Philosophy Seminar Series: 20 July 2010, 2-4pm, Philosophy Resource Room; Speaker: Patrick Greenough (Senior Lecturer, Philosophy, University of St Andrews); Moderator: Dr. Loy Hui Chieh

Abstract: Can there be pragmatic effects in thought? More particularly, can thoughts, specifically judgments, generate implicatures which are analogous to Gricean implicatures in speech? My goals in this talk are two-fold: (1) To argue that Moore’s paradox can be explained by recognising a kind of implicature akin to, but distinct from, Grice’s notion of conventional implicature (and entirely different from conversational implicature). And (2) to argue that Moore’s paradox, as it arises in thought, can receive an analogous treatment since thought, specifically judgment, also generates the relevant kind of implicatures. Hence a uniform solution of the puzzle is in prospect.

About the Speaker: Patrick is a senior lecturer in the dept of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews and a visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney. He is also the UConn Distinguished Visiting Professor for 2010. Patrick works in the fields of the philosophy of language, logic, and in epistemology. He is particularly interested in vagueness, indeterminacy, relativism, scepticism, self-knowledge, discrimination, truthmaking, the open future, and assertion.

More information on the Philosophy Seminar Series can be found here. A list of past talks in the series can be found here.