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'
Robert van Rooij (ILLC, UvA), 'In Defense of Comparison Classes'
Whether John is tall or not depends on who he is compared with. Klein (1980) concluded that we should thus interpret adjectives with respect to comparison classes, and he proposed that in terms of them we can also account for comparatives. Klein's simple analysis has come under attack both in philosophy and in linguistics. Philosophers have complained that context dependence is not enough to account for the vagueness of the adjective. Linguists have pointed to the fact that if John's length is just a bit higher than Mary's length, we can say that John is taller than Mary, but not that John is tall compared to Mary. In this talk I want to address both problems. I will show that although 'tall' needs not be vague with respect to each comparison class, we can put natural constraints on the behavior of the adjective with respect to comparison classes such that the resulting tallness ordering is a so-called semi-order (Luce, 1956) and thus gives rise to the Sorites paradox. I will also show that in terms of these constraints, we can explain why adjectives used in comparatives are sensitive to smaller differences than positive uses of adjectives, if we stick to Klein's original proposal how to account for comparatives.
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).