Workshop: Acquaintance, Familiarity & Value

The workshop Acquaintance, Familiarity & Value will take place at the University of Barcelona & University Pompeu Fabra on November 6-7th, 2025. 

We will explore topics surrounding the phenomenon of the “acquaintance inference" of aesthetic language. The use of aesthetic language to describe an object (e.g., predicates of personal taste, aesthetic adjectives, subjective attitude verbs) invites the inference that the speaker has first-hand acquaintance with that object. E.g., if I tell you that In a Roman Osteria is a wonderful painting, you are likely to assume that I have seen In a Roman Osteria. This seemingly trivial observation has intrigued linguists, aestheticians, and philosophers of language, especially in the last 10+ years (Pearson 2013, Ninan 2014, Franzén 2018, Anand & Korotkova 2018, Khoo 2024). Recently, researchers have turned their attention to other phenomena with similar features, e.g., the "practical opinionatedness" inference of moral predicates (Willer & Kennedy 2020), the familiarity inference triggered by verbs like ‘consider’ (Kennedy & Willer 2022), or acquaintance inferences triggered by other expressions, e.g. appearance predicates (Rudolph 2020).

PROGRAM:

DAY 1: Seminari de Filosofia (Room 4100), Facultat de Filosofia, University of Barcelona

• 10:30-10:45: Welcome

• 10:45-11:30: Nate Charlow (University of Toronto): Against Indeterminacy-Based Theories of Acquaintance

• 11:30-12:00 Coffee break offered by UB

• 12:00-12:45: Suchitra Srivastava (University of Burdwan): Emotionally Marked Acquaintance: Affective Authority and the Politics of First-Handness (online)

• 14:45-15:30: Nicolás Lo Guercio (CONICET-IFF): The acquaintance inference: the epistemic view revisited

• 15:30-16:15: Noa Buckle (University of Toronto): Failing to Find (online)

• 16:15-16:45 Coffee break offered by UB

• 16:45-18:00: Natasha Korotkova (Utrecht University): Refining "find": Experience, factivity, categorical judgment

DAY 2: Room 52.121, Roc Boronat Building, Poblenou Campus, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

• 10:45-11:30: Elin McCready (ICREA-UAB): Somatic Acquaintance

• 11:30-12:00 Coffee break offered by UPF

• 12:00-12:45: Jiayi Zhou (University of Connecticut): A Scale of Acquaintance Inferences in Mandarin Intensifiers

• 14:45-15:30: Natalia Karczewska (Warsaw Univerisity): Acquaintance as a norm for evaluative speech acts

• 15:30-16:15: Samuel Cantor (UT Austin): Evidentially expressive adjectives

• 16:45-18:00: Nils Franzén (Umeå University): On the experience requirement of certain mental states

Program chair & organization: 

• Andrés Soria Ruiz (Universitat de Barcelona)

Local organization

• Andrés Soria Ruiz, Teresa Marques, Lucía González Arias (U. Barcelona)

• Isidora Stojanovic, Morgan Moyer, Michelle Stankovic (U. Pompeu Fabra)

Advisory board:

• Teresa Marques (Universitat de Barcelona)

• Isidora Stojanovic (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

This workshop is generously funded by ERC Advanced Grant 'Valence Asymmetries: the positive, the negative, the good and the bad in language, mind and morality' (GA nº 101142133), research project 'New Paths in the Philosophy of Hybrid Representations' (PID2023-150569NB-I00), the Faculty of Philosophy and the Department of Philosophy of the University of Barcelona.

All enquiries should be addressed at [email protected].