Conflation: logic and application

David Ripley (University of Connecticut)

Abstract: Thinking seriously about conflation---treating distinct things as one---has the potential to open up new avenues in the philosophy of language. In this talk, I'll give a brief outline of the phenomenon, offer one way to capture it in a logical system, and sketch how this can be used to give us novel defenses both of "tolerant" accounts of vague language and "semantic" accounts of slurs.