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.
Abstract. Accuracy-first epistemology aims to supply non-pragmatic justifications for a variety of epistemic norms. The contemporary roots of accuracy-first epistemology are found in Jim Joyce’s program to reinterpret de Finetti’s scoring-rule arguments in terms of a “purely epistemic” notion of “gradational accuracy.” On Joyce’s account, scoring rules are conceived to measure the accuracy of an agent’s belief state with respect to the true state of the world, and Joyce argues that this notion of accuracy is a purely epistemic good. Joyce’s non-pragmatic vindication of probabilism, then, is an argument to the effect that a measure of gradational accuracy so imagined satisfies conditions that are close enough to those necessary to run a de Finetti style coherence argument. A number of philosophers, including Hannes Leitgeb and Richard Pettigrew, have joined Joyce’s program and gone whole hog. Leitgeb and Pettigrew, for instance, have argued that Joyce’s arguments are too lax and have put forward conditions that narrowing down the class of admissible gradational accuracy functions, while Pettigrew and his collaborators have extended the list of epistemic norms receiving an accuracy-first treatment, a program that he calls Evidential Decision Theory.
In this talk I report on joint work with Conor Mayo-Wilson that aims to challenge the core assumption of Evidential Decision Theory, which is the very idea of supplying a truly non-pragmatic justification for anything resembling the Von Neumann and Morgenstern axioms for a numerical epistemic utility function. Indeed, we argue that none of axioms have a satisfactory non-pragmatic justification, and we point to reasons why to suspect that not all the axioms could be given a satisfactory non-pragmatic justification. Our argument, if sound, has ramifications for recent discussions of “pragmatic encroachment”, too. For if pragmatic encroachment is a debate to do with whether there is a pragmatic component to the justification condition of knowledge, our arguments may be viewed to attack the true belief condition of (fallibilist) accounts of knowledge.
8th Annual Conference of the American Association of Mexican Philosophers will take place at Columbia this spring (April 24-26). The Association is mainly a group of Mexican philosophers based in the United States. We hold a conference every year to discuss our work and get to know each other better, as well as the philosophical community of the hosting institution. The topics of the talks reflect the interests of each year’s presenters, and this year they go from the philosophy of mind & language, to the philosophy of physics, metaphysics, and metaethics.
CUNY PhD Students Adriana Renero and Javier Gómez-Lavín will present.
8th Annual Conference
Columbia University, New York
April 24-26, 2015
FRIDAY, APRIL 24
Room: 304 Hamilton
8:00 – 9:00 am Coffee & Bagels
9:00 – 10:15 am Jorge Pablo Oseguera Gamba (Florida State University) “Debunking Ethical Intuitionism” Commentator: Carlos Núñez (Stanford University)
10:35 – 11:50 pm Viorica Ramírez de Santiago (UNAM) “An alternative interpretation of Plato’s beard” Commentator: Azenet López (University of Miami)
12:00 – 2:10 pm Lunch
2:10 – 3:15 pm Elías Okón (UNAM) “Benefits of objective collapse models for cosmology and quantum gravity”
Commentator: Porter Williams (Columbia University)
3:45 – 5:00 pm Sofía Ortiz-Hinojosa (MIT) “Transformative Experiences and Imagination”
Commentator: Carla Merino (Arizona State University)
SATURDAY, APRIL 25
Room: 716 Philosophy Hall
9:00 – 10:00 am Coffee & Bagels
10:00 – 11:15 am Ricardo Mena (UNAM) “Vagueness”
Commentator: Martín Abreu (NYU)
11:45 – 1:00 pm Teresa Bruno (Syracuse University) “Externalism meets Alienation”
Commentator: Jesús Aguilar (Rochester Institute of Technology)
1:00 – 3:00 pm Lunch
3:00 – 4:15 pm Felipe de Brigard (Duke University) “Vivacity and the distinction between memory and imagination”
Commentator: Javier Gómez-Lavín (CUNY)
8:00 pm Dinner at a local restaurant
SUNDAY, APRIL 26
Room: 716 Philosophy Hall
9:00 – 10:00 am Coffee & Bagels
10:00 – 11:15 am Miguel Ángel Sebastián (UNAM) “A Naturalist Model of the Subjectivity of Experience”
Commentator: Sergio Gallegos (MSU Denver)
11:45 – 1:00 pm Adriana Renero (CUNY) “Introspection”
Commentator: Laura Pérez (Harvard University)
1:00 – 3:00 pm Lunch
3:00 – 4:15 pm Agustín Rayo (MIT) (co-authored with Adam Elga) “Fragmentation and Information Access”
Commentator: Nemira Gasiunas (Columbia University)
The CUNY GC Chapter of Minorities and Philosophy (MAP) presents:
“Dynamics and Diversity in Epistemic Communities”
Cailin O’Connor (UC Irvine)
Friday, December 4th, 2015
4-6pm (followed by a reception)
CUNY Graduate Center, room 5307
Please join us for Cailin O’Connor’s presentation of a paper co-authored with Justin P. Bruner (abstract below):
Academics and other researchers regularly engage in strategic interactions—bargaining, cooperation, collaboration, etc. Given this strategic setting, how do the dynamics of social learning in epistemic communities influence outcomes of various actors? In particular, I focus on minority groups in academia. As I argue, evolutionary game theoretic models indicate that such actors may be disadvantaged through social learning.
David Kishik (Emerson College), Dr Zed Adams (New School for Social Research)
Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Joe Gould’s Oral History of Our Time, and Joseph Mitchell’s memoir each existed more in their respective author’s imagination than on the written page. In this Friday evening event, David Kishik will discuss the significance of such imaginary literary works for his own Manhattan Project (Stanford, 2015), which draws upon Benjamin, Gould, Mitchell, and others to develop a theory of Manahattan as the capital of the twentieth century. At the event, Kishik will be introduced and interviewed by New School faculty member Zed Adams.
Keynote speakers:
The Speculative Ethics Forum is a one day workshop-style event in which we’ll consider the most challenging matters of ethics. Ethical approaches of all sorts are welcomed–analytic, continental, ancient, medieval, Asian, and so on. Most papers are invited. However, there are two slots open for submissions. Any paper in ethical theory will be considered for acceptance. Bold and speculative inquiries are preferred to papers that primarily defend ground already gained or papers that are primarily scholarly. Our aim, in short, is to have a single day concentrated on expanding the horizons of ethics.
Our Invited Speakers Are:
Katja Vogt (Columbia University)
James Dodd (New School for Social Research)
Leo Zaibert (Union College)
Justin Clarke-Doane (Columbia University)
Organisers:
Register
November 17, 2017, 11:45pm EST
speculative.ethics.forum [at the host] gmail.com