Alien Structure Workshop

The Alien Structure Workshop will consist of eight talks, four of which will be given by invited speakers, and four of which will be filled via open call. Selection will be based on anonymous review of long abstracts (750-1000 words).

The main themes of the workshop will be these: What sorts of languages can there be? More specifically, what sorts of semantic differences can there be between languages? Can there be alien languages – languages whose expressions have semantic functions radically different from those of expressions of familiar languages? This is relevant to metaphysics. Might some such unfamiliar languages better represent reality? Might reality have alien structure that can only be fully captured by such a language?

The workshop will be held as part of the Alien Structure research project, which is funded by the Swedish Research Council. Researchers within the project are Matti Eklund (principal investigator) and Daniel Berntson (postdoc). For more information, see the following link (https://www.filosofi.uu.se/research/research-projects/alien-structure/).