SEMINAR ON PERSPECTIVAL PLURALITY
Mondays, 15.00-16.30 (CET)
Online
This is a biweekly seminar pertaining to my project Semantic Relativism about Perspectival Expressions: A Reassessment and Defense
(OPUS 17 project no. 2019/33/B/HS1/01269) that focuses on the phenomenon of perspectival plurality (i.e., readings of sentences with two or more perspectival expressions that appeal to two or more perspectives, such as "At Halloween, Johnny played some silly pranks and got a lot of licorice."). This phenomenon, brought to the fore recently, has been used as an argument on both sides of the debate between contextualism and relativism about perspectival expressions (predicates of taste, aesthetic adjectives, moral terms, epistemic modals etc.).
The meetings are dedicated to reading and discussing papers on various instantiations of perspectival plurality: sentences like the one above, but also attitude/speech reports, quantified sentences etc. During the seminar, we will delve into the semantics of attitudes ascriptions and shifting behavior. We will deal with both purely theoretical and experimental approaches. In addition, authors of new papers/work-in-progress will discuss their material with us (subject to availability).
Schedule and readings
NOVEMBER 3
Markus Kneer, "Multiperspectival Claims: Empirical Data" (chapter 5 of Perspective in Language, PhD thesis, EHESS 2015).
MARCH 21
Peter Lasersohn, "Quantification and Perspective in Relativist Semantics", Philosophical Perspectives, 22, 305-337, 2008.
MARCH 28
Markus Kneer, Agustin Vicente & Dan Zeman, "Relativism about Predicates of Personal Taste and Perspectival Plurality", Linguistics and Philosophy, 40, 37-60, 2017.
APRIL 11
Kjell Johan Saebø, "Judgment Ascriptions", Linguistics and Philosophy, 34, 327-352, 2009.
APRIL 25
Hazel Pearson, "A Judge-Free Semantics for Predicates of Personal Taste", Journal of Semantics, 30, 103-154, 2013.
MAY 9
Elsi Kaiser, "Shifty behavior: Investigating predicates of personal taste and perspectival anaphors", Proceedings of SALT, 30, 821-842, 2020
MAY 16
Julia Zakkou, "Embedded Taste Predicates", Inquiry, 62, 718-739, 2019.
MAY 23
Dilip Ninan, "Taste predicates and the acquaintance inference", Proceedings of SALT, 24, 290–309, 2014.