NYU Workshop Clausal Complements, Truthmaking, and Attitudes, February 21, 2015
February 21, 2015
Sponsored by the New York Institute of Philosophy
NYU, Department of Philosophy, 2nd floor
Program:
10.00 – 11.30: Jane Grimshaw (Rutgers): Clausal Complements to Say: The Driving Force.
11.30 – 11.45: Coffee
11.45 – 13.15: Wataru Uegaki (MIT): Reducing Declarative-Embedding to Question-Embedding: Arguments from Selectional Restrictions, Content Nouns and Exhaustivity
14.30 – 16.00: Kit Fine (NYU): Truthmaker Semantics: An Overview
16.00 – 16.15: Coffee
16.15 – 18.00: Friederike Moltmann (CNRS-IHPST/NYU): Cognitive Products, Satisfaction Conditions, and Complement Clauses
Comments by Mark Richard
Abstracts
Clausal Complements to SAY: The Driving Force
Jan Grimshaw
The pattern of combination for the universal light verb SAY and embedded ‘questions’/wh-clauses and ‘declaratives’/’that’-clauses result from the interplay between force (e.g. interrogative vs assertive) encoded in the clause and force encoded in the verb’s meaning. The notion of ‘selection’ (e.g. for ‘type’ or for +/- wh features) plays no role. This is demonstrated for English verbs with SAY as their core, those which participate in ‘indirect discourse’.
The observed patterns are complex, but they are entailed by three hypotheses: (i) The semantics of SAY allows for, but does not reauire, the encoding of the force of its complement. (ii) A clause may encode force, but is not reauired to do so. (iii) A clause which combines with SAY embeddding verbs must be assigned a force. Under these assumptions, we predict both significant variation in complementation patterns and the highly restricted nature of the variation.
Reducing declarative-embedding to question-embedding: Arguments from selectional restrictions, content nouns and exhaustivity
Wataru Uegaki
Several semantic accounts have been proposed to account for the fact that “know” and other so-called RESPONSIVE PREDICATES (e.g., “forget”, “tell”, “predict”) take both declarative and interrogative complements (e.g., Groenendijk & Stokhof 1984, George 2011). In this talk, I argue that responsive predicates select for questions (modelled as sets of propositions) rather than propositions. Declarative complements denote singleton proposition-sets, meaning that embedding of declaratives is a special (‘trivialized’) case of question-embedding. This analysis is in contrast to the more standard analysis of responsive predicates that treats them as proposition-taking items and reduces embedded questions to propositions (e.g., Groenendijk and Stokhof 1984; Lahiri 2002).
Three arguments will be made to support the reduction of declarative-embedding to question-embedding. First, the theory enables a natural semantic account of the selectional restrictions of attitude predicates as a whole, which is difficult in a standard theory. Second, only the proposed theory explains the interpretations of attitude predicates embedding content nominals, such as “the rumour” and “the story”. Third, the theory offers a straightforward account of several puzzles involving exhaustivity of question-embedding sentences, including George’s non-reducibility puzzle.
Truthmaker Semantics: An Overview
Kit Fine
Cognitive Products, Satisfaction Conditions, and Complement Clauses
Friederike Moltmann
This talk develops the view that complement clauses (of both verbs and nouns) are not terms standing for propositions, but rather are predicates of cognitive products, entities of the sort of claims, thoughts, and demands. The view will be applied to different types of complement clauses and embedding predicates by making use of the idea that cognitive products are not only bearers of truth- and satisfaction conditions, but also the bearers of truthmakers and satisfiers, of various sorts.
Professor Karen Lewis (Columbia) will present “Reverse Sobel Sequences in Static Semantics” in Room 302, NYU Philosophy Department, 5 Washington Place, New York City.
ABSTRACT: Sobel Sequences are consistent sequences of counterfactuals like the following:
(1a) If Sophie had gone to the parade, she would have seen Pedro dance.
(1b) But of course, if Sophie had gone to the parade and been stuck behind someone tall, she wouldn’t have seen Pedro dance.
But reverse the sequence, and it does not sound so good at all. This observation – that order makes a difference to the consistency of the sequence – motivated Kai von Fintel and Thony Gillies to abandon the classic Lewis-Stalnaker semantics and adopt a dynamic semantic account of counterfactual conditionals. Subsequently, Sarah Moss defended the classic Lewis-Stalnaker semantics against the charge that it need be abandoned because of Reverse Sobel Sequences, arguing for a pragmatic account of the infelicity of the sequences. I argue that ultimately both the dynamic semantic account and Moss’s account are untenable, but that seeing what is good about each account points the way to the right positive story. Finally, I defend a positive view that attributes the effect of counterfactuals on the context to pragmatics, but treats the effect of the context on counterfactuals as semantic.
If you wanted to prepare for the topic in advance, the paper by Sarah Moss on Sobel sequences is available online here.
New York Philosophical Logic Group
Spring Semester 2015
This semester the group will meet on Thursdays from 5-7 pm, in the Philosophy Department at NYU: Room 302, 5 Washington Place. We will meet roughly once a month. The provisional programme is as follows:
February 12: Mel Fitting, CUNY, TBA
March 12: Harvey Lederman, Oxford, TBA
April 2: Delia Graf Fara, Princeton, TBA
May 7: Provisional: Crispin Wright, NYU, TBA
Organized by Graham Priest
New York Philosophical Logic Group
Spring Semester 2015
This semester the group will meet on Thursdays from 5-7 pm, in the Philosophy Department at NYU: Room 302, 5 Washington Place. We will meet roughly once a month. The provisional programme is as follows:
February 12: Mel Fitting, CUNY, TBA
March 12: Harvey Lederman, Oxford, TBA
April 2: Delia Graf Fara, Princeton, TBA
May 7: Provisional: Crispin Wright, NYU, TBA
Organized by Graham Priest
Preliminary Programme
10.00 – 10.30 Breakfast
10.30 – 11.45 Craige Roberts (Ohio): ‘Conditional Plans and Imperatives: A Semantics and Pragmatics for Imperative Mood’
11.45 – 12.00 Coffee break
12.00 – 1.15: Peter Vranas (Wisconsin): ‘Natural Deduction and Imperative Logic’
1.15 – 3.00: Lunch Break
3.00 – 4.15: Friederike Moltmann (CNRS-IHPST/NYU): ‘Modal Objects and the Semantics of Modals’
4.15 – 4.30: Coffee break
4.30.-.5.45: Kit Fine (NYU): ‘Conditional Imperatives’
5.45 -6.30: General Discussion
Papers for advance reading
Speakers:
Una Stojnić (NYU/Columbia)
Karen Lewis (Barnard)
Ray Buchanan (University of Texas at Austin)
Hartry Field (NYU)
Crispin Wright (NYU)
Ian Rumfitt (Oxford University)
Sponsored by the New York Institute of Philosophy
For information, contact: nyip.events@nyu.edu
Speakers: Una Stojnic, Karen Lewis, Ray Buchanan, Hartry Field, Crispin Wright, Ian Rumfitt
Location: New York University
Call for Papers: NYIP Workshop on “Higher Order Metaphysics”
Submissions are invited for presentation at a forthcoming New York Institute of Philosophy workshop on “higher order metaphysics”, concerned with questions of metaphysics which can be posed in higher order languages.
Higher order languages allow for variables having different syntactic categories — for example, variables that are predicates, and variables that are formulae (open sentence) — and for quantifiers that can bind such variables. Sentences of such languages are sometimes treated as shorthand for sentences about abstract objects, such as propositions and properties. The workshop will explore views which reject such equivalences, or at least, take sentences of higher order languages as precise, intelligible, and metaphysically interesting as they stand. This approach has deep historical roots: it is arguably the view of Frege’s Begriffsschrift, and was influentially promoted by A.N. Prior. It has also recently enjoyed a resurgence; for example, Timothy Williamson makes extensive use of higher order logic in his book “Modal Logic as Metaphysics”.
Each presentation at the workshop will be followed by comments given by an invited commentator.
For consideration, please submit an (extended) abstract or a complete paper, anonymized, as a pdf attachment, and including name, institution, and contact details in the email, to Iliana Gioulatou. Please also indicate in your email if you would be interested in commenting on one of the presentations. The submissions will be evaluated by external referees; to ensure triple-blind review, please do not include any identifying information in the abstract/paper, and do not send the submission to the workshop organizer.
Submission Deadline: March 1, 2017
Travel and accommodation for speakers and commentators will be covered by the workshop.
The standard way to show the consistency of a theory, or the independence of a given statement from that theory, is to exhibit a model. But there’s more than one thing that’s been called a “model” as this notion has evolved from its original role in 19th century foundations of geometry to its current role as a universallyapplicable tool in logic. This talk investigates some of the changes that bring us to the modern notion, and asks to what extent various kinds of model do, or don’t, successfully demonstrate various kinds of consistency and independence.
When: Friday October 20, 11:00am-1:00pm (with reception to follow)
Where: NYU Philosophy Department, 5 Washington Place, Room 202
Nina Emery (Mount Holyoke), November 3, The Graduate Center, CUNY
In this short talk, I present a new account of the nature of proof, with the aim of explaining how proof could actually play the role in reasoning that it does, and answering some long-standing puzzles about the nature of proof. Along the way, I’ll explain how Kreisel’s Squeezing argument helps us understand the connection between an informal notion of of validity and the notions formalised in our accounts of proofs and models, and the relationship between proof-theoretic and model-theoretic analyses of logical consequence.
14.30 – 15.30: Kit Fine: A Truthmaker Semantics for Conditional Imperatives
15.30 – 15.45: Coffee Break
15.45 – 16.45: Friederike Moltmann: Underspecification of Attitudes and Truthmaker
Semantics
16.45-17.00: Coffee Break
17.00 – 18.00: Federico Faroldi: Truthmaker Semantics for Justification Logics – Open
Problems (joint work with Tudor Protopopescu)
18.00-18.15: Coffee Break
18.15 – 19.15: Cian Dorr: Truthmaking in the Object Language
K. Fine: A Truthmaker Semantics for Conditional Imperatives
I provide a truth-maker semantics for conditional imperatives and indicate how it might be extended to other conditional constructions.
F. Moltmann: Underspecification of Attitudes and Truthmaker Semantics
It has been argued that the satisfaction conditions of a desire can be underspecified by the complement clause. This provides support for the view according to which the complement clause gives a partial content of the reported desire, where partial content is formulated in terms of truthmaker theory. In this talk, I will discuss the extent of such underspecification and whether it truly supports a truthmaker-based approach to the content of attitudes.
Optional preparatory reading here.
F. Faroldi: Truthmaker Semantics for Justification Logics – Open Problems
Justification logics are a family of logic where "implicit" modal operators are substituted by explicit terms to get formulas of the form t : A, where t could be evidence, a reason, etc. why A is known, believed, obligatory, etc., thus resulting in an “objectual” approach to modalities. In this talk we explore how to give a truthmaker semantics for justification logics, we provide some philosophical reasons to do so, and note some technical open problems.
Cian Dorr: Truthmaking in the Object Language
I consider a simple language with Boolean connectives, sentential variables and quantifiers binding them, and a connective for propositional identity (‘for it to be the case that … is for it to be the case that …’). Using familiar techniques, the possible-worlds model theory for such a language can be ‘internalised’ to derive a theory stated in the language itself, based on the definition of ‘world-proposition’ as ‘maximal consistent proposition’, and this theory can be shown to follow from the theory that propositions form a complete atomic Boolean algebra. In this paper, I will consider to what extent something similar can be done for Fine’s truthmaker semantics. This will involve looking for a way of picking out a class of special propositions to serve as surrogates for the states, and a binary relation among propositions to serve as a surrogate for the verification relation, and using these definitions to rewrite the metalinguistic definition of a model as theory in the object-language. I will make a start at considering to what extent the axioms of this theory can be derived from an independently natural weakening of the theory that propositions form a complete atomic Boolean algebra.