an account of the psychology of suppositional reasoning not involving “if…then”. The resulting account may unexpectedly shed light on why we can use if-clauses to denote questions, as in, “I wonder if you will attend the talk.”

The workshop will take place on Monday, February 25th at 6:30 in the third floor meeting room at NYU’s philosophy building. We hope to see you there!

Workshop Monday, February 11th: Daniel Greco on Expressivism and First-Order Normative Theorizing

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 11:40:00 -0500

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 won’t place any significant constraints on our first-order normative theorizing; once we have the right metaethics, we can go on having the same first-order normative debates, and accepting the same first-order normative views. This thesis of the “autonomy of ethics” is particularly popular among writers in the expressivist tradition. A.J. Ayer wrote that “a strictly philosophical treatise on ethics should make no ethical pronouncements,” and contemporary expressivists have tended to agree that their metaethical views do not limit their normative ethical options.

I’ll argue, however, that this position is at best half right. While metaethical expressivists may not be forced to adopt particular first-order normative positions, they face systematic constraints concerning which first-order normative debates they can regard as substantive. I’ll show how these constraints force expressivists to take a position on the substantiveness (or lack thereof) of certain recent debates in normative ethics. Whether this commitment of expressivism is a feature or a bug, I leave to the audience to decide.

The workshop will take place at 6:30 on Monday, February 11th in the third floor seminar room of NYU’s philosophy building. We hope to see you there!

Workshop Monday, February 4th: Ulf Hlobil on the Meaning of 'Therefore'

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 10:50:23 -0500

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 inferring. Specifying the contribution that “therefore” makes to the truth conditions of utterances is not enough to understand what “therefore” means. One upshot of my discussion will be that some version of expressivism is correct.

I will proceed as follows: First, I introduce what I call the “Inferential Moorean Phenomenon.” Then I will briefly look at the disagreement between Grice and Bach regarding the meaning of words like “therefore.” Next I argue that “therefore” is polysemous. This is followed by an interlude, which raises the question whether “P; therefore Q” is truth-evaluable. After that I will present a direct argument against Bach’s view. And, finally, I shall consider two possible reactions to the considerations I am presenting.

Our meeting will take place on Monday, February 4th in the 3rd floor seminar room at NYU’s philosophy building (5 Washington Place).

Workshop Monday, Jan. 28th: Ian Olasov on Sociolinguistic Variation in Moral Speech

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 12:56:23 -0500

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 moral philosophy in the past century, philosophers have generally approached the subject through the qualitative analysis of invented examples. While appropriate for some purposes, this approach is not suitable for answering many philosophical questions about the variety of moral speech acts and the social functions of moral talk. For example, to what extent does the felicity or appropriateness of any type of moral utterance depend on an asymmetrical power relationship between speaker and audience? How, if at all, do we moralize differently with people we are intimate with and people we don’t know well? What are the differences in the ways more and less educated people moralize? How does women’s moral speech differ from men’s? These questions call for a more corpus-based approach.

The present study has three aims. The first is to explore the practical and methodological difficulties involved in compiling a balanced corpus of moral utterances – a corpus that is representative of the distribution of features of moral utterances in the fragment of English usage under consideration – from a larger corpus of spoken English. A balanced corpus embedded in a general-purpose corpus can be used both to address quantitative questions of interest to philosophers, and as a resource for the qualitative description of actual moral utterances. The second aim is to examine how prior findings about moral reasoning, attitudes, and values based on elicited utterances generalize to more naturalistic settings. The final aim is to explore questions about the social function of moral talk by looking at the statistical effects of a range of demographic and interactional variables on the frequency of a variety of types of moral utterance. For example, to the extent to which the felicity or appropriateness of moral utterance depends on the speaker having some form of power over the addressee, we would expect to find a greater frequency of moral utterance among more powerful speakers, and a greater frequency of moral utterance in interactions between power-asymmetrical individuals. To the extent to which moral institutions are male-dominated, we would expect to find a greater frequency of moral utterance among males. If a variety of moral utterance is appropriate only with an intimate (or socially distant) addressee, the frequency of that variety would be greater in conversations between more (or less) intimate participants.

As background reading, Ian suggests having a look at ‘Moral Communication in Modern Societies’ by Thomas Luckmann (download a PDF here).

The meeting will take place on Monday, January 28th in the third floor seminar room of NYU’s philosophy building (5 Washington Place). Anyone with an interest in the philosophy of language is welcome!

Announcing the NYPLW Spring 2013 Speaker Schedule

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 16:55:00 -0500

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 Fogal (NYU)

March 11th: Daniel Harris (CUNY)

March 25th: Lucy Jordan (Rutgers)

April 1st: Christoph Pfisterer (Zürich)

April 8th: Arancha San Ginés (Columbia)

April 15th: Matt Moss (Columbia)

April 22nd: Jennifer Carr (MIT)

April 29th: Jessica Keiser (Yale)

May 6th: Will Starr (Cornell)

May 13th: Katrina Przyjemski (NYU)

We look forward to seeing you at the meetings!

Workshop Friday Jan. 18 at 3:00: David Pereplyotchik on the Metaphysics of Linguistic Entities

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 19:16:00 -0500

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. Some argue that only a “cogntivist” metaphysics, according to which linguistic expressions are mental entities, can underwrite the search for linguistic universals. I show why this line of thought is incorrect. Next, I examine a nominalist view, on which linguistic expressions are token sounds, inscriptions, and the like, of which various predicates are true in virtue of their relations to one another. I argue that this proposal has trouble with the theoretical posits that linguists call empty categories. (Maybe the trouble can be fixed. I’ll ask you to help me figure out how. It would be ever so lovely.) Finally, I’ll argue that standard practice in acquisition theory requires ineliminable reference to public languages. We’ll do our best to construct a metaphysics that makes these things unmysterious. We will surely fail, but I’ll be happy if I’ve convinced you that I-languages are not the only (nor even the clearest) object of linguistic inquiry.

The workshop will take place in NYU’s third floor seminar room at 3:00 on Friday, January 18th. We hope to see you there!

Bonus Workshop this Friday (Jan. 11th): Josh Armstrong on Loose Assertions

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 23:54:40 -0500

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 ordinary assertions are often loose: they only approximate how things are in the actual world. For example, I might assert that it is 3:00 when, in actual fact, it is 3:03. The phenomenon of loose assertion raises a challenge to standard accounts of both the norm of assertion and the connection between semantics and the objects of assertion. In this talk, I develop a framework for modeling the contribution of loose assertions. I argue that the data motivates a rejection of the widespread assumption that there is a single language that the members of a conversation use for their communicative exchange. Instead, I propose that there are a range of admissible languages compatible with background linguistic conventions and the context of utterance. As a consequence, a speaker may semantically express multiple contents in asserting a single sentence. This framework captures what is communicated in cases of loose assertion, while preserving standard norms on assertion. In addition, it will be shown that such an approach straightforwardly predicts the semantic contribution of so-called slack regulators (such as ‘precisely’ and ‘approximately’) and that it is preferable to a purely pragmatic approach to the phenomenon.

This bonus workshop will take place at our usual location (the third floor seminar room of NYU’s philosophy building), but at an unusual time (3:00pm on Friday, January 11th). If you’re in New York, stop by for your philosophy of language fix.

Workshop this Tuesday (Dec. 4th): Michael Schweiger on Metaphysical Modality

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 18:40:04 -0500

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 discourse? What is its function or use in our cognitive lives? We might view the discourse as being of a kind with familiar representational varieties of discourse, and hence view the concept of metaphysical necessity as being primarily a tool for representing objective modal facts. However, if we adopt this view then we must address difficult epistemological worries concerning our alleged access to such facts. Alternatively, we might reject the view that the discourse is best thought of as representing objective modal facts, but if we take this stance then we must provide some alternative account of the function of the discourse. In this talk I suggest some reasons for going “non-factualist” about metaphysical modality and explore an alternative understanding of the function of the concept of metaphysical necessity.

This will be our last meeting of the semester. It will take place in the third floor seminar room of the NYU philosophy building on Tuesday evening at 6:30. All are welcome!