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CANCELED- Colloquium by Chris Kennedy (Chicago) (RESCHEDULED): Expressing experience:  Not necessarily 'stoned', but 'beautiful'

Christopher Kennedy
April 3, 2020
3:55PM - 5:15PM
Oxley Hall 103

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Add to Calendar 2020-04-03 15:55:00 2020-04-03 17:15:00 CANCELED- Colloquium by Chris Kennedy (Chicago) (RESCHEDULED): Expressing experience:  Not necessarily 'stoned', but 'beautiful' This event has been canceled due to travel restrictions related to COVID-19.   It has been frequently observed in the literature that assertions of sentences containing  predicates of personal taste like 'tasty' and 'fun' give rise to an acquaintance inference that is not present in assertions of sentences containing non-subjective predicates. An utterance of "sea urchin is tasty," for example, implies that the speaker has first-hand  experience of the taste of sea urchin, but an utterance of "sea urchin is orange" does not imply first-hand experience of the color of sea urchin. The goal of this talk is to develop and defend an expressivist-inspired account of this phenomenon: acquaintance inferences arise because plain sentences containing subjective predicates are designed to express distinguished kinds of mental states, which differ from beliefs in that they can only be acquired by undergoing certain experiences. Our account is rooted in a fundamentally descriptivist semantics, with the expressive component emerging out of a generalization of the felicity conditions on assertion, and so does not run afoul of traditional objections to expressivism. We show that the resulting framework accounts for a range of data surrounding acquaintance inferences, as well as for striking parallels between acquaintance inferences in subjective predication and the kind of considerations that have fueled expressivist accounts of moral and aesthetic language. Oxley Hall 103 Department of Linguistics linguistics@osu.edu America/New_York public

This event has been canceled due to travel restrictions related to COVID-19.

 

It has been frequently observed in the literature that assertions of sentences containing  predicates of personal taste like 'tasty' and 'fun' give rise to an acquaintance inference that is not present in assertions of sentences containing non-subjective predicates. An utterance of "sea urchin is tasty," for example, implies that the speaker has first-hand  experience of the taste of sea urchin, but an utterance of "sea urchin is orange" does not imply first-hand experience of the color of sea urchin. The goal of this talk is to develop and defend an expressivist-inspired account of this phenomenon: acquaintance inferences arise because plain sentences containing subjective predicates are designed to express distinguished kinds of mental states, which differ from beliefs in that they can only be acquired by undergoing certain experiences. Our account is rooted in a fundamentally descriptivist semantics, with the expressive component emerging out of a generalization of the felicity conditions on assertion, and so does not run afoul of traditional objections to expressivism. We show that the resulting framework accounts for a range of data surrounding acquaintance inferences, as well as for striking parallels between acquaintance inferences in subjective predication and the kind of considerations that have fueled expressivist accounts of moral and aesthetic language.

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