Invited Talks
Patricia Blanchette (Notre Dame)
Title: Frege's Logical Objects
Abstract: TBC
John Campbell (UC Berkeley)
Title: Linear Time and the Shared Language
Abstract: TBC
Imogen Dickie (Toronto)
Title: Making Sense
Abstract: Giving full weight to the status of belief-formation as an activity opens up an alternative to extant neo-Fregean frameworks. I’ll lay out this alternative framework, and develop applications to the problem of empty names; the relationship between assertoric content and ingredient sense; and the problem of propositional unity.
Hannah Ginsborg (UC Berkeley)
Title: Is Speaking a Language a Rational Activity?
Abstract: TBC
Riki Heck (Brown)
Title: What is Compositionality?
Abstract: TBC
Daniel Isaacson (Oxford)
Title: Dummett's Argument that the Concept of Natural Number is Inherently Vague
Abstract: TBC
Ofra Magidor (Oxford)
Title: On Words and Names
Abstract: TBC
Christopher Peacocke (Columbia)
Title: Reconceiving Proof and the a priori: a Fourth Way
Abstract: TBC
Ian Rumfitt (Oxford)
Title: Alternative Questions and Logical Laws
Abstract: TBC
Peter Sullivan (Stirling)
Title: Is there any such thing as Fregean Ontology?
Abstract: In Chapter 14 of Frege: Philosophy of Language Dummett observed that when we pose the fundamental question of ontology, ‘What is there?’, our intention is to ask, ‘What kinds of thing are there?’; and from this he inferred that any approach to the question must be informed by an understanding of what the relevant kinds are. Dummett then suggested that Frege set a new course for ontological enquiry by establishing that the central ontological kinds are the logical categories that constitute the Fregean hierarchy, the categories of object, first-level concept, and so on. I will hold that this suggestion is mistaken. Moreover, that it is mistaken is, I will suggest, a consequence of a distinctive feature of Dummett’s own interpretation of Frege, namely the contrast he draws between simple and complex predicates, or more generally between expressions which contribute their meanings to the meanings of sentences they help to constitute, and those whose meaning is derivative from that of sentences in which they might be discerned. Dummett acknowledges that this distinction remains implicit in Frege’s works, essential for a correct understanding of his thought but hardly emphasized – indeed scarcely mentioned – by Frege himself. Although it is also discernible, in various half-formed guises, in Russell and the early Wittgenstein, it became fully explicit only in Ramsey. His treatment of it makes clear that the Fregean logical categories are not ontological categories at all, in that there is no stable, context-independent answer to the question of what falls under them. A consequence of this is that logical principles have a kind of generality distinct from that possessed by what Wittgenstein called ‘material generalizations’, generalizations over kinds of entities; and it is surely those to which ontology must attend.
Mark van Atten
Title: Dummett and Brouwer: Proximity and Distance
Abstract: TBC
Timothy Williamson (Oxford)
Title: Recognitional Capacities and their Uses
Abstract: TBC
Crispin Wright (Stirling)
Title: Dummett Against Classical Logic
Abstract: TBC