CFP: The Unstructured Conference

The Unstructured Conference will take place at Rutgers University on 22-23 April 2016. We welcome submissions related to the conference theme–unstructured content– especially those addressing one or more of the research questions below. Submissions of anonymized abstracts of 500–1000 words for 45 minutes presentations should be made by 15 February 2016 to [email protected]. Notifications of acceptance will be sent in early March 2015. Some support for travel will be available.

Invited speakers: 

• Kit Fine
• Jeff King
• Sarah Murray
• John Perry
• Susanna Schellenberg
• Robert Stalnaker
• J. Robert G. Williams (by video conference)
• Stephen Yablo

Description: 

Conceptions of unstructured content take contents to be sets of possibilities, or circumstances, or conditions (or functions from such things to truth values). In recent years, a great variety of new conceptions of unstructured content have been developed and applied, often with great formal ingenuity. Debates on relativism and context-sensitivity more generally, on expressivism, de se attitudes, counterfactual attitudes, vagueness, truthmaker semantics, and many more bear witness to these developments. At the same time, not as much attention has been paid to the philosophical foundations of unstructured conceptions. 

In sharp contrast, proponents of structured propositions have recently spent a great amount of their time developing and clarifying the foundations of their conceptions in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. This conference encourages new reflexion on the foundations of unstructured conceptions of content, the availability of existing foundational stories to new technical conceptions, the competitiveness of unstructured conceptions vis-a-vis structured conceptions as well as the relationship between the two conceptions. It also aims to establish renewed dialogue between, on the one hand, proponents of structured conceptions and of unstructured conceptions and, on the other hand, between proponents of the various conceptions and applications of unstructured content.

(Non-exhaustive) list of topics:

• Foundations in philosophy of mind of conceptions of unstructured content
• Kinds of unstructured content \& the nature of representation
• Philosophical and / vs formal motivations for unstructured content
• What are the relationships between structured and unstructured conceptions of content? Competition? Complementation?
• Promiscuity on permissible sets of n-tuples: anything goes? (worlds-hyperplans, worlds-languages, worlds-standards of taste, …)
• What is it that gets characterised, or modelled, by a set of possibilities, or circumstances, or conditions?
• What are outstanding problems of fineness of grain?
• What progress has been made on the the problems of deduction / logical omniscience as they arise for unstructured content?
• The role of (unstructured) content in semantic theory
• Truthmaker semantics
• Notions of hyperintensionality with unstructured content
• Mental fragmentation/compartmentalisation
• Metaphysical foundations of unstructured content
• Possible worlds/points in the possibility-space: primitive or construed (e.g. out of structured things/sentences)?

Submission deadline: 15 February 2015

Submission format: 

Submissions of anonymous abstracts of 500-1000 words (exclusive bibliography),

prepared for anonymous peer-review, in pdf format should be sent to [email protected]. Authors will be notified of decisions in early March 2016. Please indicate in your email the title of your paper.

Organisers: Andy Egan (Rutgers), Dirk Kindermann (University of Graz)

Please direct all queries to [email protected].