How we do (not) talk about mistaken beliefs

The lexica of natural languages abundantly feature morphologically simple predicates that denote attitudes by which people get things right, for instance factive predicates like know. Yet, as far as we know, they do not regularly feature contrafactive predicates that denote attitudes by which people get things wrong. Indeed, it even remains an open question whether there are any morphologically simple predicates at all that mirror the truth-presupposition or entailment attested with know by having a falsity-presupposition or entailment. Cross-linguistic work has discussed a number of candidate contrafactive predicates (in Cantonese, Daakie. Dutch, German, Kipsigis, Mandarin, Spanish, Tagalog, Taiwanese Southern Min, Turkish, and Washo), but the data collected so far is insufficient to assess whether a no-contrafactive-universal is plausible. To address this, this workshop brings together researchers that are collecting or have collected relevant data from the world’s languages. A second open question is how the difference in the frequency of the two kinds of predicates can and should be explained. This question is not only relevant to linguists, but also to philosophers, as some explanations have significant linguistic and philosophical implications. Proposals that have been explored range from ontological explanations that predict a categorical difference (for instance that there are no suitable entities, ‘contrafacts’, for the complements of contrafactive predicates to denote) to learnability-based explanations that predict a mere difference in degree (e.g., that contrafactive predicates are harder to learn). But the explanations currently on offer still face difficult questions concerning their details and empirical coverage, and it even remains to be seen whether we should give a unified explanation or instead rely on a bunch of different factors. The second aim of this conference will thus be to compare existing explanations, to discuss alternatives that might improve on them, and what, if any, philosophical and linguistic implications follow from the best available explanations.

Confirmed speakers

Madeline Bossi (independent)
Lelia Glass (Georgia Tech)
Emily Hanink (Indiana University)
Richard Holton (University of Cambridge)
Mora Maldonado (University of Nantes)
William McGregor (Aarhus University)
Tom Roberts (Utrecht University) & Deniz Özyildiz (University of Konstanz)
Thorsten Sander (University of Duisburg-Essen)
David Strohmaier (University of Cambridge) & Simon Wimmer (HHU Duesseldorf)