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Arché Methodology Conference 23 October, 2008 in Announcements | No comments As has already been announced by Jonathan (one of the organisers) truth about enzyte there is a great looking conference on methodology coming up in April. Details are here. The line-up of keynotes looks really interesting and I’m sure there will be a flood of great submissions. 21 October, 2008 in Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, What I'm saying, Where I've been | No comments I spent the weekend in Carbost on Skye for the St Andrews postgraduate reading party. I gave a paper: ‘Thoughts, Utterances, and Underdeterminacy’. There were some good comments that I need to think about, but the draft that I gave on Friday can be found here. Other than that I had a great time climbing a Munro, drinking Talisker whisky, and last but not least hearing papers from: 20 October, 2008 in Philosophers' carnival | No comments is here. (This means that I haven’t written anything here in a fortnight. I do have some things to say, after having given a paper at the St Andrews Graduate reading party this weekend. Watch this space.) 6 October, 2008 in Philosophers' carnival | No comments is here. 4 October, 2008 in Where I'm going | 1 comment At the end October I’ll be going back to Oslo to attend a course on Relevance theory put on by CSMN and taught by Herman Cappelen and Deirdre Wilson. I’m especially keen to get clearer on the details of the view from one of its originators. I’m also looking forward to spending a little more time in Oslo, my last visit was brief to say the least. 28 September, 2008 in Where I've been | No comments I spent the weekend here in St Andrews at the third Basic Knowledge workshop. It’s not immediately within my area of expertise, but it was still pretty interesting. The theme was ‘Warrent and Closure’. Speakers: 24 September, 2008 in Where I've been | No comments I’m flying back to Scotland tomorrow, and I’ll be in St Andrews on Friday. Unfortunately that means I’ll miss the last day of EALing courses, but there was no way round that. I’m going to miss my commute on the Metro a little. This week I’ve been attending: The latter especially has been fascinating, if very challenging. I need to start reading some philosophy now. The Arché Basic Knowledge Workshop this weekend should get me back into the mood. 22 September, 2008 in Philosophers' carnival | No comments is here. 20 September, 2008 in Philosophy of Language, Semantics | 2 comments During Nicholas LaCasse’s talk today he outlined a theory that predicts the existence of certain possible sentence connectives. His theory predicts eight. Five of them are actually present in English as ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘not’, ‘if … then …’, and ‘neither … nor …’. They look pretty familiar to anybody who knows some logic. One slightly strange feature is that he predicts that there is no ‘If-and-only-if’. This is the logical ‘⇔’ or ‘iff’. We had an interesting chat afterwards about what exactly he was predicting, and what its consequences would be. I’ll jot down a few points that came up. Clearly people do say and write ‘iff’ when they’re using English, and they also say ‘… just in case …’. What does it then mean to deny that it’s a natural language connective? The answer is one of two things. (i) deny that it does ever occur, or at least that occurrences of such forms of words have anything like the truth-functional meaning one would expect ({<T,T,T,>,<T,F,F>,<F,T,F>,<F,F,T>}, I suppose). But if that rests on intuitions of normal speakers it looks weak: They don’t have intuitions about ‘if … then …’ that match the material conditional ({<T,T,T>,<T,F,F>,<F,T,T>,<F,F,T>}) but the conditional is treated as material in the theory being defended. (ii) deny that it’s a connective at all. This is Nick’s favoured line. His solution is that these forms of words are to be treated as a normal conditional plus something additional at the semantic level. This all got we wondering about the grounds on which a theoretical entity such as ‘iff’ is to be identified with a bit of natural language. Which is, of course, a classic Gricean issue. I’m not sure what to say about it. 20 September, 2008 in Where I've been | No comments There were two separate events today at EALing. First was the UCL-ENS-UPMC Workshop (although it consisted solely of people from UCL): Both of these focused quite heavily on experimental data which was both interesting and frustrating for someone like me who is wedded to his armchair. There was a second ‘Workshop’ in the afternoon, mostly of the computational side of presuppositions. This was refreshingly non-empirical but also largely over my head. After all this there was a ‘poster session’, which was an entirely new concept for me. In effect it was a series of prettily laid out abstracts for people’s research. Some of them were quite interesting. There was an argument against Borg style minimalism on one and an argument for a Relevance-theory based account of polysemy on another. I would say that it’s not the best way to present more philosophically inclined work, simply because of the space constraints involved. But on the other hand there were lots of new ideas available to be taken in within a short space of time, so it was certainly efficient. |