Wolfgang Huemer (Parma)
MON MAR 19 — 15.00-17.00
Sala "Enzo Paci" — Direzione del Dipartimento (Via Festa del Perdono 7, Milano)
Fiction: Neither Ornament, nor Instrument – but Practice
The contemporary debate in the philosophy of literature is strongly shaped by the anti-cognitivist challenge, according to which works of literary fiction (that contain propositions that are neither literally true nor affirmed by the author) cannot impart (relevant) knowledge to the readers or enrich their worldly understanding. Anti-cognitivists appreciate works of literary fiction for their aesthetic values and so risk to reduce them to mere ornaments that are entertaining, but eventually useless.
Many philosophers have reacted to this challenge by pointing at ways in which works of literary fiction can be informative even though they lack worldly reference: it has been argued, for example, that fictions work like thought experiments; that they add not to our theoretical knowledge, but to our know-how or to our phenomenal knowledge; or that that they help readers to understand the perspectives of others. A stubborn defense of literary cognitivism, however, risks to collapse into an instrumental understanding of literature.
In my paper I will suggest that both sides in the debate focus too narrowly on semantic features of the works in question and that a shift perspective is needed. For one, we ought to fully appreciate that the term “literature” does not refer to a homogeneous phenomenon, but rather to a very heterogeneous and multifarious set of works that are read by many different readers for many different reasons in many different ways. Second, we need to understand that these works have in common much more than the semantic peculiarity of lacking worldly reference: they are a unique means of communication between authors and readers – and in particular the role of the latter is often neglected in contemporary debate. These two points should help us to get a more comprehensive understanding of the practice of literature and the vast range of values we can find works of literary fiction – and the interplay between them.
Max Kölbel (Vienna)
MON MAR 26 — 11.00-13.00
Sala "Enzo Paci" — Direzione del Dipartimento (Via Festa del Perdono 7, Milano)
Conversational Score and Harmful Speech
We are all aware that it is possible to harm someone by linguistic utterances, for example by slander or insult. In this talk, I shall examine the possibilities that the Stalnaker-Lewis framework of conversational analysis offers for explaining the nature of such harm. I shall look at some cases of derogatory speech and argue that there are at least two types of harm that can be done. One depends on the social significance afforded to the conversational score by the conversationalists, the other consists in the contribution to maintaining linguistic means that are designed to do the first kind of harm. I finally draw some tentative conclusions in the applied ethics of speech.
Massimiliano Vignolo (Genova)
MON APR 16 — 15.00-17.00
Sala "Enzo Paci" — Direzione del Dipartimento (Via Festa del Perdono 7, Milano)
Testare empiricamente le teorie del riferimento: alcuni problemi
In “Semantics, cross-cultural style” (Cognition 2004) Machery et al. hanno attaccato la teoria causale del riferimento di Kripke sostenendo che essa non è empiricamente giustificata. L’articolo di Machery et al. ha acceso un forte dibattito sulla metodologia dei filosofi del linguaggio. In questo intervento si discutono alcuni aspetti controversi degli esperimenti che sono stati usati per mettere in discussione la teoria causale del riferimento.
Dorothy Edgington (Birkbeck, London)
MON MAY 14 — 15.00-17.00
Sala "Enzo Paci" — Direzione del Dipartimento (Via Festa del Perdono 7, Milano)
Counterfactuals and Indeterminacy
Many counterfactuals seem to have no determinate truth value, and yet are easily judged to be probable or improbable, for instance: 'If you had picked a red ball it would have had a red spot (when 90% of the red balls have black spots); 'If I had approached, the dog would have attacked me'; 'If you had had the operation, you would have been cured'. I consider a way of treating this indeterminacy, which can also be applied to vague statements, and show that it is compatible with the conditionals having truth conditions, although it is often indeterminate what their truth value is.