Dorit Bar-On’s paper “Pragmatically Intermediate Protolanguage” will appear in a volume titled Evolutionary Pragmatics.

The final draft of a volume co-authored by ECOM director Dorit Bar-On and Crispin Wright, entitled Expression and Self-Knowledge has just been submitted to Wiley. It will appear in their Great Debates series in late 2023.

Dear ECOM community,

Just trying to get the word out about a seminar that I’ll be holding in the spring (Wed 12:30-3:20) that may be of interest to some in the community. Please feel free to share with anyone who may be interested!

Course Title: (PSYC 5570) Language and Thought: From sound symbolism to abstract concepts

Course Description: How does language shape thought? Are there thoughts that we cannot have without the support of language? Can the language you speak (or sign) affect what and how you think? In this seminar we will explore the relationship between language and thought, touching on topics like sound symbolism (do some sounds naturally tend to be associated with certain meanings?), how labels shape conceptual development (and perhaps help us form concepts we would otherwise not have), and more broadly, linguistic relativity (e.g., the relationship between language and perception).

Time: Wednesdays 12:30-3:20 PM

More info can be found here (and this is a dynamic page which I will be adding more info to).

Happy new year!

Dimitris Xygalatas published an amazing book, Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, from Hachette. Congratulations Dimitris!

Bill’s new paper “What Is It We Touch?,” will appear in Sensory Individuals (Oxford).

Drew Johnson started his new job at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Congratulations Drew!

Mitch Green has three new papers!

-‘Dimensions of Commitment & the Abuse of Illocutionary Norms in Public Discourse,’ is forthcoming in Topoi.

– ‘Should Speech Act Theory Eschew Propositions?’ is forthcoming in L. Cepollaro and P. Labinaz (eds.) Sbisà on Speech as Action (Palgrave Macmillan).

– ‘What Might Machines Mean?’ (with J. Michel) Minds and Machines 32(2022), pp. 323-38. (This addresses the question whether machines can perform speech acts (and not just acts of speech)).

Congratulations Mitch!

Our member Benjamin Winokur who received his PhD from York University in 2021, will be Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Ashoka University for the 2022-2023 academic year.

One of our members, Drew Johnson, will be defending his dissertation titled “A Hybrid Theory of Ethical Thought and Discourse” on April 8, between 11 AM – 1 PM, in the UCHI Conference Room (Babbidge 4-209), which will also be broadcasted. The abstract of his work and the event link is below. Good luck Drew!

Abstract: What is it that we are doing when we make ethical claims and judgments, such as the claim that we morally ought to do what we can to assist refugees? This dissertation introduces and defends a novel theory of ethical thought and discourse. I begin by identifying the surface features of ethical thought and discourse to be explained, including the realist and cognitivist (i.e. belief-like) appearance of ethical judgments, and the apparent close connection between making a sincere ethical judgment and being motivated to act on it. I examine prominent attempts to explain these features, with a focus on recent ‘hybrid’ theories combining elements of expressivism and cognitivism. Despite their initial promise, I argue that extant hybrid theories are nevertheless committed to problematic semantic, metasemantic, or pragmatic assumptions. I then develop what I take to be the strongest existing option, ethical neo-expressivism (Bar-On and Chrisman 2009; Bar-On, Chrisman, and Sias 2014), into an explicitly hybrid theory proposing that ethical judgments incorporate both motivationally-charged affective states and moral beliefs. I further develop this account by developing a theory of the proper function (following Millikan 1984) of ethical claims and judgments, arguing that they function simultaneously to track the morally salient features of social situations, and to coordinate our behavior around these features. Finally, I defend one of the cognitivist commitments of the theory – namely, that objective moral knowledge is possible – by applying recent work on the epistemology of fundamental or ‘core’ intellectual commitments (Lynch 2012; Pritchard 2016) to the moral realm.

Dissertation title: “A Hybrid Theory of Ethical Thought and Discourse”

Committee: Dorit Bar-On (chair), Michael Lynch, William Lycan, Paul Bloomfield.

Dissertation in philosophy.

Nimra published his paper at Synthese! The paper is titled “Minimal Theory of Mind – A Millikanian Approach”. Congratulations Nimra!