“Assertion and Its Many Norms” by John Williams (Apr 2)

Timothy Williamson offers the ordinary practice, the lottery and the Moorean argument for the ‘knowledge account’ that assertion is the only speech-act that is governed by the single rule that one must know its content. I show that these fail to support it and that the emptiness of the knowledge account renders mysterious why breaking the knowledge rule should be a source of criticism. I argue that focusing exclusively on the sincerity of the speech-act of letting one know engenders a category mistake about the nature of constraints on assertion. After giving an analysis of assertion I propose that the norm of a type of assertion is the epistemic state one needs for one’s speech-act to succeed in being an assertion of that type and that the epistemic state in question is determined by the point of the type of assertion. One is practically irrational in violating the norm.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 2 Apr 2015
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: John Williams, Singapore Management University
Moderator: Dr. Qu Hsueh Ming

About the Speaker:

John WilliamsJohn N. Williams (PhD Hull) works primarily in epistemology and paradoxes, especially epistemic paradoxes. He also works in philosophy of language and applied ethics. He has published in Acta Analytica, American Philosophical Quarterly, Analysis, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Journal of Philosophical Research, Philosophy Compass, Philosophy East and West, Mind, Philosophia, Philosophical Studies, Religious Studies, Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, Synthese and Theoria. He is co-editor of Moore’s Paradox: New Essays on Belief, Rationality and the First Person, Oxford University Press together with Mitchell Green. He researches and teaches in the School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University.

“An Austrian Economic model of Wittgenstein’s Philosophies of Language and Mind” by Richard McDonough (Feb 5)

Most scholars understand para. 608 of Wittgenstein’s Zettel (Z608) to propose that language might emerge out of chaos at the neural centre.  These scholars see in Z608 one or another neural theory, causal indeterminism, or connectionist processes, or even the possibility of a pile of sawdust at the neural centre. But these contradict Wittgenstein’s basic views that the philosopher must not advance theories and that the relevant phenomena are “always before one’s eyes” (Philosophical Investigations, pgh. 129; Culture and Value, p. 63). The paper proposes an Austrian economic model of Z608 that better coheres with Wittgenstein’s fundamental views. For example, the Austrian philosopher-economist, Hayek argues that the price of a commodity emerges out of the chaos of activities at the centre of gravity a free market. He proposes no theories about hidden mechanisms but only a description of the economic activities right “before one’s eyes.” Whereas Wittgenstein claims language arises, not out of physical chaos in the brain, but out of the chaotic behaviour in human forms of life, Austrian economists hold that the natural price arises out of the chaotic behaviour in human forms of economic life. Finally, the paper shows how this Austrian economic model of Z608 clarifies Kripke’s suggestion that the Austrian economic calculation argument against socialism parallels Wittgenstein’s “private language argument”.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 5 Feb 2015
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Richard McDonough, James Cook University, Singapore
Moderator: Dr. Qu Hsueh Ming

About the Speaker:

RichRichard McDonough received his BA in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh in 1971, his MA in philosophy from Cornell in 1974, and his Ph.d. from Cornell in 1975.  He is the author of two books, about 50 articles in internationally referred journals, several encyclopedia and dictionary entries, 11 book reviews and has acted as a guest editor of Idealistic Studies.  He has taught previously at Bates College, National University of Singpaore, University of Tulsa, University Putra Malaysia, Overseas Family College, PSB Academy, University of Maryland, Arium Academy, and James Cook University.   In addition to philosophy, he has taught psychology, physics, general humanities and writing courses.

“Abstraction and Referential Indeterminacy” by Matthias Schirn (Nov 13)

In this talk, I shall critically discuss some issues related to Frege’s notion of logical object and his paradigms of second-order abstraction principles: Hume’s Principle and especially Axiom V. The focus is on the referential indeterminacy of value-range terms, Frege’s attempt to remove it as well as on his subsequent proof of referentiality for his formal language. Special attention will be paid to the assumptions that underly his overall strategy.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 13 Nov 2014
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Matthias Schirn, University of Munich
Moderator: Dr. Tang Weng Hong

About the Speaker:

SchirnCROPMatthias Schirn  is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Munich. His research interests are in the philosophy of logic and mathematics, proof theory, the philosophy of language, intensional semantics, epistemology and the philosophies of Kant, Frege, Hilbert, Russell and Wittgenstein. He also taught at the universities of Oxford (1976, 2014), Michigan State (1976-77), Cambridge (1977-78), Minnesota (1989), the State University of Campinas (1991), the National University of Buenos Aires (1992), the National Autonomous University of Mexico (1993, 1994, 1997), the Federal University of Ceará in Fortaleza (2003), the National University San Marcos in Lima (2009) and numerous other universities in Europe and Latin America. He gave invited talks at many of the most prestigious universities in Europe, the United States of America, Latin America, Asia and Australia. Since 2012 he is a member of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. He has published in Mind, Synthese, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Erkenntnis, Dialectica, The Journal of Symbolic Logic, Reports on Mathematical Logic, History and Philosophy of Logic, Logique et Analyse, Axiomathes, Theoria, Kantstudien, and other international journals. He is currently preparing two books on Frege’s philosophy and his logic.

The Daoist Yin-Yang Cosmology and Deleuze’s Ecological Ethics (3 Apr)

This lecture proposes to delve into the Daoist yin-yang cosmology by referring to the etymological make-up of a number of compound-nouns, i.e. 经验 (experience), 关系 (relation) and 体会 (bodily-recognition), etc. in the Chinese language. Through an analysis of these pairings which emulate certain foldings or overlapping of 虚 (empty) / 实 (solid), and finally summated into the Deleuzian transcendent/ empiricism, this lecture aims at a bringing together the concept of yin-yang and Deleuze’s philosophy of becomings within the context of human/ nature relation. Meanwhile, the lecture will follow Deleuze’s dic-tum to “connect, conjugate and differentiate” in detailing how a new materialism under the banner of posthumanism can be used to orchestrate a harmonic duet with Daoism, particularly in terms of how eco-logical aesthetics moves into ecoethics.

Chair : A/P Yung Sai-Shing (Department of Chinese Studies)
Date : Thursday, 3 April, 2014
Time : 11:00 am – 12:30 pm
Venue : AS7/03-30 (Chinese Studies Meeting Room)

About the Speaker:

Prof. Wong Kin Yuen is the Head and Professor of English Department at Hong Kong Shue Yan Universi-ty. He is also the Director of the Technoscience Culture Research and Development Centre at SYU. Be-fore coming back to Hong Kong, Prof. Wong taught in Comparative Literature Department at University of California, San Diego and Foreign Language and Literature Department at National University of Taiwan. Prof. Wong taught in the English Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong for 20 years and later founded the Modern Languages and Cultural Studies Department. He has also taught literature, East-West comparative poetics, cultural studies, science fiction, ecological ethics, technoscience culture, film studies and visual arts at various Hong Kong universities. Topics of his published works include Posthu-man culture, cyberculture, aesthetics, hermenuetics, film theory as well as Deleuze studies.

“Conversational Implicature, Communicative Intentions, and Content” by Ray Buchanan (12 Dec)

At the core of the Gricean account of conversational implicature is a certain assumption concerning the phenomenon that its proponents hope to explain, and predict; namely, that conversational implicatures are, essentially, cases of speaker meaning. Heck (2006), however, has argued that once we appreciate a distinctive kind of indeterminacy characteristic of many cases of particularized implicatures, we must reject this assumption. Heck’s observation is that there are cases where it is clear a speaker has conversationally implicated something by her utterance, but there is no particular proposition – other than what the speaker said – such that we can plausibly take the speaker to have meant, or intended to communicate, it. I argue that while Heck’s observation does call into question a standard assumption about the objects of our communicative intentions, it is ultimately not in conflict with the core Gricean idea. What is needed, I argue, is to give up the assumption, which has seemed to go hand-in hand with that idea: that propositions are both the things we mean as well as the objects of our cognitive attitudes. I sketch an alternative account of the things we mean – one that that allows for the fact that in many cases of successful communicative exchanges, speakers do not intend to communicate any particular proposition.

Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Thursday, 12 Dec 2013
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Ray Buchanan, University of Texas, Austin
Moderator: Dr. Ben Blumson

About the Speaker:

Since receiving his PhD from New York University in 2008, Ray Buchanan has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin. His work primarily focuses on the questions of how, and to what extent, we can express our thoughts by our actions – linguistic, or otherwise. Ray has published papers on these issues in Mind, Nous, Philosopher’s Imprint, The Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Studies, Thought, The Canadian Journal of Philosophy, and elsewhere. His more recent work focuses on the nature of linguistic agency and foundational issues in pragmatics.

“The True and what might be the truth about ‘is true’: A critical examination of Frege’s views” by Matthias Schirn (24 Jan)

What Frege has bequeathed to us regarding the concept of truth is not a homogeneous, coherent and systematically worked out conception. It is rather an agglomeration of remarks, scattered throughout several of his writings, on the nature of judgement and assertion, the conception of the two truth-values the True and the False as the references of assertoric sentences (as objects), the relation of a (true) thought to the True, the role and the purportedly unique sense of the word “true” and its alleged redundancy on the level of both sense and assertion, the characterization of logic as the science of the most general laws of truth, the “truth-conditional“ approach concerning the semantics of his formal language — to mention some issues, but not all.

The core of my talk will be a critical examination of what Frege says in some key passages about truth, the True and “is true”. I shall only touch upon his treatment of the True in Grundgesetze since a proper analysis of it would require a separate talk. Where it seems useful and enlightening, aspects of the current discussion of the concept of truth (for example, the role of this concept in minimalism about truth) will be taken into account. I shall argue among other things (a) that Frege’s reflections on the relation of a (true) thought to the True are incoherent; (b) that he fails to offer a convincing argument for rejecting the view according to which a sentence of the form “The thought that p is true” expresses the subsumtion of a thought (qua object) under the concept is true; (c) that Frege seems to overlook the fact that in such a sentence, even if it is interpreted as expressing a subsumtion of this kind, we still have the relation of sense to reference, of a thought to a truth-value; (d) that he falls short of providing a cogent argument for the purported synonymy of “p” and “The thought that p is true” and thus for the alleged redundancy of “is true” on the semantic level; (e) that, contrary to what he says, he has to concede that the word “true” makes an essential contribution to the thought expressed by “The thought that p is true”; (f) that there are indispensable uses of the truth-predicate anyway, not only in sentences such as “Everything Peter says is true” but also, for example, in informal “metalogical” discourse (g) that, contrary to what Frege appears to claim, he is committed to acknowledging that true is a property (of true thoughts); (h) that it remains unclear what truth qua that which is acknowledged (not predicated) in a judgement is supposed to be if it is possibly neither the True nor the concept is true.

Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Thursday, 24 Jan 2013
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Matthias Schirn, Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Munich
Moderator: Dr. Ben Blumson

About the Speaker: 

Mathias Schirn is a professor of analytical philosophy at the University of Munich. His research interests are in the philosophy of logic and mathematics, the philosophy of language, epistemology and the more recent history of philosophy and logic with particular emphasis on the work of Gottlob Frege.

He held visiting positions at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Berkeley, Minnesota (Twin Cities), Mexico City (UNAM), Buenos Aires, São Paulo and several other universities in Europe, the United States and Latin America.

He published in The Journal of Symbolic Logic, Mind, The Philosophical Review, Synthese, Erkenntnis, History and Philosophy of Logic, Logique et Analyse, The Bristish Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Metascience, Dialectica, Axiomathes, Kantstudien, Theoria, Crítica, Manuscrito and other international journals.

He published two books on the philosophy of language (one in German and one in Portuguese with Guido Imaguire), edited several books including Frege, Importance and Legacy, de Gruyter, Berlin New York, and The Philosophy of Mathematics Today, Oxford University Press, Oxford and he is now preparing a book with the title Foundations of Logic and Mathematics. Essays on Frege and another with the title Zahl und Begriff, Untersuchungen zu Freges Philosophie der Mathematik.

Among his hobbies are chamber music (especially string quartets), jazz, Roman languages, visits to Latin America and sports (especially bike racing competitions).

“Metasemantic of Complex Expressions” by Michael Johnson (8 Oct)

I argue that the most natural reading of the claim that the language of thought is compositional is a metasemantic reading: complex expressions mean what they do in virtue of their syntax and the meanings of their parts.

I then argue that there is a better metasemantic theory for complex expressions, one I call the Direct Theory. According to the Direct Theory, both simple and complex expressions get their meanings in the same way, via the causal or informational connections they have with objects, properties, and relations in the world.

Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Monday, 8 Oct 2012
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Michael Johnson, Visiting Assistant Professor, University of Hong Kong
Moderator: Dr. Neil Sinhababu

About the Speaker: Michael Johnson is Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD. from Rutgers University in 2011. He considers himself a cognitive scientist whose work centers around issues in the epistemology and metaphysics of mental and linguistic content, and he approaches those issues with an empirically oriented attitude.

“Say It But Don’t Mean It” by Daniel Nolan (7 Jun)

Call “fictional assertions” sentences that look or sound like assertions, but which are produced as parts of fictions or in talk engaged with fictions.  Two popular views about fictional assertions are either that they are genuinely assertions, but differ in content from the content they would have had if asserted literally;  or that they are not assertions at all, but perhaps have some other force.  In this paper, I will defend a view, similar to one suggested by Max Köbel, that fictional assertions have the same content as their literal counterparts and are genuinely asserted.

Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Thursday, 7 June 2012
Time: 2-4pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 Level 5)
Speaker: Daniel Nolan, Professor of Philosophy,  Australian National University
Moderator: Dr. Tang Weng Hong

About the Speaker: Daniel Nolan is professor of philosophy at the Australian National University.  He is the author of two books, Topics in the Philosophy of Possible Worlds and David Lewis, and a number of articles.  He works in a number of areas of philosophy, including philosophy of science, philosophy of language, meta-ethics and philosophical logic, though he works more in metaphysics than anything else.

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

Two Problems for Pragmatic-Descriptive Accounts of Empty Names, by Fred Kroon (6 October 2011)

Philosophy Seminar Series: 6 Oct 2011, 2-4pm, Philosophy Resource Room; Speaker: Fred Kroon, Associate Professor, University of Auckland; Moderator: Dr. Ben Blumson

Abstract:
In this paper I consider two problems for the idea (favoured by many Millians) that descriptions play a pivotal non-semantic role in what is asserted with sentences containing empty names: the specification problem, which holds that candidate descriptions often fail to have the kind of content that would allow them to fulfil this role, and the variation problem, which holds that candidate descriptions often show considerable variation even in ordinary conversational exchanges.  I suggest that a theory like causal descriptivism can be used to solve the specification problem.  The nature of the descriptions appealed to in such a theory, however, makes the variation problem look even more recalcitrant.  For much of the rest of the paper I consider a new way of solving the variation problem, one which combines the appeal to causal descriptivism with an appeal to Pluralistic Content Relativism (PCR) — the doctrine, defended in particular by Cappellen and Lepore and Soames, that what is said or asserted by an utterance at a context of utterance depends crucially on the context of interpretation from which the utterance is interpreted.

Fred KroonAbout the speaker: Fred Kroon teaches philosophy at the University of Auckland, mainly in the areas of formal and philosophical logic, and the theory of computability.  His research areas include metaphysics, the philosophy of language (especially the theory of reference), and the philosophy of fiction.  His papers in these areas have appeared in a wide range of journals, including the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Mind, Noûs, the Philosophical Review and the Journal of Philosophy.  He is an associate editor of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, and an editor for 20th century Philosophy for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
More information on the Philosophy Seminar Series can be found here. A list of past talks in the series can be found here.

Talk: Liar Paradox II: Revenge of the Liar Paradox, by Ben Burgis (26 April 2011)

Philosophy Seminar Series: 26 April 2011, 2-4pm, Philosophy Resource Room; Speaker: Ben Burgis; Visiting Professor, University of Ulsan in South Korea; Moderator: Dr. Tang Weng Hong

Abstract: Dialetheists like Graham Priest and JC Beall conclude from the Liar Paradox that sentences like “This sentence is not true” are fact both true and untrue, and that we must therefore revise our logic to accommodate the existence of true contradictions. Similarly, “paracomplete” theorists like Hartry Field avoid the contradiction posed by the Liar Paradox by rejecting one of the central elements of classical logic, the Law of the Excluded Middle. A more conservative solution starts from the claim that sentences that attempt to attribute truth or untruth to themselves are meaningless, and therefore simply not the kinds of things we can logically symbolize or apply truth talk to without committing a nonsensical category mistake. The most common objections to this move are (1) that the “meaninglessness solution” is refuted by the existence of “revenge paradoxes” like the one revolving around the sentence “This sentence is either false or meaningless”, and that (2) the sentences involved are so obviously meaningful that it’s just not possible to take seriously the claim that they’re literally meaningless in any ordinary sense, like “Blorks geblork” or “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” whereas the dialetheist and paracomplete approaches have the advantages that they (1*) make room for the perfectly obvious fact that, in any language with normal expressive resources, we can construct perfectly meaningful sentences that attribute untruth to themselves, and (2*) are immune to refutation by means of “revenge paradoxes.” I will argue that (1), (2), (1*) and (2*) are all completely wrong.

About the speaker: Ben Burgis is a Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ulsan in South Korea. He has an MA from Western Michigan University, where he worked on problems related to the metaphysics of time, and a PhD from the University of Miami, where his dissertation was about the dialetheism and the Liar Paradox. His other research interests involve quantum logic, the philosophy of mathematics, and the problem of how to reconcile his atheism with the existence of good whiskey.
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More information on the Philosophy Seminar Series can be found here. A list of past talks in the series can be found here.