Talk: 5-7 PM, Room 5414
Mixer: 7-8 PM, Room 7113
Professor Jessica Moss (NYU) will present at SWIP-Analytic Monday, September 8th from 5:00-7:00 PM at the Graduate Center, CUNY, Room 5414. Her talk title is “Dual Systems in 400 BC: Plato and the Origins of Contemporary Psychology“.
Abstract: Proponents of contemporary Dual Systems psychology – the view that we have in some sense two minds, one responsible for automatic, associative, intuitive processing, and the other for controlled, inferential, deliberative processing – have sometimes recognized that there are ancient roots to their view. I will argue that we should in fact credit Plato with anticipating this contemporary view in striking, almost comprehensive detail, and also that the contemporary view both illuminates and vindicates Plato’s much-misunderstood notions of parts of the soul and of rationality.
Listen to Jessica Moss interview “Plato and Aristotle on Weakness of Will” on Philosophy Bites
Mixer: Our first presentation of the fall by Jessica Moss will be followed by a SWIP-Analytic Fall Kickoff Mixer featuring philosophy songs written and performed by Vivian Feldblyum. Vivian will be visiting us from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, where she is a philosophy student. We will also have a special prize to give away at the mixer generously provided by Oxford University Press.
Everyone (men & women, philosophers & non-philosophers) is welcome at our public events.
CUNY Pragmatics Workshop
Relevance, Games, and Communication
Tuesday, October 14 (Room 9207)
10:15 Coffee
10:30 Rohit Parikh (CUNY) “Grice, Hoare and Nash: contributions to pragmatics from game theory and program semantics”
11:30 Peter Godfrey-Smith (CUNY) “What do generalizations of the Lewis signaling model tell us about information and meaning?”
12:30 Lunch
1:30 Prashant Parikh (CUNY) “Deriving illocutionary meaning”
2:30 Student Presentations:
Ignacio Ojea (Columbia) “Credibility and the stability of what is conveyed”
Todd Stambaugh (CUNY) “Implicatures, etchings, and coffee”
Cagil Tasdemir (CUNY) “Influencing behavior by influencing beliefs”
3:30 Coffee
4:15 Ariel Rubinstein (Tel Aviv/NYU) “A Typology of Players”
5:30 Reception
7:00 Speakers’ dinner
Wednesday, October 15 (Room 9207)
9:15 Coffee
9:30 Daniel Harris (CUNY) “Act-theoretic semantics for pragmatics”
10:30 Larry Horn (Yale) “Trivial pursuits: on being orderly”
11:30 Stephen Neale (CUNY) “All meaning is natural meaning?”
12:30 Lunch
1:30 Robyn Carston (UCL) “Systematicity, optionality and relevance”
2:30 Student Presentations
Elmar Unnsteinsson (CUNY) “The pragmatics of malapropisms”
Marilynn Johnson (CUNY) “Why we implicate: revising Pinker’s game-theoretic proposal”
Jesse Rappaport (CUNY) “Parsimony in linguistic theorizing: a double-edged razor”
3:30 Coffee
4:15 Keynote Talk & Philosophy Colloquium
Deirdre Wilson (UCL/Oslo) “Explaining Metonymy”
6:00 Reception
7:30 Speakers’ dinner
The CUNY Pragmatics Workshop is funded by a CUNY Collaborative Incentive Research Grant (CIRG# 2033) with additional support from the Program in Philosophy and the John H Kornblith Fund.
CUNY Linguistics Colloquium
Spring 2015
SPECIAL ADDED TALK!
Sven Lauer (University of Konstanz)
Thursday, May 21, 2015
Time: 4:15pm
Room: C205
Model-theoretic pragmatics and obligatory implicatures
The model-theoretic approach to semantics has enabled the development of articulated, formally explicit theories of natural language meaning. At the same time, pragmatic explanations are still frequently given informally, or in terms of rather rough schematic inference schemes. I show that a model-theoretic approach to pragmatics is feasible, and that it significantly improves our understanding of pragmatic inference.
To that end, I present a model-theoretic pragmatic theory, the Dynamic Pragmatics of Lauer (2013), and show that it makes rather unexpected predictions: There are pragmatic inferences, which, though Gricean in nature, arise necessarily whenever an expression is used, and when such an inference is known to be false, this makes the expression infelicitous. This goes against conventional wisdom in pragmatics, according to which Gricean inferences are, by necessity, optional and cancelable.
I argue that the prediction is nonetheless correct, reviewing a range of cases where an arguably non-semantic inference is non-optional and robust enough to trigger infelicities. The model-theoretic analysis shows that these inferences are not just pragmatic in a vague sense, but neatly fit into the Gricean fold: They arise in exactly the same way as classical examples of implicatures. The only difference between the better-studied optional implicatures (such as the familiar scalar ones) and obligatory implicatures is that the former are driven by pragmatic pressures that are context-dependent in a particular way, while the latter are driven by pressures that apply equally in all contexts.
All are welcome. Please come!
CUNY Graduate Center – 365 Fifth Avenue – New York (between 34th and 35th Streets) Phone: 212-817-8500. Email: linguistics@gc.cuny.edu website: www.gc.cuny.edu/linguistics
The Simon H. Rifkind Center for the Humanities and Arts
Presents:
Cinzia Arruzza
New School for Social Research
Sara Brill
Fairfield University
Andrea Capra
State University of Milan
Burt Hopkins
Seattle University
Elizabeth Jelinek
Christopher Newport University
Michael Naas
DePaul University
Noburu Notomi
Yokohama National University
Nicholas Rynearson
Brooklyn College, CUNY
Marylou Sena
Seattle University
Thomas Thorp
Saint Xavier University
Organisers:
Nickolas Pappas
CUNY Graduate Center
Poster: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzqJK3SK3JjZbTBQY0d3ZnIxWUU/view?usp=sharing
Friday, April 15th
The Graduate Center (365 5th Ave), rm. 5409
11:30 – 11:45am. Welcome, Coffee and Snacks
11:45 – 12:45pm. JJ Lang (Stanford University) “Semantic Ambiguity, Presuppositions, and the Offensiveness of Out-Group Uses of Appropriated Slurs”
12:45 – 3:15pm. Lunch Break
We invite you to attend the Cognitive Science Speaker Series talk (1:00 – 3:00pm, rm. 7102):
Hedda Hassel Mørch (Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness, NYU) “The Evolutionary Argument that Phenomenal Properties Are Intrinsically Powerful”
3:15 – 4:15pm. Ian York (San Francisco State University) “A Limit to Camp’s Semantic Account of Slurs”
4:15 – 4:30pm. Coffee and Snacks
4:30 – 6:00pm. KEYNOTE. Elisabeth Camp (Rutgers) “Conventions, Complicity, and Conflict”
6:00 – 7:00pm. Meet & Greet (rm. 7113: Philosophy Lounge)
Saturday, April 16th
The Graduate Center (365 5th Ave), rm. 5409
10:00 – 10:30am. Coffee and Snacks
10:30 – 11:30am. Kayleigh Doherty (Arizona State University) “Making It So: Social Identity and Hate Speech”
11:30 – 1:30pm. Lunch Break
1:30 – 2:30pm. Cassie Herbert (Georgetown University) “Talking about Slurs”
2:30 – 2:45pm. Coffee & Snacks
2:45 – 3:45pm. Adam Simon (Stanford University) “Pragmatizing Pejoratives”
3:45 – 4:00pm. Coffee & Snacks
4:00 – 5:30pm. KEYNOTE. Rachel McKinney (MIT)
5:30 – 6:30pm. Meet & Greet (rm. 7113: Philosophy Lounge)
Crafting Ancient Identities: Mythological and Philosophical Approaches to the Self and Society in Antiquity
Tenth Annual Graduate Conference in Classics
Friday, March 31, 2017
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Keynote Speaker: Professor Kathryn Morgan, UCLA
In Greek and Roman antiquity, mythology and philosophy helped individuals understand their world and define their place in society. From the supernatural exploits in Homer to the etiological accounts of Ovid, mythology humanized natural phenomena and preserved cultural history. Philosophy, meanwhile, reflects an effort to systematize knowledge and answer questions about our place in the world. Both mythological narratives and philosophic thought participated in the crafting of ancient identities, whether as individuals, communities, or nations. The Romans, for example, turned to mythology to identify themselves as the descendants of Aeneas, just as the Athenian philosophers attempted to define what it meant to be a citizen.
The PhD/MA Program in Classics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York invites graduate students in Classics or related fields to submit abstracts of papers that explore how mythology and philosophy contribute to the development of identity in the Greco-Roman world.
Possible paper topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Etiological myths
- Autochthony and migration stories
- Philosophic schools and communities
- Philosophical poetry and the Presocratics
- Reception and transformation of myth in antiquity
- Hero cults and religious communities
- The role of myth in philosophical discourse
Please send an anonymous abstract of approximately 300 words as an email attachment to cunyclassicsconference@gmail.com by January 16, 2017. Please include, in the body of the email, your name, university affiliation, and the title of the presentation. Speakers will have 15 minutes to present. Selected applicants will be notified in early February. Submissions and questions will be received by conference co-organizers Federico Di Pasqua and Thomas Moody.
The Saul Kripke Center is delighted to announce that Brian Cross Porter (PhD student, CUNY) will give the second talk in our Young Scholars Series, on October 11th, 2pm – 4pm, in room 3207.
The title is “Kripke’s Fixed Point Construction and the V-Curry Paradox.”
The series is an opportunity for graduate students and early career faculty from throughout the CUNY system to present material on philosophy, computer science and linguistics that is connected to Saul’s work.