The Konstanz 2025 Workshop on Normative Generics

The Konstanz 2025 Workshop on Normative Generics:

Linguistic and Philosophical Perspectives of Normative Generics, Scripts, and Stereotypes.   Normative generics are generic sentences like their descriptive counterparts, but rather than merely describing a kind of generalization, their meanings are said to have a distinctively more normative flavor. How the meanings of normative and descriptive generics differ, and the source of the normative flavor, is a matter of intense debate, and further complicates the already challenging landscape of existing accounts of generics.   The difference between descriptive and normative generics has been observed in important work going back to the 1970s (cf. especially Lawler or Burton-Roberts), with other significant work following some decades later (Carlson, Greenberg, Cohen, a.o.). Work by Leslie brought the topic to particular prominence in the last decade, particularly in philosophy.   This workshop addresses open questions in the analysis of normative generics--pertaining to their semantics, their pragmatics, their discourse functions, and the kinds of cognition that might underpin their use. We are particularly interested in how various kinds of social cognition provide explanatory tools for understanding aspects of their use (e.g., in recent work by Berio & Musholt, Hesni, a.o.)  

Date: Thursday and Friday, May 22-23, 2025

Location: University of Konstanz/ Zukunftskolleg  

Speakers:

Elin McCready (ICREA; U.A. Barcelona)

Hana Filip (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)

Gen Eickers (Osnabrück University)

Frank Veltman (University of Amsterdam)

Leda Berio (Ruhr University Bochum)

Alda Mari (Institut Jean Nicod/ CNRS)

Samia Hesni (Boston University)

Manfred Krifka (ZAS)  

Organized by: Hadil Karawani (University of Konstanz) Daniel Skibra (University of Konstanz)   The workshop will be in-person only, but is open for participants who would like to attend. We ask that you register by May 16th if you intend to join us.   

More information (including information on how to register) is available on the website: www.knormgens.weebly.com   This workshop is made possible by a generous grant from the Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz.