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'
Peter Pagin (Stockholm/LOGOS),
'Vagueness and Domain Restriction'
Agustin Rayo (MIT),
'A Plea for Localism'

It is natural to suppose that part of what one does when one comes to master a language is associate *meanings* with the language's basic lexical items -- that is, rules specifying which uses of a lexical item are correct -- and that one exercises one's mastery of the language by deploying one's knowledge of which meanings are associated with which lexical items. I think this is a mistake. I suggest instead that language mastery consists in large part of the ability to use speech-acts as evidence for proposed presupposition updates, and that -- in much the way that we lack access to a rule which would allow us to infer a person's age-in-days from an examination of their physical appearance -- we lack access to a rule which would allow us to infer a proposed presupposition-update from a given speech-act.


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).