Semantics etc.

Final Call for Papers

First Formal Epistemology Festival
Conditionals and Ranking Functions
Konstanz, July 28-30, 2008
Kindly funded by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung

This is the first of a series of small and thematically focused events in formal epistemology organized by Eric Swanson (Michigan), Jonathan Weisberg (Toronto), and Franz Huber (Konstanz).

The background for the first Formal Epistemology Festival is the 40th anniversary of Robert Stalnaker’s “A Theory of Conditionals” and the 20th anniversary of Wolfgang Spohn’s “Ordinal Conditional Functions. A Dynamic Theory of Epistemic States”.

Invited speakers include:

Alan Hájek (ANU)
Hannes Leitgeb (Bristol)
Hans Rott (Regensburg)
Wolfgang Spohn (Konstanz)
Robert Stalnaker (MIT)
Timothy Williamson (Oxford)

The festivities of 2009 will take place in Ann Arbor, featuring Causal Decision Theory and Scoring Rules (this happens to be the 10th anniversary of James Joyce’s The Foundations of Causal Decision Theory). The festivities of 2010 will take place in Toronto and focus on Defeater/Default Logic and Perception (this happens to be the 30th anniversary of Ray Reiter’s “A Logic for Default Reasoning” and the 15th anniversary of John Pollock’s Cognitive Carpentry). Further details about these events will be announced in due time.

We are now inviting submissions of papers of at least 5000 words on the topic of Conditionals and Ranking Functions. Please send a pdf prepared for blind refereeing to:

franz.huber@uni-konstanz.de

Deadline for submissions: February 29, 2008
Notification of Acceptance: April 30, 2008

In a short review of the sequel to “The Graduate”, we find this in today’s Boston Globe:

Forty years have passed since Benjamin Braddock and Elaine Robinson were last seen breathless on the back seat of a bus, staring at a future that suddenly seemed as dense and inscrutable as a new planet. The indelible scene, of course, is from the movie “The Graduate,” which consigned Charles Webb, on whose novel it was based, to the bizarre fate of being the unknown author of his most famous work.

“the unknown author of his most famous work” — Discuss.

Kent Bach. 2008. “Perspectives on Possibilities: Contextualism, Relativism, or What?” ms.

Abstract:

Epistemic possibilities are relative to bodies of information, or perspectives. To claim that something is epistemically possible is typically to claim that it is possible relative one’s own current perspective. We generally do this by using bare, unqualified epistemic possibility (EP) sentences, ones that don’t mention the relevant perspective. The fact that epistemic possibilities are relative to perspectives suggests that these bare EP sentences fall short of fully expressing propositions, contrary to what both Contextualists and Relativists implicitly assume. They reject Propositional Invariantism (it implausibly implies that any EP proposition is false whose core proposition is known by anyone to be false) and maintain that changes in perspective shift either these sentences’ propositional contents or their truth-values. Radical Invariantism, which I defend, denies that the semantic contents of bare EP sentences shift. It claims, however, that these contents lack truth-values. They are not full-fledged propositions but merely propositional radicals. Only explicitly relativized EP sentences manage to express propositions, and these are the only EP propositions there are. Nevertheless, bare EP sentences are perfectly capable of being used to assert EP propositions, because utterances of them implicitly allude to the relevant perspective. Various problem cases challenge Radical Invariantism to explain pragmatically which perspective is read into the utterance of a given bare EP sentence. It can handle them without resorting, as Contextualism and Relativism do, to semantic bells and whistles.

Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 18 will take place March 21-23, 2008 at UMass Amherst. The program is now public.

Sad news: Eloise Jelinek has passed away. See the obituaries at Language Log and the Arizona Daily Star.

I met Eloise in 1988 when she was part of the NSF project on cross-linguistic quantification with Emmon Bach, Angelika Kratzer, and Barbara Partee. She was a brilliant linguist and even more wonderful human being. She lived to the age of 83. She will be missed.

If you’re one of us conditionals buffs, you know the famous footnote from Frank Ramsey’s article “General Propositions and Causality”:

If two people are arguing “If p will q?” and are both in doubt as to p, they are adding p hypothetically to their stock of knowledge and arguing on that basis about q; so that in a sense “If p, q” and “If p, not q” are contradictories. We can say that they are fixing their degrees of belief in q, given p. If p turns out false, these degrees of belief are rendered void. If either party believes not p for certain, the question ceases to mean anything to him except as a question about what follows from certain laws or hypothesis.

The first sentence of that footnote is now known as the Ramsey Test for the acceptability conditions of conditionals. The paper was written in 1929 and appeared posthumously (Ramsey died in 1930 at the age of 26) in 1931 in the collection The Foundations of Mathematics and other Logical Essays.

The Cambridge University DSpace archive contains a selection of Ramsey’s manuscripts and among them is the manuscript for “General Propositions and Causality”. The original of the Ramsey Test is on p.17 of the manuscript, which I reproduce here (click on the picture to download a full resolution pdf of the page):

How cool is that? For more on Ramsey, see D.H. Mellor’s biography article and the radio portrait that it was derived from, also in the Cambridge DSpace archive.