Kolejny odczyt w ramach seminarium Znak-Język-Rzeczywistość (5 czerwca 2025)/The Next SLR Seminar Meeting (June 5, 2025)

Kolejny odczyt seminarium ZJR odbędzie się:

Czwartek, 5 czerwca 2025, 17.00

Andrea Raimondi (University of Bielefeld)
Marco Santambrogio (Università degli Studi di Parma

wygłosi odczyt:

Sherlock Holmes and the Queen of Chess

Abstrakt:

Two views are central to a widely accepted philosophical account of fiction: first, authors of fiction engage in pretense rather than assertion; second, there are fictional characters understood as abstract objects created by authors The paper’s critical section advances some objections: (i) these views are hard to reconcile, since pretense – not a proper speech act – does not seem capable of creating anything; (ii) the first view is incompatible with the thesis that names are directly referential; (iii) the second view struggles to account for the apparent truth of sentences like ‘Sherlock Holmes is a detective’ when used as reports of fiction, as they seem to involve category mistakes – attributing to abstract objects properties that do not appear applicable to them. The paper proposes a novel account grounded in two ubiquitous linguistic mechanisms: stipulation and meaning transfer. Authors perform speech acts of stipulation. A principle from Frege’s Begriffsschrift – which, we argue, governs all declarative speech acts – clarifies how the authors’ stipulations can give rise to truths: sentences first used stipulatively can later be truthfully asserted. This entails that ‘Sherlock Holmes is a detective’ truthfully reports what Conan Doyle stipulated and straightforwardly accounts for the creation of fictional characters.
To address the problem of the category mistake, we appeal to Nunberg’s notion of meaning transfer. In the report ‘Sherlock Holmes is a detective’, the predicate
undergoes a transfer: instead of picking out (as it ordinarily does) a property of people, it picks out a structurally analogous property of abstract objects. Our account places fiction within a broader and entirely new perspective encompassing phenomena seemingly unrelated to it, like perception and various
human artifacts, including games and political institutions. Finally, we compare our theory with recent proposals by Abell, and Bergman and Franzen.

Seminarium odbędzie się online, aby dołączyć do spotkania, prosimy o
skorzystanie z poniższych informacji:

Join Zoom Meeting
https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/j/92716044372?pwd=0l7PETAOwqQDBKTMCnheYQN7ag7zx1.1

Meeting ID: 927 1604 4372
Passcode: 697648

Strona seminarium (z orientacyjną listą spotkań):
http://pts.edu.pl/seminarium-2024-2025-seminar-2024-2025.html

Spotkanie otwiera się o 16:45, a wykład rozpoczyna się o 17:00.

Prezentacja będzie nagrywana.

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The next meeting of the Sign-Language-Reality seminar in the academic
year 2024/25 will take place:

Thursday, the 5th of June 2025, 17.00, Central European Time

Andrea Raimondi (University of Bielefeld)
Marco Santambrogio (Università degli Studi di Parma

will deliver a talk:

Sherlock Holmes and the Queen of Chess

Abstract:

Two views are central to a widely accepted philosophical account of fiction: first, authors of fiction engage in pretense rather than assertion; second, there are fictional characters understood as abstract objects created by authors The paper’s critical section advances some objections: (i) these views are hard to reconcile, since pretense – not a proper speech act – does not seem capable of creating anything; (ii) the first view is incompatible with the thesis that names are directly referential; (iii) the second view struggles to account for the apparent truth of sentences like ‘Sherlock Holmes is a detective’ when used as reports of fiction, as they seem to involve category mistakes – attributing to abstract objects properties that do not appear applicable to them. The paper proposes a novel account grounded in two ubiquitous linguistic mechanisms: stipulation and meaning transfer. Authors perform speech acts of stipulation. A principle from Frege’s Begriffsschrift – which, we argue, governs all declarative speech acts – clarifies how the authors’ stipulations can give rise to truths: sentences first used stipulatively can later be truthfully asserted. This entails that ‘Sherlock Holmes is a detective’ truthfully reports what Conan Doyle stipulated and straightforwardly accounts for the creation of fictional characters.
To address the problem of the category mistake, we appeal to Nunberg’s notion of meaning transfer. In the report ‘Sherlock Holmes is a detective’, the predicate
undergoes a transfer: instead of picking out (as it ordinarily does) a property of people, it picks out a structurally analogous property of abstract objects. Our account places fiction within a broader and entirely new perspective encompassing phenomena seemingly unrelated to it, like perception and various
human artifacts, including games and political institutions. Finally, we compare our theory with recent proposals by Abell, and Bergman and Franzen.

The seminar will be held online, to join the meeting, please use the
information below:

Join Zoom Meeting
https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/j/92716044372...
Meeting ID: 927 1604 4372
Passcode: 697648
Seminar website (with a tentative list of meetings):

http://pts.edu.pl/seminarium-2024-2025-seminar-2024-2025...

The meeting opens at 4:45 pm, the talk starts at 5 pm.

The presentation shall be recorded.