talks and lectures

by Isidora Stojanovic

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Since I joined the Jean-Nicod Institute (2004), I have given over 50 talks at various conferences and colloquia (mostly in Europe & in the U.S.A., but also in Mexico, South America, and India). Below is a selection of some recent, forthcoming, or otherwise significant talks and lectures (for a complete list, cf. curriculum vitae).

Disentangling Reference from Semantic Content

Given as a keynote talk at the Logic and Language Conference in Aberdeen (Sept 2010) as well as the 1^st of three Lectures at the University of Buenos Aires and SADAF (Aug 2010) and at the 1^st Semantic Content Workshop in Barcelona (July 2010); an ancestor version of the talk was given at the CSMN Inaugural Conference on Reference in Oslo (August 2007).

De Se Assertion, and related stuff on 'What Is Said'

I have given various versions of the talk (under various titles), at places including the following the 3^rd Paris-Oxford workshop at the IHPST in Paris (June 2008), Cognitive Perspectives on Mind and Language at UNAM in Mexico City (August 2009, with Maite Ezcurdia as commentator), the Jean-Nicod-MIT workshop on Self-Locating Belief at MIT, Boston (Sept 2009, with Jennifer Carr & Ryan Doody as my commentators), and at the SPAWN Philosophy of Language conference in Syracuse (August 2011, with Ernie Lepore as commenator). This also constituted my 2^nd Lecture at UBA and SADAF (see above).

Summary: One of Kaplan's central motivations for distinguishing a level of content (obtained by applying the sentence's 'character' to a specific context) is that it should stand for what is said. Many of Kaplan's followers have departed from him in this respect, by resisting the idea that semantic content stands for what is said, or that it is even desirable to try to pin down the notion of what is said to some single, distinguished level of content, the idea being that the intuitive notion of what is said is simply too versatile to be subject to theoretical analysis. In this lecture, I will present a wide range of cases that are problematic for Kaplan's account, but, contrary to those who hold that what is said can be pretty much anything, I will argue that the data are actually much more systematic, and that a semantically driven theory of what is said is worth pursuing. What is more, I will argue that the notion of semantic content defended in Lecture 1 can stand for what is said, provided that we think of saying not as a binary relation (between a speaker and a proposition), but rather, a three-or-more-place relation (between a speaker, a content, and the thing(s) spoken about). I will then extend this approach into a semantics for reported discourse and will apply it to the cases previously discussed, with some hints on how to generalize it to more complex cases.

Cross-contextual Assessments of Truth Value

Given as the 3^rd Lecture a the University of Buenos Aires and SADAF (Aug 2010); the lecture is a sequel to my talk "Context-Dependence vs. Assessment-Sensitivity" given at the 1^st Jean-Nicod-LOGOS workshop in Barcelona (Oct 2008, with Dan Zeman as commentator) and at one of the Philosophy of Linguistics workshops at IUC in Dubrovnik (Sept 2008).

Summary: The view defended in Lecture 1 is a form of "semantic relativism": the truth value of a given content, associated with a given utterance of a sentence, may vary as we vary the values of the parameters at which we evaluated it; what is more, it may vary not only with worlds and times, but even with individuals. In this lecture, I will relate my view to the recent debate between contextualism and relativism regarding predicates of personal taste, epistemic modals, knowledge ascriptions, etc. One possible objection to my view is that it blurs the distinction between elements that are genuinely context-dependent, such as indexical or demonstrative pronouns, and elements that are merely "assessment-sensitive", such as predicates of taste, epistemic modals or knowledge ascriptions. The goal of the lecture is to get a better grip on the distinctions that there are, which will led us to look at what happens when we assess the truth of a given utterance from a context different from the one in which the utterance is made. I will try to show that the data are very subtle, and will rely on some ideas laid down in the first two lectures to sketch the beginning of a solution to some of those problems.

Talking about Taste, and related stuff on Disagreement

I have given a series of different, though related talks on disagreement over matters of taste, the semantics of predicates of personal taste, the contextualism/relativism debate, and other phenomena that exhibit features of 'faultless disagreement'. Among these, the first one, entitled "Talking about Taste: Disagreement, Implicit Arguments and Relative Truth" was given at the workshop Relativizing Utterance Truth in Barcelona (Sept 2005), and later at the IPrA Panel on Semantic Relativism in Gottenburg (July 2007). Two later talks, entitled "Cross-contextual Disagreement", given at the CeLL Inaugural Conference at the Institute of Philosophy, London, (November 2008) and the workshop on Agreement and Disagreement at CSMN, Oslo (Sept 2009). Among related talks, "Emotional Disagreement" was given at the Logic, Language and Cognition workshop in Valparaiso (Aug 2010), "When (true) Disagreement Gives Out", at the Panel on Richard's When Truth Gives Out in Dubrovnik (Sept 2010), and "Désaccords sur les valeurs et sous-détermination sémantique", for the conferences on Values and Value Judgments in Rennes (May 2010).

Summary: In this talk, I take issue with an idea that has emerged from recent relativist proposals, and, in particular, from Lasersohn (2005), according to which the correct semantics for taste predicates must use contents that are functions of a judge parameter (in addition to a possible world parameter) rather than implicit arguments lexically associated with such predicates. I argue that the relativist account and the contextualist implicit argument-account are, from the viewpoint of semantics, not much more than notational variants of one another. In other words, given any sentence containing a taste predicate, and given any assignment of values to the relevant parameters, the two accounts predict the same truth value and are, in that sense, equivalent. I also look at possible reasons for preferring one account over the other. The phenomenon of “faultless disagreement” (cf. Kölbel (2002)) is often believed to be one such reason. I argue, against Kölbel and Lasersohn, that disagreement is never faultless: either the two parties genuinely disagree, hence if the one is right then the other is wrong, or the two parties are both right, but their apparent disagreement boils down to a misunderstanding. What is more, even if there were faultless disagreement, I argue that relativism would fail to account for it. The upshot of the talk, then, is to show that there is not much disagreement between a contextualist account that models the judge parameter as an implicit argument to the taste predicate, and a relativist account that models it as a parameter of the circumstances of evaluation. The choice between the two accounts, at least when talking about taste, is thus, to a large extent, a matter of taste.

Relative Truth, Logical Truth, and Pragmatically Warranted Truth

I have given a couple of talks on the relationship between logical truth, truth in virtue of meaning, and validity, especially in languages containing indexicals. An early one was a joint colloquium talk with Stefano Predelli, "Semantic Relativism and the Logic of Indexicals", at the University of Stockholm (Oct 2007). My further work on the topic was presented at the 3^rd workshop of Foundations of Logical Consequence in St Andrews (March 2010), then "Logical Validity vs. Pragmatically Warranted Truth" at PALMYR IX in Amsterdam (June 2010), with Lucian Zagan as commenator, and "Meaning, Context, and Logical Truth" at the Philosophy and Logic Today in Delhi (Jan 2011). My forthcoming talk at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica in Rio de Janeiro (Nov 2011) will also address some of these issues, as well as the question of whether indexicals are logical constants.

Summary for 'Meaning, Context, and Logical Truth' :I starts by discussing the philosophical motivations that had driven the development of model-theoretic semantics for natural language, at the interface of logic and philosophy of language in the early 1970’s. I further address the question of how to reconcile the context-dependence of meaning in natural language with the conception of logical truth as 'truth in virtue of meaning'. The bulk of the talk consists of a discussion of some open issues related to the notion of validity in indexical intensional logics, such as the question whether 'F iff Actually F' should qualify as a truth of logic'; I also discuss the interplay between validity and modality.

Domain-Sensitivity

Given as a keynote talk for the conference Context and Levels of Locutionary Content in Lisbon (Dec 2009), and published as a paper in Synthese. It is a significantly developed sequel to my earlier talks "False Truths" at ENFA 3 in Lisbon (June 2006) and at 5^th Congress of SLMFCE in Granada (Nov 2006), "True Premises, False Conclusion, yet Valid" at PALMYR 3 in Paris (June 2006) and "Vrai implique faux?" at SOPHA in Aix en Provence (Sept 2006).

Summary: In this talk, I argue that there are good motivations for a relativist account of the domain-sensitivity of quantifier phrases. I will frame the problem as a puzzle involving what looks like a logically valid inference, yet one whose premises are true while the conclusion is false. After discussing some existing accounts, literalist and contextualist, I will present and argue for an account that may be said to be relativist in the following sense: (i) a domain of quantification is required for determining truth value, but is idle in determining semantic content, and (ii) the same sentence, as used on one and the same occasion, may receive different truth values relative to different domains.

upcoming talks

Talking about the Future

to be given at SPR-11 in Donostia-San Sebastian (Nov 2011)

Summary: Philosophers have been long concerned with the issue of whether the notions of truth and falsity can apply to future contingents, i.e. statements expressing future events that are not yet determined yet and thus need not happen. While there are several semantic frameworks that (arguably) provide a satisfactory account of truth conditions of future tensed sentences, not much has been done when it comes to providing assertability conditions for such statements. The issue, in other words, is under which conditions one may justifiably assert that a certain event will happen, if our universe is indeterministic and its current state leaves it open whether the event at stake will indeed happen. I will try to fill in this lacuna, by proposing an amendment to two existing frameworks (Belnap's and MacFarlane's) that accounts better for the way that people talk about the future.

Perspective Adjustment in Evaluative Judgments

to be given at the 2^nd Congress in Philosophy and Linguistics in Belo Horizonte (Nov 2011)

Summary: Many recent semantic accounts hold that the truth of an evaluative claim, e.g. that a given person is smart, a given event shocking, or a given food delicious, depends on the perspective from which the person is judged to be smart, the event shocking, and the food delicious, just as the truth of a perspectival claim, e.g. that the bench is to the left of the tree, depends on the perspective from which one is observing the bench and the tree. However, while we easily assent to a person's claim that the bench is to the left of the tree, even when we don't share that person's perspective, in the case of evaluative judgments, we only do so if we already share the same perspective. Relativists have taken this apparent difference to show that, in the case of expressions such as 'to the left of', perspective affects semantic content, and even 'what is said' by a given claim, and doesn't in the case of evaluative expressions, and have thereby traced the difference down to the semantic underpinnings of the two sorts of expression. In this talk, I argue that the difference is not to be traced to semantics, and that in neither case does perspective affect semantic content. Rather, the differences stem from one's unequal capacities of adjusting one's perspective in the two types of cases. I end by discussing how this my proposal bears on the prospects of developing a semantics for evaluative expressions, and on the contextualism-relativism debate.

one-time talks

i.e. talks given on specific occasions; the first three have been subsequently published; the next two exist as paper drafts; the last one does not even exist as a draft (though it might, someday)

For Whom Is the Problem of the Essential Indexical a Problem?

given at the CONTEXT-01 conference in Dundee (July 2001); published in Akman et al. (Eds.) Modeling and Using Context, LNAI 2116: 304-315

Summary: Philosophers used to model belief as a relation between agents and propositions, which bear truth values depending on, and only on, the way the world is, until John Perry and David Lewis came up with cases of essentially indexical belief; that is, belief whose expression involves some indexical word, whose reference varies with the context. I shall argue that the problem of the essential indexical at best shows that belief should be tied somehow to what is subsequently acted upon, and must make room for other relations than those properly predicated. But it does not show that belief cannot be modeled as a binary relation between an agent and some suitable object (pace Perry), nor that this object cannot be a proposition (pace Lewis).

The Myth of the Contingent A Priori

given at the workshop on the A Priori and its Role in Philosophy in Oelde (Germany, June 2007); published in the volume with the same title, ed. by N. Kompa, Ch. Nimtz and Ch. Suhm, Mentis Verlag (2009): 69-82

Summary: Since Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity, the view that there are contingent a priori truths has been surprisingly widespread. In this paper, I argue against that view. My first point is that in general, occurrences of predicates “a priori” and “contingent” are implicitly relativized to some circumstance, involving an agent, a time, a location. My second point is that a priority entails necessity, whenever the two are relativized to the same circumstance. In other words, what is known to be the case a priori (by an agent in a circumstance) could not fail to be the case (in the same circumstance), hence is necessary.

A Different Story about Indexicals

given at the DIP Colloquium at the University of Amsterdam (UvA, February 2005); published in its long 43 page version in the ILLC Research Reports Series, PP2005-05, available here

Summary: The received view about indexicals holds that their semantic contribution of an indexical consists of that thing or individual to which the indexical refers in the context of its utterance. The aim of this paper is to put forward a different picture. I argue that direct reference and indexicality are distinct and separate phenomena, even if they often co-occur. Still, it is the speaker who directly refers to the things that she is talking about, and those things matter for the truth of her utterance. Indexicals, on the other hand, merely help the interpreter identify the speaker's intended reference. Typically, indexicals encode descriptive conditions that the context must meet to make the utterance true, conditions whose purpuse is primarily heuristic. In this paper, I develop a formal account, dubbed contextual update semantics, which builds on dynamic logics for actions. I then show how it captures the main conceptual motivations and how it handles embedded indexicals, which may seem problematic at a first glance..

'Perhaps' and 'Surely'

given at the Barcelona Reference workshop BW5 on Non-Truth-Conditional Aspects of Meaning (July 2007)

Summary: In this paper, I propose a non-truth-conditional (albeit model-theoretic) approach to the meaning of words like 'perhaps', 'surely', 'definitely', etc., and to epistemic modals more generally. That words such as 'perhaps' are truth-conditionally inert has been argued by others (e.g. Edgington (1995)), and it will not be properly our goal to argue that it is impossible to provide a truth-conditional semantics for such words. In fact, some recent truth-conditional accounts of epistemic modals, as in Egan et al. (2005), von Fintel and Gillies (2006), or MacFarlane (2006), are easily applicable to words like 'perhaps', and though those accounts might be problematic in various respects, they are certainly not hopeless. Our position is, rather, that, given the apparent difficulties that the truth-conditional approach faces, there is no compelling reason to pursue it. As Barwise and Perry pointed out with what they called the "fallacy of misplaced information" (1983), it is a mistake to think that all the information that one can correctly derive from some utterance ought to be traced to the semantic (or truth-conditional) content of the sentence uttered. Words such as 'perhaps' are, we believe, precisely such: they provide information on the speaker's epistemic evidence, and on her justification for saying what she says, without reaching into the truth conditions of the asserted content. My goal is to propose a non-truth-conditional analysis of this lexically encoded function of 'perhaps', viz. that it serves to inform the hearer that the speaker's evidence does not exclude the falsity of the claim qualified with 'perhaps'. Since the proposed analysis is nevertheless model-theoretic, it will be easy to compare it with the above mentioned truth-conditional accounts, and I will point out certain aspects in which my account appears to be superior to those.

Two Problems of Overgeneration for the Reflexive-Referential Theory

given at the conference on John Perry's philosophy in Madrid (April 2008); draft available at the Jean Nicod Archives

Summary: One of the most promising aspects of Perry (2001)'s Reflexive-Referential Theory (henceforth RRT) is its capacity to generate a variety of contents that may be associated with a single utterance, contents that may be used for various explanatory purposes. My concern in this paper is that, as it stands, RRT generates too many contents. The problem is not just that most of those contents will be explanatorily idle, but rather, that nothing in the actual RRT explains why those contents cannot play the roles that their minimally different “neighbors” can play. In Section 1, I discuss two kinds of example that motivate RRT and its multiplicity of contents; the first comes close enough to some of Perry's own examples, but the second is original, and may be therefore viewed as an application of RRT to a problem that has not been discussed by Perry himself. In Section 2, I will show how these examples give rise, in turn, to problems of overgeneration. In other words, just as RRT is able to derive contents that may be used to account for the cases that need explanation, it ought to be able to derive analogous contents that, in turn, give counterintuitive, if not outright wrong predictions. In Section 3, I will tentatively outline a line of response that Perry could take. The overall direction of the paper is thus optimistic, since the problems raised may be viewed as pointing to ways of improving RRT, rather than undermining it.

The Assessment-Sensitivity of Belief Reports

given at the Jean-Nicod-Stanford workshop Context, Communication and Meaning in Paris (April 2008)

Summary: I will discuss an old problem - that of the de re vs. de dicto readings of belief reports - in the light of a new trend - that of semantic relativism. The idea is that a sentence of the form "A believes that the F is G", as used in a given context, may be assessed as true from one context and as false from another context. A similar proposal has been advanced by Predelli (2005), which I will discuss and show not to be yet quite satisfactory. In the second part, I will discuss the status of the context of assessment parameter. Unlike MacFarlane, for whom it is a primitive parameter in the definition of truth, I will propose a construal of contexts of assessment on which they are a subspecies of contexts of utterance - namely, such in which a sentence like "That's true" or "That's the case" is being used, and will show how this conservative construal accounts for the data equally well as, if not better than, MacFarlane's more radical construal.

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