Conference

Two interesting conferences in the works:

Workshop: “Epistemology, Context, Formalism”

Focusing on a very interesting and underdeveloped area of research, with an incredible keynote lineup (as seen on Certain Doubts):

• Context and Epistemology. In the last decades epistemology has seen a major “linguistic turn”, through the increased reliance, in contemporary debates, on syntactic, semantic and pragmatic “evidence” about ordinary (uses of) linguistic constructions in terms of “know”, most notably as a result of the flourishing discussions over the epistemological relevance of various notions of context (of inquiry, of attribution, of assessment, etc.).
• Epistemology and Logic. In addition to its “linguistic turn” epistemology has also seen a “logical turn”, through the recently revived and rising conviction that discussions in mainstream epistemology may benefit from formal epistemology (epistemic logic, formal learning theory, belief revision, and so on) which, however, has had close to nothing to say about context (modulo a few exceptions).
• Logic and Context. While well-known approaches to context can be found in natural language semantics and pragmatics, the only logics of context properly speaking are to be found in theoretical computer science where, however, the main logical treatments of context owe nothing or so to philosophy (again, modulo a few exceptions).

CFP: “New Directions in the Theory of Presupposition”

As seen on Kai von Fintel’s blog, the description provides an excellent summary and list of references in the current areas of research:

The last ten years has seen a wealth of new developments on the topic of presupposition and, in particular, the projection problem for presupposition. While there had been considerable interest in the seventies in developing entirely pragmatic accounts of presupposition triggering and projection (Wilson, 1974, Stalnaker 1977, Grice, 1981), these accounts had generally not been sufficiently developed to match the dynamic accounts developed in the eighties in predictive power. Recent work, such as that of Schlenker (2006, 2008), however, has shown that broadly pragmatic accounts can also have considerable predictive power. In addition, trivalent approaches based on such techniques as supervaluations and the Strong Kleene connectives, which were dismissed by many long ago, have recently attracted new interest (Beaver and Krahmer, 2001, George, 2008, Fox, 2008) and have been shown capable of handling many empirical issues in presupposition projection. Thus there is no longer a clear consensus on how we should explain presupposition projection. In addition, experimental work has raised interesting questions about what the basic facts of presupposition projection are and suggests that real empirical work is needed to determine some of the subtleties (Chemla 2007). There has also been renewed interest in the triggering problem (Simons, 2001, Abusch, 2002) which naturally links up to the projection problem, as well as recent theoretical work on foundational issues such as the notion of common ground and accommodation (Beaver and Zeevat, 2004, von Fintel, 2001, 2006, Stalnaker, 2002). The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers on presupposition to discuss these new developments and connect some of the different theoretical and empirical questions, which are too often considered in isolation.

We invite submission of abstracts from linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists, addressing formal or foundational issues about theories of presupposition, or offering new empirical perspectives that bear on them. We especially encourage papers that address questions about the explanatory depth of different theories or the triggering problem, or introduce new forms of experimental or empirical evidence relevant to adjudicating between theories of presupposition.