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SYNTACTIC ARGUMENTS IN THE CONTEXTUALISM/RELATIVISM DEBATE

Thursdays, 15:00-16:30 (CET)
Online

NEXT MEETING:
TBA (January)
Reading: John Collins, "The Syntax of Personal Taste", Philosophical Perspectives, 27, 55-103, 2013.

Please write to d.zeman@uw.edu.pl if you want to participate!


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 various arguments in the debate between contextualism and relativism about perspectival expressions (predicates of taste, aesthetic adjectives, moral terms, epistemic modals etc.) of a syntactic nature: licensing, binding, anaphora, control, sluicing, various embeddings, the "operator argument" etc.

The meetings are dedicated to reading and discussing papers dealing with such issues. We will both read original formulations of the arguments and responses to it, with the aim of assessing their dialectical efficacy. In addition, authors of new papers/work-in-progress will discuss their material with us (subject to availability).


Schedule and readings

NOVEMBER 3
Jonathan Schaffer, “Perspective in Taste Predicates and Epistemic Modals”, in A. Egan and B. Weatherson (Eds.), Epistemic Modality, Oxford University Press, pp. 179–226, 2011 (part 1).

NOVEMBER 17
Jonathan Schaffer, “Perspective in Taste Predicates and Epistemic Modals”, in A. Egan and B. Weatherson (Eds.), Epistemic Modality, Oxford University Press, pp. 179–226, 2011 (part 2).

NOVEMBER 24
Eric Snyder, “Binding, Genericity, and Predicates of Personal Taste”, Inquiry, 56, 278-306, 2013.

JANUARY (TBA)
John Collins, "The Syntax of Personal Taste", Philosophical Perspectives, 27, 55-103, 2013 (part 1).

JANUARY (TBA)
John Collins, "The Syntax of Personal Taste", Philosophical Perspectives, 27, 55-103, 2013 (part 2).


Further readings:
Peter Lasersohn, “Relative Truth, Speaker Commitment and Control of Implicit Arguments”, Synthese, 166, 359–374, 2009.
Julia Zakkou, "Embedded Taste Predicates", Inquiry, 62, 718-739, 2019.
David Kaplan, “Demonstratives”, in J. Almog, J. Perry & H. Wettstein (Eds.), Themes from Kaplan, Oxford University Press, pp. 481-563, 1989 (excerpts).
David Lewis, “Index, Context, and Content”, in S. Kanger & S. Ohman (Eds.), Philosophy and Grammar, Dordrecht, 79–100, 1980.
Max Kölbel, "The Evidence for Relativism”, Synthese, 166, 375-394, 2009.
Herman Cappelen & John Hawthorne, Relativism and Monadic Truth, Oxford University Press, 2011 (excerpts).
Dan Zeman, "Experiencer Phrases, Predicates of Personal Taste and Relativism: On Cappelen and Hawthorne's Critique of the Operator Argument", Croatian Journal of Philosophy, XIII, 375-398, 2013.
Peter Fritz, John Hawthorne & Juhani Yli-Vakkuri, "Operator Arguments Revisited", Philosophical Studies, 176, 2933-2959, 2019.