The Departments of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Chicago will host a two-day workshop, May 19-20, 2017, that aims to bring together recent innovations and novel perspectives on the phenomenon of subjectivity in language and thought. Submission deadline: January 2, 2017. The workshop website with submission guidelines and more info about the workshop is here.
Expressions whose meaning have a distinctly subjective dimension – most notably predicates of personal taste — have received increased attention by linguists and philosophers in the last decade or so. In addition to the extensively debated phenomenon of “faultless disagreement,” the fact that across languages certain attitude verbs such as English ‘find’ require their complement to be subjective in a distinct way raises unique conceptual and empirical challenges to a comprehensive theory of natural language meaning. Several researchers have explored issues about subjective expressions beyond their significance for the relativism-vs-contextualism debate that is so prominent in linguistics and philosophy of language, including: the types of subjective meanings that natural languages encode, the subjective dimensions of modality, and the evidential dimension of subjective predicates and attitude verbs. The aim of this workshop is to continue this trend by bringing together innovative perspectives on subjective language and thought in an interdisciplinary setting.