Pictures from Reference Workshop

Sep 18, 2007 10:00 PM

Pictures from the workshop Reference Workshop (Sep 14-Sep 15, 2007)

Below are some pictures from the reference workshop.

The topic for this workshop was the relation of reference, which is a topic that raises a set of interrelated questions about how words and language stand to objects and relations in the world. The issue of reference is a classical puzzle in the philosophy of language, and attracted enthusiastic interest throughout the 20th century among such prominent philosophers as Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Peter Strawson, Keith Donnellan and Saul Kripke. Today the issue re-emerges as one seek to understand the complex semantic workings of language through the lenses of recent developments and breakthroughs in linguistics and semantics.

For more info please see the workshop website

John Perry (Stanford University) has spent a lifetime working on understanding the complex semantics for demonstratives and indexicals in natural language - a material he has fruitfully applied to other vexed issues in philosophy of mind and action. His talk at the workshop concerned different ways we can understand demonstratives when we follow in the footsteps of David Kaplan. Later that same week John also gave the opening talk for CSMN where he grappled with the issue of ‘The Mind as a Philosophical and Scientific Problem’.

Dagfinn Føllesdal (Stanford University), who organized the workshop together with Herman Cappelen (University of St. Andrews), introduces Kenneth Taylor (Stanford University). Taylor’s talk ‘On Singularity’ concerned the issue of singularity, which, among other related problems, concerns the question about what factors are necessary for “full blown” singular thoughts.

Genoveva Marti (Universitat de Barcelona) gives her talk ‘Referring, Denoting, Describing’ where she grapples with the issue of naming. One of the important questions she raised concerns whether or not a name refers in virtue of having a descriptive semantic content (or search mechanisms of other kinds).

Robert Williams (Leeds University) demonstrating the relation between semantics and meta-semantics, urging us to lay down some metaphysical constraints on our theory of reference in virtue of certain ontological commitments that he takes as necessary fulfilments on any adequate theory.

Carsten Hansen (CSMN/UiO), Dagfinn Føllesdal, and Christel Fricke (CSMN/UiO) listening with interest on the following discussion.

Audience listening to the talk. Robyn Carston (first table left) and Deidre Wilson (second table right) will return shortly and give talks at the upcoming CSMN workshop ‘Implicature’. Ernie Lepore (second table left) will also return soon to speak and participate at the upcoming workshop / PhD Course ‘Metaphor, Poetry, Paraphrase’.

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