Chris Barker, Liz Camp, and Andy Egan
- Omicron update 14 January. As per Rutgers policy, the first two weeks of the seminar will be conducted purely remotely. If you would like to participate, in order for us to be able to provide you with access to the zoom meetings, you must send your first and last name and email address to Professor Camp as soon as possible, which will enable us to add you to Rutgers's Canvas instruction platform. We continue to look forward to having in-person interactions during the seminar sessions. However, we recognize that some people, for a variety of reasons, will have to participate via zoom. We expect that people who are local for the relevant session will participate in person as much as they reasonably and safely can. We'll continue to adjust as events unfold.
In this course we'll be concerned with questions about what kinds of theoretical resources we need in order to characterize states of conversations, and ways in which states of conversations evolve in response to various actions (especially utterances) by participants in the conversation.
One theme will be the attractions and limitations of "flat" models, according to which all we need is information, and in particular information that can be represented with a set of possible worlds. (Rather than something more dynamic or more complex.)
Another theme will be the relation(s) between the objects that we use to characterize conversational states and linguistic meanings and the psychological states of participants, speakers, and hearers.
Another theme will be questions about what line of work semantic theories are in: which phenomena are they properly accountable to? Which phenomena should we be trying to model with semantic theories? Why?
Some more specific questions and problems we'll look at:
- Updates that don't alter which possibilities are in the context set.
- Variations in the conversational status of different kinds of updates.
- Updates that aren't fixed by composition on conventional meaning.
- What kinds of connections between theory and... something else (psychological states of speakers? of hearers? something more complicated?)... ground the scope and explanatory relevance of linguistic theories? Semantic theories? Which details of those theories do they affect?
All participants must do the reading and post a comment/question on the class forum in advance of the class meeeting. The post must discuss something you genuinely don’t understand, and should be anchored in a specific part of the text. (Not a fancy counterexample or a general rant.)
The course is sponsored jointly by the Philosophy department at Rutgers New Brunswick and the Linguistics department at NYU. We will meet from 11:00 to 1:45 on Wednesdays, alternating between NYU, where we'll meet in room 103 at 10 Washington Place (the Linguistics building) and Rutgers, where we'll meet in the seminar room on the 5th floor of 106 Somerset Street (in the philosophy department). Both universities require vaccination for attendance, and require participants (registered or not) to complete forms verifying compliance.
Zoom stance: We strongly prefer in-person conversation, and hope and expect that participants will attend class physically when possible. That said, we recognize that some people will find it challenging to migrate between campuses. Please talk to us in advance to discuss virtual arrangements.
Work:
- Research option: 25 page response paper.
- Non-research option: 6 page focussed point or squib.
- Auditors are welcome, and are expected to do the reading and post comment/questions.
The operative schedule is now available as part of the Rutgers Canvas site, here.