Bianca Cepollaro “(Not Necessarily Credible) Deniability”

Our speaker on Monday, February 13th will be Bianca Cepollaro, who is a Research Fellow at the Faculty of Philosophy in University Vita-Salute San Raffaele. Bianca will give a talk called ‘(Not Necessarily Credible) Deniability’:

Dinges and Zakkou’s 2022 analyze deniability as an epistemic notion. For them, a speaker has deniability with respect to the proposition that they meant something just in case their audience does not know what they meant, possibly thanks to their denial. In this paper, we illustrate two kinds of cases that challenge their account, in order to argue that deniability cannot be so understood. The first kind of scenario shows how their epistemic understanding of deniability does not provide sufficient conditions for deniability; the second one suggests that their conditions are not necessary either. Our goal here is entirely negative: we aim to do a ground-clearing job, providing reasons why deniability cannot be understood in certain ways, and leave the articulation of an alternative proposal for future work.

We’re a community of philosophers of language centered in New York City. We have a meeting each week at which a speaker presents a piece of their own work relating to the philosophy of language.

During Spring 2023, we will meet on Mondays, 6-8pm in room 202 of the NYU Philosophy Building, at 5 Washington Place. Anyone with an interest in philosophy of language is welcome.