Philosophy Research Seminar - Justina Berškyte (Manchester)
| Dates: | 10 March 2021 |
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| Times: | 15:15 - 16:50 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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This year we are running all of our research seminars online using Zoom. If you would like to attend, and are not included on our events mailing list, please email Dr Stephen Ingram to request the Zoom meeting details.
Seminars will take place on Wednesdays, and will run from 15.15-16.50, with a 5 minute break between the talk and the Q&A. The Zoom meeting will be available to join from 15.00.
Title: Jeremy is a… Expressive-Relativism and Expressive Predicates in Copular Positions
Abstract: Consider two examples:
ATTRIBUTIVE: That fuckhead Jeremy forgot the turkey.
COPULAR: Jeremy is a fuckhead.
In both examples the predicate 'fuckhead' communicates some expressive content - the negative attitude of the speaker. However, only in COPULAR does it appear to contribute to the truth-conditional content. The task is to explain the semantics of the predicate 'fuckhead' when it seemingly behaves wildly differently in different syntactic positions.
In this talk, I will briefly consider several good candidates for dealing with 'fuckhead' occurring in COPULAR position: Expressivist and Descriptive approaches that treat 'fuckhead' in Copular as purely descriptive, and the more promising Expressive-Contextualism that treats COPULAR as communicating to both expressive and descriptive dimensions. I show that none of these accounts are satisfactory, before turning to my positive proposal which combines Expressivist semantics with Relativism. I call this view Expressive-Relativism. I show that by adopting Expressive-Relativism we can not only explain the relationship of 'fuckhead' in ATTRIBUTIVE and COPULAR, but also give a suitable descriptive theory that captures the truth-conditions of COPULAR.
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This event will run online - contact Stephen Ingram for details on accessing the Zoom meeting.
