The Relational Nature of Thought

UIC's Institute for the Humanities is sponsoring a two-day workshop on relationist approaches to content and cognitive significance.

The workshop will take place on Friday Sept 16th and Saturday Sept 17th. The speakers are: Rachel Goodman (Nebraska), Richard Heck (Brown), Dilip Ninan (Tufts), Ángel Pinillos (Arizona State), Gurpreet Rattan (Toronto), and William Taschek (Ohio State). A schedule will be posted here. The organizers are Mahrad Almotahari and Aidan Gray.

The workshop will explore broadly relationist notions of content in the philosophy of language and mind. Our plan is for the workshop to include discussion of both ‘formal’ varieties of relationism (theories which capture cognitive significance in terms of the formal relations among representational vehicles) and ‘semantic’ varieties (theories which capture cognitive significance in terms of primitive semantic notions of strict co-reference), and the relation between the two approaches (What are the substantive differences between the approaches? What are the benefits and drawbacks of each? Are they notational variants?). We  also hope to relate these issues to broader questions about the explanatory/evaluative role of content, the structure of content, and the relationship between content and representational vehicles.

Attendance at the workshop is free, but space is limited. Please email either Aidan Gray ([email protected]) or Mahrad Almotahari ([email protected]) if you would like to attend or have any questions.