Sententialism references

I’ve been thinking a bit about sententialism, which is the view that the relata in attitude reports are people and sentences. I’ve found recent paper by John Collins and James Higginbotham that defend the view:

• Collins, John. 2003. “Expressions, Sentences, Propositions.” Erkenntnis 59 (2): 233–262.
• Higginbotham, James T. 2006. “Sententialism: the Thesis That Complement Clauses Refer to Themselves.” Philosophical Issues 16: 101–119.

I’ve also found some things to read about a related approach, sometimes called the interpreted logical form theory:

• Clapp, Lenny. 2002. “Davidson’s Program and Interpreted Logical Forms.” Linguistics and Philosophy 25 (3): 261–297.
• Dusche, M. 1995. “Interpreted Logical Forms as Objects of the Attitudes.” Journal of Logic, Language and Information 4 (4): 301–315.
• Edwards, Jim. 1999. “Interpreted Logical Forms and Knowing Your Own Mind.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 99: 169–190.
• Fiengo, Robert, and Robert May. 1996. “Interpreted Logical Forms: a Critique.” Rivista Di Linguistica 8 (2): 349–373.
• Harman, Gilbert H. 1972. “Logical Form.” Foundations of Language 9 (1): 38–65.
• Higginbotham, James T. 1991. “Belief and Logical Form.” Mind & Language 6 (4): 344–369.
• Larson, Richard K, and Peter Ludlow. 1993. “Interpreted Logical Forms.” Synthese 95 (3): 305–355.
• Ludlow, Peter. 2000. “Interpreted Logical Forms, Belief Attribution, and the Dynamic Lexicon.” In The Pragmatics of Propositional Attitude Reports, K. M. Jaszczolt ed. Oxford: Elsevier Science.

What am I missing?

EDIT: As Daniel Harris pointed out in his comment below, I should have Church’s criticism of  Carnap’s early sententialism:

• Church, Alonzo. 1950. “On Carnap’s Analysis of Statements of Assertion and Belief.” Analysis 10 (5): 97–99.

Contextualism & Relativism in St Andrews

The next C&R workshop will be in St Andrews on the 24th & 25th of November. Speakers:

• Eric Swanson (Michigan)
• Thomas Hodgson (Arché)
• John Hawthorne (Oxford)
• Herman Cappelen (Arché)
• Sarah Moss (Michigan)

I’m going to talk about propositions and unarticulated constituents.

Women working on propositions

I’m helping to organise a workshop on propositions at CSMN. With the very worthwhile gendered conference campaign and the recent BPA/SWIPUK report at the back of my mind I started to wonder if any female philosophers were working on propositions. I couldn’t think of any. I scanned a few bibliographies and didn’t discover any.  Am I just failing to recall some important people, or are there really only male philosophers interested in these issues?

EDIT: I remembered somebody after I posted: Friederike Moltmann.

Minimalism, contextualism, and underdeterminacy

I’ve been thinking a little bit recently about the familiar debate between minimalists and contextualists over the semantics/pragmatics distinction. In particular I’ve been thinking about the thesis that is sometimes called underdeterminacy (U). Robyn Carston defends the following in her book Thoughts and Utterances:

(U) Linguistic meaning underdetermines what is said.

For Carston linguistic meaning is the thing assigned to an expression relative to a context as its semantic value. What is said is the proposition that competent speakers take to be expressed by an utterance. Carston is a contextualist, and she is defending contextualist theses in her book. But is (U) a distinctly contextualist claim?

(U) is not a distinctly contextualist claim. Semantic minimalists are also committed to (U). This is sometimes obscured by the different way in which e.g. Emma Borg or Herman Cappelen & Ernie Lepore use terms like ‘linguistic meaning’ and ‘what is said’. But if we translate their terms into Carston’s then the views defended in both Minimal Semantics and Insensitive Semantics are committed to the claim that the content hearers take to be communicated by an utterance is not exhausted by the thing assigned as its semantic value. It’s also not clear that the minimalist has to have a very different view about the sorts of things are going on between the assignment of semantic value and the content expressed than the contextualist does.

Maybe that was obvious to anybody who was paying attention. In any case I think it shows that there is something universal about underdeterminacy that in practice most views are trying to deal with. (I don’t say all views because it looks like the indexicalist position defended by Jason Stanley and others is somewhat different.)

BPPA conference 2011

I’ll be at the British Postgraduate Philosophy Association’s annual conference this weekend at the University of Reading. I’ll be giving a paper on the consequences of semantic underdeterminacy for the semantics of attitude-verbs. I also have a few things to say about the consequences of underdeterminacy for semantics more generally.

Visiting CSMN

Next academic year I will be visiting CSMN under the Norwegian Research Council’s Yggdrasil scheme. I will take part in events organised by their linguistic agency project and, hopefully, finish up my thesis.

2011 Joint Session

I just heard that my paper has been accepted for the postgraduate session at the 2011 Joint Session of the Mind Association and the Aristotelian Society.

I will be talking about structured propositions, sentence structure, and their relationship.

Cerisy Context Conference

In the first week of June various centres in Europe are organising an event in Cerisy, Normandy. The website is here. I’ll be attending and giving a paper in one of the young researchers’ sessions. I’ll be talking about the consequences of semantic underdeterminacy for traditional (neo-Gricean) accounts of meaning.

I suspect that I’ll recognise a lot of people there from LOGOS/Jean-Nicod/CSMN and elsewhere. If you’re going let me know.

PhiLang2011

My abstract has been accepted for PhiLang2011 at the University of Łódź in Poland. It seems to be a big (in the sense of there being a lot of speakers) event. There isn’t a schedule online yet, but there is a list of keynote speakers:

• Aleksy Awdiejew (Jagiellonian University, Cracow)
• Katarzyna Jaszczolt (University of Cambridge)
• Ruth Kempson  (King’s College London)
• Alex Miller (University of Birmingham)
• Stefano Predelli (University of Nottingham)

One of the themes is the ontological status of linguistic entities. I’m going to give a paper critically discussing attempts to derive the structure of structured propositions from the syntactic structure of the sentences that express them à la Jeffrey King.

Workshop/mini-course on Propositions and the Aim of Semantics

On 16th–20th of May Arché and CSMN will be holding a mini-course/workshop on Propositions and the Aim of Semantics. The event will be held at the Ardtornish Estate, near Mull. The speakers will be:

• Derek Ball (Arché)
• Cian Dorr (Oxford)
• Andy Egan (Rutgers/Arché)
• Thomas Hodgson (Arché)
• Jeffrey C. King (Rutgers)
• Kirk Ludwig (Indiana)
• Matthew McGrath (Missouri)
• Mark Schroeder (USC)
• Scott Soames (USC)