Kate Arnold and Dorit Bar-On’s paper, “Primate Pragmatics, Expressive Behavior, and The Evolution of Language” will appear in May 2020, in a special issue of Animal Behavior and Cognition.

Ryo Tanaka is the 2020 recipient of the Ruth Garrett Millikan Graduate Research Fellowship. The Fellowship will enable Ryo to devote the summer to completing two chapters of his dissertation, which is entitled, ‘Semantic Knowledge as Expressive Know-How’. His major advisor is Dorit Bar-On. For more information about the Ruth Garrett Millikan Fellowship, please visit here.

Connecticut Institute for Brain and Cog. Sciences will host their annual Meet and Speak Event on March 28 in Oak Hall 101. Our ECOM Coordinator, Aliyar Ozercan will give short talk on Mental states and language development. 

Here is the program of the event:

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One of the most active members of ECOM, Drew Johnson, will be giving a talk with the title, “The Proper Function of Ethical Judgment: Towards a Biosemantic Theory of Ethical Thought and Discourse” at the North Carolina Philosophical Society meeting on March 27-28 at UNC Asheville. Go Drew!

Our director, Dorit Bar-On, has received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship for next year for completion of her book. The title of her project is the same as ECOM: “Expression, Communication, and Origins of Meaning” and it aims to develop her her neo-expressivist approach to the issue of continuities and discontinuities between animal communication and human language. Congrats Dorit!

ECOM director Dorit Bar-On has been invited to give a keynote address at the annual conference of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology (ESPP) 2020 (31st August – 3rd September 2020) in Leipzig, Germany. The aim of the Society is to promote interaction between philosophers, psychologists, and linguists on issues of common concern. ESPP is a great interdisciplinary venue. ECOM members are encouraged to submit papers to this conference – submissions will be solicited beginning in January 2020, so stay tuned!

1. Our Meet & Greet/ECOM Welcome will take place over refreshments Fri September 13, 3:30-5:00 at the UCHI Seminar Room (Babbidge Library, 4th floor). Come hear recipients of the ECOM 2019 summer fellowships (Ryo, Ken, Aliyar, Eno, and Drew) tell about their summer projects.
2. Reading group: We’ll be reading a recent book, Transparent Self-Knowledge (OUP, 2018) by Alex Byrne (MIT), We’ll be meeting on the following Thursdays 12:15-1:30 at the Philosophy seminar room, Manchester 227: Sept 5, 19; Oct 10, 24; Nov 7, 14. If you’d like to participate, please let Aliyar (aliyar.ozercan@uconn.edu) know. Once we have a list of participants, Dorit will send participants summary notes on the book (prepared by ECOM research specialist Teresa Allen).
3. Prof. Byrne will be an ECOM guest and will meet reading group members on Nov 15 over lunch. On Nov 15, 4 pm Prof. Byrne will also be giving a keynote talk opening ECOM’s Inaugural Graduate Conference “Kinds of Knowledge” Nov 15-16. Kristin Andrews (York) will give a second keynote talk on Saturday. See details at PhilEvents. We will need help selecting papers, hosting graduate student speakers, chairing sessions, etc. Please let us know if you’re available to help.
4. This year we’re introducing a new series “ECOM SPOTLIGHT”, featuring ECOM faculty members who will present their current work to the ECOM community. This Fall, Prof. Emily Myers will give a talk on Thurs Oct 17, 12-1:30 Arjona 307, and Prof. Eiling Yee will give a talk on Thurs Dec 5, 12-1:30 Arjona 307.
5. Also, please mark your calendars, May 13-15! We’ll have a major conference, Expression, Language, and Music (ELM) to celebrate our 10th anniversary. We now have the following invited speakers: Tecumseh Fitch (Biology, Vienna), Kathleen Higgins (Philosophy, Austin TX), Ray Jackendoff (Linguistics, Tufts), Jerrold Levinson (Philosophy, Maryland), Lisa Margulis (Music Cognition, Princeton), Isabelle Peretz (Psychology, Montreal), David Poeppel (Neuroscience, NYU), Ljiliana Progovac (Linguistics, Wayne State).

Our member, Ryo Tanaka gave a talk at the 7th Nagoya Meta-Philosophy Workshop on August 9th in Japan, titled “Does Linguistic Understanding Require Knowledge of Meaning?”.

One of the most active members of our group, Drew Johnson, will give a talk titled “Deep Disagreement, Hinge Commitments, and Intellectual Humility” at the 2019 meeting of the Alabama Philosophical Society, September 27-28. 

Good luck, Drew!

Our member, Phillip Barron has been awarded one of the Outstanding Student Paper awards for his paper submitted to the American Society of Aesthetics conference in October. See the link below.

https://aesthetics-online.org/news/462297/Outstanding-Student-Papers-Named.htm

The paper, “The role of poetry in Daoist texts,” was his seminar paper for Alexus McLeod’s graduate seminar on Early Chinese Philosophy from last fall.

Congrats, Phil!