Keynote Talks

  • Amie Thomasson (Dartmouth College)
  • Anandi Hattiangadi (Stockholm University) [via webconference]
  • Benjamin Davies (University of Oxford)
  • Eleonora Orlando (Universidad de Buenos Aires)
  • Ernesto Perini (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais)
  • Marco Ruffino (Universidade Estadual de Campinas)
  • Matthew Mandelkern (New York University)
  • Otávio Bueno (University of Miami)
  • Roberta Pires de Oliveira (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina)
  • Sara L. Uckelman (Durham University)

Amie L. Thomasson (Dartmouth College)
Starting a Step Back: The Relevance of Systemic Functional Linguistics to Metaphysics

Metaphysics traditionally addresses questions such as ‘Are there properties, universals, numbers, possible worlds, fictional characters…?’ ‘(If so), what are they like? How are they related to minds, physical objects, etc.? Does ‘positing’ these things add explanatory power to our theories?’… Metaphysicians typically insist that linguistic issues are irrelevant to addressing the ‘worldly’ questions of metaphysics. In this paper, however, I aim to show the relevance of work in linguistics, especially systemic functional linguistics, to reassessing many traditional questions, criteria, and debates in metaphysics. Rather than starting straight in with ‘metaphysical’ questions, I will argue that we should begin our questioning back a step—beginning instead by asking questions about the functions and rules of use of the relevant forms of language. For taking a step back to address such linguistic questions can lead us to reassess the legitimacy and relevance of various allegedly ‘worldly’ problems of metaphysics, and enable us to redirect our work to more fruitful pursuits.

Anandi Hattiangadi (Stockholm University)
The Normativity of Meaning and Content Revisited

According to materialism, the fact that an arbitrary representation has a certain meaning or content is fully grounded in the physical facts. In Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Kripke put forward an objection to materialism about meaning and content that turned on their assumed normativity. According to the orthodox reconstruction of this argument, the key claim is that meanings and contents are constituted by rules that are robustly normative, where a rule R is robustly normative just in case it has a normative authority over an agent that is wholly independent of the agent’s own attitudes or interests, and wholly independent of the conventions prevalent in the agent’s linguistic community. It is the independence of robust normativity from any potential non-normative grounds that seems to prevent it from being fully grounded in the physical. If meanings and contents are robustly normative, then, they too resist full grounding in the physical. However, as I argued in Oughts and Thoughts, the rules that constitute meanings and contents are not robustly normative, but only weakly so. Thus, the orthodox reconstruction of Kripke’s argument against materialism fails.

In this paper, I formulate an alternative argument against materialism that turns on the assumption that meanings and contents are constituted by rules that are merely weakly normative. A rule R is weakly normative just in case it has a normative authority over an agent that is dependent on the agent’s own attitudes or interests, or on the conventions of the agent’s linguistic community. I argue that it is precisely the dependence of weak normativity on endorsements, attitudes, interests or conventions that gives rise to a problem for materialism, since it sets up a ‘circle of ground’: On the one hand, meanings and contents are ineliminable from the grounds of weak normativity; on the other hand, weak normativity is ineliminable from the grounds of meanings and contents. Since neither weak normativity nor meanings and contents can be fully grounded in the physical, materialism fails.

Benjamin Davies (University of Oxford)
Disability discrimination in emergencies: the return of Taurek

John Taurek is sometimes referred to as the only proponent of the view that, when deciding whom to rescue, the numbers don’t count: we should instead give everyone the same chance of surviving by choosing at random. Surprisingly little engagement has taken place between the detailed and rich literature on whether the numbers count in rescue cases, and the practical question of whether certain facts about patients are eligible for consideration in real-world prioritisation, e.g., in emergency triage during a pandemic. I suggest that a position close to Taurek’s maps on to real-world arguments by groups representing disabled individuals. Whereas Taurek is focused on equalising survival chances, some disability rights activists and scholars appear to argue in favour of equalising selection chances. I construct an argument in favour of this position by appealing to the idea of “opacity respect”. I then consider the implications of this approach for broader principles of affirmative action in healthcare.

Eleonora Orlando (Universidad de Buenos Aires)
Fictional names, mental files, and declarative speech acts

In this presentation I will defend the thesis that fictional names refer to individual concepts, understood as mental files. Such concepts make up the set of thoughts constitutive of what I call ‘the conceptual world of a fictional story’. In my defense of this thesis, I reinterpret the distinction between fictive, parafictive and metafictive uses of sentences containing fictional names. Fictive uses are analyzed as declarative speech acts of different types: they comprise both original uses, through which an author introduces a name during the process of creating a story, and reproductive uses, which depend on the insertion into a chain of communication that leads to that story. Parafictive uses, conceived as mixed assertive-declarative speech acts, are those in which the fictional story is reformulated through the creation of another conceptual world that constitutes an interpretive extension of the story. Finally, metafictive uses are understood as assertive uses, determinants of another extension of the story, which, unlike the previous one, provides a critical interpretation, namely, an interpretation informed by the categories of literary criticism.

Ernesto Perini-Santos (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais)
Building the common ground: a new metasemantics for demonstratives

Segundo King (2014), o valor semântico do uso de um demonstrativo d num contexto c é aquele que o falante visa e que é apreendido por uma audiência atenta, competente e razoável. Um falante terá revelando sua intenção demonstrativa com sucesso se ela puder ser apreendida por um tal ouvinte – na verdade, diz King, ele terá sucesso em revelar sua intenção mesmo se uma audiência desatenta, incompetente ou irrazoável não captar sua intenção. Esta afirmação é ela mesma surpreendente: como a intenção comunicativa de um falante terá sido revelada com sucesso (‘successfully’) se ela não foi apreendida por seu interlocutor? Se é claro que a falha na compreensão mútua pode ser de responsabilidade da audiência e se, talvez, a escolha de ‘successfully’ pode não ser a melhor, o problema se situa na ideia que o falante terá cumprido sua responsabilidade com um uso de palavras bem escolhidas e que não segue o resultado de sua enunciação numa conversa. Ora, como mostram Clark e Wilkes-Gibbs (1986), a construção do common ground e, na construção do common ground, o estabelecimento da referência, é um esforço colaborativo estabelecido no que eles dizem ser um ciclo de aceitação. Esta simples correção de curso abre a janela para um outro domínio da linguística e para o papel de commitments e entitlements na dinâmica conversacional – Clark e colaboradores, mas também Enfield (2017) são exemplos deste tipo de trabalho. Além disto, pode-se também propor uma outra entrada para a teoria da referência direta e para o papel classificatório de proposições, como sugerido no trabalho de Perry e Korta (e.g., 2011).

Marco Ruffino (Universidade Estadual de Campinas)
Austin and Kripke: Making Sense of Contingent A Priori Truths

Kripke famously claims in Naming and Necessity (1980) that there are some contingent truths that might, nevertheless, be known a priori. His claim is a consequence of some theses regarding rigidity of proper names and some features of stipulative reference-fixing. Some critics (e.g., Donnellan, Salmon and Soames) argue that there could not be knowledge properly speaking in Kripke’s alleged examples unless some sort of perceptual contact has taken place between the stipulator and the reference of proper names (which thereby destroys the credentials of his cases as genuine instances of a priori knowledge).
My aim is to sketch a way of looking at Kripke’s examples that differs from most accounts in the literature and that can survive this sort of criticism: I propose an approach based on the analysis of what must be involved in the illocutionary act behind the stipulations that generate Kripke’s cases. Using the resources of speech act theory, especially as presented in Austin (1962) and Searle and Vanderveken’s (1985), I shall investigate the special illocutionary act involved in stipulative reference-fixing. As I argued in previous work (Ruffino 2021, 2022), this approach can also fill out some gaps in Kripke’s original discussion (and that have been largely ignored in the literature on the issue).
I shall also consider a line of argument recently raised by Stalnaker (2021) that looks at Kripke’s cases from a perspective similar to the one that I suggest but comes to the opposite conclusion. As I shall argue, this line of argument does not fully appreciate the specific kind of illocutionary act involved in those cases.

Matthew Mandelkern (New York University)
Ability, Chance, and Control

What does it take for S to be able to do p? According to one analysis, it is enough that doing p is compatible with S‘s intrinsic properties and contextually salient local circumstances. According to a competitor analysis, it is rather that S would do p if she tried to. According to yet another alternative, it is that doing p is somehow under S‘s control. I argue that probability judgments about chancy ability ascriptions provide an important new source of evidence for this debate. In particular, I argue that they provide evidence against the prima facie intuitive view that ability requires control over the action in question, and evidence for the view that ability ascriptions have an essentially conditional meaning.

Otávio Bueno (University of Miami)
Referring to Nothing

It is a typical assumption of accounts of reference to require that referring terms stand for what exists: one cannot refer to what does not exist, since, in this case, there is nothing to be referred to. This is a feature shared by a variety of theories of reference, such as descriptivism and direct reference theories. This is also an assumption shared by certain metaphysical theories, such as neo-Fregeanism, via the connection they impose on truth and reference: a true statement in which a referring term is used guarantees the existence of the objects that are referred to. (In fact, this is the central form of argument for the existence of mathematical objects found in the heart of neo-Fregeanism; see Hale and Wright [2001].) Similar, albeit importantly different, considerations are also found in easy approaches to ontology (Thomasson [2015]). In this paper, I resist this assumption by arguing for the importance and the possibility of referring to the nonexistent. I do this by, first, undermining an approach in terms of free logic that rightly aims to carve out a space between descriptivism and direct reference theories (Sainsbury [2005]), since free logic is unable to deliver the technical machinery that is ultimately needed for the task. I then recommend instead, as a better resource, ontologically neutral quantifiers (Azzouni [2004] and Bueno [2005]). Finally, in contrast to Jody Azzouni’s [2010] approach, I argue that it is important to make sense of how nonexistent objects, despite their nonexistence, still have properties, so that in referring to the nonexistent one can still refer to different objects.

Roberta Pires de Oliveira (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina)
Natural languages, Logic and the Mind/Brain: some thoughts

Linguistics is an empirical science that aims to explain a complex and, at the same time, simple capacity that shows up very early in our lives, without any formal education: the ability to produce meaningful expressions (infinitely) and to understand them. Natural languages vary in many different ways. Not only in the “lexicon” – there are just a handful of “words” that are universal -, but also in the so-called functional words such as and or or – not all languages have a morpheme that corresponds to and (Matthewson & von Fintel 2008). A great number of languages do not have articles, and being faithful to the empirical data, it just does not seem right to assume that there is a covert definite article, the, doing the job. Finally, languages are not just the vehicle to convey thoughts, since they create concepts out of thin air, via recursiveness (and analogy). Several species, including us, entertain “middle level concepts”, things like trees, and people, substances and objects, but although all languages have middle level concepts, they vary in the way they cut reality into classes. Several languages do not seem to make the difference between mass and count, since they count substances directly (Yudja, Nez Perce, among others). But all languages count (Lima & Rothstein 2020). So not all alternatives are available, in particular even if a language does not have a word for and – and it seems that the default case for conjunction is not to have a word for it -, the relations of entailments are preserved. There seems to be a “Logic in Grammar” (Chierchia 2013) that explains the distribution and interpretation of linguistic expressions. This natural “logicality” is blind to the content of words: the distribution of any is explained because in upward contexts it generates a tautology, independently of the word it is related to. Logical contradictions depend on the content of the expression. Partee (1979) asks whether the study of natural languages belongs to mathematics or psychology and bends towards psychology relying on the fact that we are not logically omniscients. In this talk I argue that languages build a natural logic while they structure mental representations.

Sara L. Uckelman (Durham University)
Fiction Writing as Philosophical Methodology

Much has been made of the relationship between fiction and thought experiments, but this literature focuses predominantly on completed pieces of fiction: Fully fledged and polished published pieces.  In this talk, I focus on how the process of writing fiction, especially speculative fiction such as science fiction and fantasy, not just the outcomes of this process, can be viewed as a philosophical methodology. This will be bound up in arguing for two claims:

  • First, the process of writing short speculative fiction is essentially a process of argumentation.
  • Second, the distinctive benefit of writing fiction as opposed to writing analytic philosophy is that the starting points need not be justified.

These two claims — which may seem like they are in tension with each other — will each serve to justify two overall conclusions about the writing of fiction — the very process whereby short stories or novels are created.  The first is that this process is a legitimate philosophical methodology, sharing many relevant features with traditional analytical argument building and conceptual analysis.  The second is that it is distinctive philosophical methodology, in that it can provide us with insights that would not be gained via other means.

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