29.04 Odczyt w ramach seminarium ZJR: Perspective-Shifting in Relativist Semantics

Zapraszamy na kolejny odczyt w ramach seminarium ZJR.

Warszawa, Krakowskie Przemieście 3, sala nr 4

Dan Zeman
(Uniwersytet Warszawski)

wygłosi odczyt:

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Warsaw, Krakowskie Przemieście 3 Street, room nr 4

Dan Zeman
(University of Warsaw)

will deliver a talk:

Predicates of taste are perspectival, in the sense that they require a perspective to be supplied for their semantic interpretation. Although most of the time predicates of taste are used with the speaker’s perspective as default (as in (1)), the perspective can be shifted by using a predicate from someone else’s point of view (see Lasersohn’s “exocentric” vs. “autocentric” uses) or via explicit “for”-phases, quantifiers or attitude and speech verbs (as in (2)-(6)):

(1) Licorice is tasty,
(2) Licorice is tasty for Anne.
(3) Everyone got something tasty. (Schaffer 2011)
(4) Alicia believes/thinks/etc. that licorice is tasty.
(5) Helen finds licorice tasty.
(6) Mary said that licorice is tasty.

The combination of autocentric and exocentric uses of predicates of taste gives rise to perspectival plurality: the existence of readings of sentences containing them in which appeal to two different perspectives is needed. The phenomenon is present with sentences in which the predicates of taste are not modified (as in (7)), but also when embedded within “for”-phrases, quantifiers and attitude verbs (as in (8)-(10)):

(7) At Halloween, Johnny played a silly prank and had a lot of tasty licorice
(8) Licorice is tasty for Anne, but not for Bob.
(9) At Halloween, every kid played a silly prank and had a lot of tasty licorice.
(10) The mother snipe thinks the ugliest baby birds are beautiful. (Sæbø 2013)

In this paper I tackle the issue of what is the best way to handle perspective-shifting in a relativist framework, with the explicit aim of providing a unified relativistic account of all shifting phenomena. To this end, I explore two possibilities: i) an “intensional” approach, according to which all shifters are treated as intensional operators; ii) an “extensional” approach according to which all shifters are treated as variadic operators. Neither of these two accounts, however, has taken perspectival plurality into consideration. Relying on previous work, I argue that the best way to account for this phenomenon is by introducing a sequence of parameters for perspectives (a version of relativism which I dub “Multiple Indexing Relativism”). The paper addresses various formal and philosophical challenges for this version concerning issues like how do the lexical entries for predicates of taste change, whether new compositional rules are needed, what implications do the new type of (relative) contents have for asserting or believing and so on.

The list of this year’s seminar meetings is available at:
http://pts.edu.pl/seminarium-2021-2022.html
Sign-Language-Reality seminars are organized jointly by the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Warsaw and Polish Semiotic Society.