Metametaphysics and Semantics

null, null, null, Franz Berto (University of Amsterdam)

Timothy Williamson (Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University) will give an online talk presenting an original view on Metametaphysics and Semantics on June 10 at 6pm (CET).
The talk will be chaired by Francesco Berto (Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of St. Andrews and visiting professor at USI) .
Title of the talk: ‘Metametaphysics and Semantics’. The talk will be held both on Zoom and Facebook. To receive the link to the Zoom meeting, you can either send a message to our Facebook page or write an email to [email protected]. Join us!
Have a look at the abstract of the talk: Intensional semantics threatens to trivialize metaphysics by making all sentences expressing necessary truths, including trivial tautologies, express the same proposition. This threat can be found in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and in more recent work by Stalnaker and Hirsch. It is quite different from epistemologically sourced critiques of metaphysics such as the logical positivists’. Hyperintensional responses invoking Russellian propositions, Fregean thoughts, impossible worlds, or other devices do not get to the root of the problem; nor do metalinguistic reinterpretations of metaphysical claims. The basic problem is not specific to necessary and impossible propositions. It is that matters of cognitive significance such as triviality and non-triviality are irreducibly sensitive to the vehicles of content (e.g. sentences in contexts) as well as to the contents themselves. Fine-grained accounts of metaphysical inquiry must therefore track vehicles as well as contents. Scapegoating intensional semantics is a misdiagnosis. This talk is part of the Lugano Philosophy Colloquia - a series of events organised by:
- Master in Philosophy at USI
- Ratio - philosophical association 
- Istituto di Studi Filosofici, Lugano