Research Seminar on Mind and Language: Factually Questionable Discourse

RESEARCH SEMINAR ON
LANGUAGE AND MIND
Offered Spring 2003

Factually Questionable Discourse

The research seminar on Language and Mind will be conducted for the Spring of 2002 by Hartry Field and Stephen Schiffer. It will meet in the Philosophy Department on Tuesdays from 4:00 to 7:00 PM. (A preparation session restricted to students enrolled in the course will meet Mondays from 5:00 to 6:00.) Papers for discussion will be available one week in advance and will be distributed at the preceding seminar. They can also be picked up at the Department of Philosophy, Room 503, Silver Center (previously Main Building), 100 Washington Square East. Many of the papers will also be available on this web page by clicking on the title of the paper. Unless otherwise noted, these papers are in PDF form.

This year's topic is "Factually Questionable Discourse", discourse which, on the one hand, appears to involve true or false statements of fact but for which, on the other hand, there is reason to think that that appearance is misleading. Leading examples of factually questionable discourse are moral (and other evaluative) judgments, vagueness and indeterminacy, and conditionals.

Schedule of Visitors:

January 21, 2003:	Caroline West University of Sydney "Moral Fictionalism" Daniel Nolan, Greg Restall and Caroline West.
January 28, 2003:	Hartry Field NYU "No Fact of the Matter".
February 4, 2003:	William Lycan University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill "Background Handout"; "Chapter Four" of Real Conditionals; "Chapter Eight" of Real Conditionals. NOTE: These electronic versions of chapter 4 and 8 of Real Conditionals have not ben proofread or copy-edited. Hardcopies of the copy-edited and proofread versions from Real Conditionals will be available at the preceding seminar and at the front desk of the Philosophy Department.
February 11, 2003:	Terence Horgan University of Arizona This session has been cancelled. "Nondescripive Cognitivism: Framework for a New Metaethic" Terence Horgan and Mark Timmons, Philosophical Papers 29 (2000) 121-53; "Replies to Corbi and Barker" excerpted from "Replies", Grazer Philosophische Studien 63 (2002), Essays on the Philosophy of Terence Horgan, 303-41.
February 18, 2003:	Kit Fine NYU "Two Puzzles Concerning the Use of Names".
February 25, 2003:	David Wiggins Oxford Excerpts from Sameness and Substance Renewed (CUP, 2001). The designated reading is pp. 156-76. As background reading, he suggests the following further selections from the book in the following order: pp. 102-6; pp. 139-56; pp. 91-102; and pp. 225-44.
March 4, 2003:	Stephen Schiffer NYU "Note on the Reading"; "Vagueness and Indeterminacy", chapter five of The Things We Mean (updated 2/28/03); "Pleonastic Propositions", excerpt of chapter two of The Things We Mean (optional); "Works Cited".
March 11, 2003:	Tim Maudlin Rutgers University Truth and Paradox: Solving the Riddles. We will focus on the final chapter, chapter nine, particularly the material on pp. 282-302. Skimming chapters one through five may be helpful for understanding this chapter. The most important background material may be found in chapter three, and consists of pp. 48-54, 59-76, and 80-96. The title page and preface are also available.
March 25, 2003:	Stephen Yablo MIT "Does Ontology Rest Upon a Mistake?"; "Why I am Not a Nominalist".
April 1, 2003:	Cian Dorr NYU "Vagueness Without Ignorance".
April 8, 2003:	Michael Resnik University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Note: This session has been canceled.
April 15, 2003:	Dorothy Edgington Birkbeck College, University of London "Conditionals, Truth, and Objectivity".
April 22, 2003:	Michael Smith Austalian National University "Cognitivist vs. Non-Cognitivist Explanations of the Belief-Like and Desire-Like Features of Evaluative Judgement".
April 29, 2003:	John Hawthorne Rutgers University "Epistemicism and Semantic Plasticity".

updated 9/5/02
philo.web@nyu.edu