Call for Abstracts: New Perspectives on Conventionalism

The members of the 'Categoricity by Convention' project at the University of Salzburg (www.categoricitybyconvention.org) are pleased to invite submissions for a workshop on linguistic conventionalism and related topics, broadly construed.

Conventionalist approaches to areas of discourse such as logic and mathematics were for many years almost universally rejected, but this appears to be changing. Recent years have seen the publication of significant works broadly in the conventionalist tradition, works that respond to objections previously thought to be fatal for conventionalism and that develop and defend views that either are explicitly conventionalist or at least are clearly indebted to historical conventionalist approaches. We aim to bring together philosophers working on topics related to conventionalism, its challenges, and its prospects for a workshop on these themes.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to) the analytic-synthetic distinction, analytic theories of the a priori, the nature of linguistic conventions, easy ontology and related deflationary approaches, theories of inference and rule-following, expressivist and pragmatist approaches to meaning, metasemantic inferentialism and its relationship to the possibility of truth by convention, and determinacy worries about logical and mathematical language.

Invited speakers:
Corine Besson (Sussex)
Luca Incurvati (ILLC, Amsterdam)
Hannes Leitgeb (MCMP, LMU Munich)
Benjamin Marschall (Cambridge)
Fredrik Nyseth (Tromsø)
Gil Sagi (Haifa)
Zeynep Soysal (Rochester)
Sebastian Speitel (Bonn)

Up to two additional talks will be selected from submitted abstracts.

To apply, please send an anonymized abstract (1000 words maximum excluding references, suitable for a 45-minute talk) to [email protected], with the words 'Conventionalism workshop' in the subject line.

Submission deadline: 30 May 2025

Selected speakers will be notified by 30 June 2025.

This is an in-person event. We will organize and cover the cost of accommodations for selected speakers.