Please join us this Friday as Thomas Grano (Linguistics, Indiana University) presents work on intention reports.
Date and time: Friday, November 11, 11:00 a.m. – 12:50 p.m.
Location: Stuart 209 (Philosophy seminar room)
Title: A progress report on intention reports
Abstract:
Unlike belief and desire reports, intention reports (e.g., “John intends to leave soon”) are not well studied in formal semantics. In this talk I report on my recent efforts to begin filling this gap, focusing on empirical similarities and differences that intention reports bear in relation to other attitude reports and to other expressions that involve intentional action. I show that these empirical properties follow from the view that an intention report “a intends p” denotes true iff “a” has a maximally ranked ACTION-RELEVANT or EFFECTIVE PREFERENCE (in the sense of Condoravdi and Lauer 2016) that “a” bears the RESPONSIBILITY relation (in the sense of Farkas 1988) to “p”. I close with some preliminary thoughts on how this study might inform a larger discussion about what kinds of meanings are and are not possible for natural language attitude predicates.
[References]
Condoravdi, Cleo, and Sven Lauer. 2016. Anankastic conditionals are just conditionals. Semantics & Pragmatics 9:1–61.
Farkas, Donka F. 1988. On obligatory control. Linguistics and Philosophy 11:27– 58.
A draft of the paper on which the talk is based can be found here: