Summer School on Truthmaker Semantics

About the Summer School

The 2022 Summer School on truthmakers semantics organised by the University of Italian Switzerland will be held in Lugano, Switzerland, from June 13 to June 17, 2022. It is open to graduate students and early career researchers. The morning sessions will be taught by Kit Fine (NYU); the afternoon session by Martin Glazier (Geneva). Further activities will also be organized.

During the summer school, participants will be using a pre-publication copy of the book on truthmaker semantics that Kit Fine is co-authoring with Mark Jago.

Programme

The course will provide the students with an overview of truthmaker semantics with special attention to some particular applications. It will begin with a comparison of three forms of truth-conditional semantics: possible worlds semantics, situation semantics and truthmaker semantics. It will then lay down the basic framework of the truthmaking approach. Here, the notions of a state space, of conjunctive and disjunctive part and of exact, inexact and loose verification will be introduced. The remainder of the course will be devoted to applications of the framework to such topics as counterfactuals, deontic logic and scalar implicature.

Dates and title of the sessions

13/06/21 Varieties of Truth-conditional semantics compared: possible worlds semantics; situation semantics; truthmaker semantics.

14/06/21 Basic framework of truthmaker semantics: state space; truth-maker clauses; notions of entailment.

15/06/21 Application to counterfactuals.

16/06/21 Applications to deontic logic and deontic revision.

17/06/21 Some linguistic applications: scalar implicature; free choice; negation.

How to apply

It is necessary to send a copy of the CV, a one-page motivation letter and a reference letter from a supervisor or colleague to [email protected].
The deadline for applications is January 15, 2022.