1st Annual UConn Philosophy Graduate Conference (on Realism and Anti-Realism)

The Philosophy Graduate Student Association at the University of Connecticut is proud to announce its first annual graduate conference in philosophy, to be held 8 November 2014. The topic of this year's conference is the debate between Realism and Anti-realism. We're pleased to announce that Sharon Street (NYU) will be our keynote speaker.

In the first chapter of Crispin Wright's seminal book Truth and Objectivity he identifies three paradigms of the realism/anti-realism debate which we might call:

1. Semantic realism: The claim that the truth of some given propositions are determined independently of any standard given by us or any ability to be verified by us.
2. Entity realism: The claim that there are actually entities which can be the referent of our statements about some domain and thus make those statements true.
3. Factual realism: The claim that assertions have substantial truth conditions, i.e. are capable of being (substantially) true or false.

These three paradigms allow us to identify at least three ways to be an anti-realist about some domain, corresponding to the above three paradigms: constructivism, fictionalism and noncognitivism.

We welcome papers on the type of debate between realism and anti-realism covered above in any area of philosophy, including but not limited to: moral philosophy, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophy of language and philosophy of mathematics. Talks will be 30 minutes long, so please keep submissions to 3500 words or less.

Submission Deadline
September 1st 2014.

Submissions will be blind reviewed. Please submit a PDF and RTF of your document
    Note: .doc and .docx will not be accepted.

Please include a cover letter with your paper including your name (please initial your name for the blind process, e.g. J.J. Smith), institution, and email, paper title, paper word count, and an abstract for the paper.

Send submissions and any questions to: [email protected].