Program


Keynote Speakers

Chris Barker (NYU),
'Achieving Clarity'
Delia Graff Fara (Princeton),
'Context, Content, Interests, and Saying the Same Thing'
Chris Kennedy (Chicago),
'Vagueness and Comparison'

Vagueness and comparison are linked together in a number of different ways, both empirically and analytically. Vague predicates typically support comparison (though not all predicates that support comparison are vague); some notion of comparison or similarity plays an important role in many accounts of vagueness; and several influential semantic analyses of (grammaticized) comparative constructions are based on prior semantic analyses of vagueness. However, despite (or maybe because of) these connections, the subtlety and significance of the places where vagueness and comparison do not line up have not been fully appreciated, either by philosophers or linguists. The goal of this talk is to examine such cases and discuss their significance. I will take a close look at the semantic and pragmatic properties of several different ways of expressing comparison, and show that some of them preserve canonical features of vagueness while some of them do not. I will then discuss the implications of the facts for the analysis of vagueness, for the semantics of comparison, and (potentially) for our understanding of the ways that natural languages do and do not differ in encoding these concepts. 


Peter Pagin (Stockholm/LOGOS),
'Vagueness and Domain Restriction'
Agustin Rayo (MIT),
'A Plea for Localism'
Robert van Rooij (ILLC, UvA),
'In Defense of Comparison Classes'
Uli Sauerland (ZAS Berlin), with Penka Stateva,
'Approximating Expressions and Vagueness'

Contributed papers


Matthew Carmody  (Richmond-upon-Thames College, Greater London)
'Vagueness and Communication: a Minimally Contextualist Approach'

Pablo Cobreros  (University College London)
'Borderline, yet not Definitely so'

Ariel Cohen  (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev),  joint w/ Lavi Wolf
'Clarity and Objectivized Belief'

Kevin Connolly  (U. of Toronto)
'Vague Color Predicates and the Richness Argument'

David Etlin  (MIT)
'Vague Desire: The Sorites and the Money Pump'

Emily Fletcher  (U. of Toronto)
'Normative Predicates and Vagueness'

Michael Freund  (ISHA Université Paris IV)  *alternate
'Membership for Constructible Concepts'

Caspar Hare  (MIT)
'Vagueness and Rationality'

Scott Fults  (U. of Maryland, College Park)
'Vagueness, Semantic Representation and Verification'

Daniel Lassiter  (NYU)
'An Interpretive Theory of Vagueness'

Jean-Roch Lauper  (U. of Fribourg)
'Vagueness and Ordinary Understanding of Measurement Phrases'

Dan López de Sa  (LOGOS/Arché)
'Indeterminate Reference'

Ofra Magidor  (Balliol College, Oxford),  joint w/ Stephen Kearns (FSU)
'Epistemicism about Vagueness and Meta-linguistic Safety'

Sebastiano Moruzzi  (U. of Bologna/Arché)
'Borderline Cases and Permissibility'

Rick Nouwen  (OTS, Utrecht University)
'Graded Predication by Evaluation'

Elisa Paganini  (Università degli Studi di Milano)
'Vagueness and Omniscience'

Galit Sassoon  (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)
'Vagueness Pertaining to Numerical Degree Constructions'

Osamu Sawada  (U. of Chicago)  *alternate
'Vagueness and Adverbial Polarity Items'

Phil Serchuk  (U. of Toronto),  joint w/ Ian Hargreaves (U. of Calgary) & Richard Zach (U. of Calgary)
'Vagueness, Logic and Use: Some Experimental Results'

Yael Sharvit  (UConn),  joint w/ Natasha Fitzgibbons & Jon Gajewski (UConn)
'Plural Superlatives, Distributivity, and Context-Dependency'

Elia Zardini  (Arché, St. Andrews)
'A Model of Tolerance'

John Zeimbekis  (U. of Grenoble)
'Soritic Series and Phenomenal Types'


Related event


Stephen Schiffer (NYU), presents 'Vagueness, Concepts, and Properties: a Non-Semantic and Non-Psychological Account of Vagueness', as part of a series of invited lectures in the ENS Dept. of Philosophy. time: April 10, 10h30-12h30; place: salle des Résistants (ENS).