Syntactic Arguments in the Contextualism/Relativism Debate

DESCRIPTION

Syntactic arguments have played an important role in the debate between contextualism and relativism about a variety of natural language expressions - predicates of taste, aesthetic and moral terms, epistemic modals, etc. Phenomena like binding, licensing, control, etc. have been taken to support contextualism about such expressions (e.g., Glanzberg (2007), Schaffer (2011), Snyder (2013)). On the other hand, relativists like Lasersohn (2009, 2014) have argued that embeddings under certain (factive) attitude verbs and modification by certain adverbs favor their view. Finally, a classic argument - the so-called "operator argument" found in Lewis (1980) and Kaplan (1989) - has also been invoked in support of relativism (Kölbel (2009)). The operator argument has been heavily contested (e.g., King (2003), Cappelen & Hawthorne (2009), Fritz, Hawthorne & Yli-Vakkuri (2018)). This workshop purports to assess the viability and dialectical role of these arguments and to bring to light new ways of approaching them.

Among the main questions tackled by the presentations at the workshop are the following:
- How successful are the arguments against relativism based on syntactic considerations (binding, licensing, control, etc.)?
- What relativist accounts of these phenomena are there?
- What other relevant syntactic phenomena can be brought to bear on the debate? Etc.
- Is there a successful version of the "operator argument"?

ORGANIZATION

The workshop is part of the project Semantic Relativism about Perspectival Expressions: A Reassessment and Defense
(OPUS 17 project no. 2019/33/B/HS1/01269) and is organized by Dan Zeman with the support of the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Warsaw. Please write to danczeman[at]gmail.com if you want to participate.


PROGRAM
(All times are in CEST)

9.50: Welcome
10.00-11.00: Michael Glanzberg (Rutgers University), "Experiencers in Taste and the Status of Obliques"
11.10-12.10: John Collins (University of East Anglia), "Variables: The very Idea"
Lunch break
13.30-14.30: Isidora Stojanovic (CNRS/Institut Jean Nicod), "New Findings on FIND-embeddings"
14.40-15.40: Brian Rabern (University of Edinburgh), "Operators and Relativism"
15.50-16.50: Eno Agolli (Rutgers University), "Radical Schmentencism"