The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is pleased to welcome Rachel Goodman (Chicago, graduate student) for our first talk of the year.

`Do Acquaintance Theorists Have an Attitude Problem?’

DATE: October 14, 2011
TIME: 11:30-1:30pm
PLACE: Wieboldt 130

ABSTRACT: The traditional approach to singular thought involves the idea that there is a special epistemic relation—call it *acquaintance*—that underpins all cases in which an agent entertains a singular thought. However, the behaviour of attitude ascriptions poses a problem for this view: If attitude ascriptions that relate an agent to a singular content are true only in case in which that agent entertains that content (call this the tracking assumption for attitude ascriptions), then it appears that there is little to be said in the way of a unified theoretical account of acquaintance. I argue that the lesson we ought to learn from this is not, as has been proposed, that acquaintance is a looser and more diverse phenomenon than we might have originally thought or that singular thought does not require acquaintance at all, but rather that we should reject the tracking assumption for attitude ascriptions. I argue, furthermore, that there are reasons independent of considerations concerning singular thought to think that the tracking assumption is false.