UConn Meaning Group

Space is limited. Please RSVP below. After the event, join us for a reception in the Dodd Lounge.

_______________

In Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, Jason Stanley, Ph.D., makes an urgent, fact-intensive call on behalf of democracy, showing it requires what is now being threatened: a common understanding of reality; a shared view of what has happened, that informs ordinary citizens’ decisions about what should happen, now and in the future. Authoritarians, he shows, have learned from the past and present how to attack this shared understanding, seeking to separate us from our own history to destroy our self-understanding and leave us unmoored, resentful, and confused. By setting us against each other, he writes, authoritarians represent themselves as the sole solution.

In authoritarian countries, critical examination of those nations’ history and traditions is discouraged if not an outright danger to those who do it. And it is no accident that local and global institutions of education have become a battleground, the authoritarian right’s tip of the spear, where learning and efforts to upend a hierarchal status quo can be put to end by coercion and threats of violence.

In Erasing History, Stanley exposes the true danger of the authoritarian right’s attacks on education, identifies their key tactics and funders, and traces their intellectual roots. He illustrates how fears of a fascist future have metastasized, from hypothetical threat to present reality. And he shows that hearts and minds are won in our schools and universities—places that democratic societies across the world are now ill-prepared to defend against today’s fascist assault. Deeply informed and urgently needed, Erasing History is a global call to action for those who wish to preserve democracy—in America and abroad—before it is too late.

_______________

This event is the public keynote address of a workshop on ‘Sustaining Human Rights in the Face of Far-Right Extremism.’

Manisha Sinha, James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History (UConn), will provide comments. Rolf Frankenberger, Director of the Institute for Research on Far-Right Extremism (University of Tübingen) will moderate.

It is sponsored by the Connecticut-Baden Württemburg Human Rights Research Consortium, the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute, UConn Philosophy, and the Office of Global Affairs.  

_______________

The Social Epistemology Working Group (Also known as SEW or the SEWing Circle) investigates philosophical issues at the intersection of epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of technology and AI, and social and political philosophy. Activities include research presentations, reading groups, and external speakers.

Understanding Unfreedom
Much political philosophy theorizes ideals of justice, freedom, equality. But our current world is in many ways not ideal. When we look around us, we see injustice, unfreedom, inequality. These phenomena do not merely seem temporary blips on our way toward achieving ideals. They seem, instead, relatively permanent features of our world. What might a political philosophy look like that began from those phenomena, from the shape of our existing world? Beginning from unfreedom, I argue, directs philosophical theorizing toward a) explanation of the forces that keep things as they are, and b) imagination of how things might be changed, through c) the exercise of collective agency. Political philosophy in this way becomes more closely connected to issues in moral psychology and to existential questions about the relation of human beings to each other and to the world.

Join us for a talk in the Logic Colloquium by

Yale Weiss (CUNY Graduate Center):

“A relevant framework for barriers to entailment”

In her recent book, Russell (2023) examines various so-called “barriers to entailment”, including Hume’s law, roughly the thesis that an ‘ought’ cannot be derived from an ‘is’. Hume’s law bears an obvious resemblance to the proscription on fallacies of modality in relevance logic, which has traditionally formally been captured by the so-called Ackermann property. In the context of relevant modal logic, this property might be articulated thus: no conditional whose antecedent is box-free and whose consequent is box-prefixed is valid (for the connection, interpret box deontically). While the deontic significance of Ackermann-like properties has been observed before, Russell’s new book suggests a more broad-scoped formal investigation of the relationship between barrier theses of various kinds and corresponding Ackermann-like properties. In this talk, I undertake such an investigation by elaborating a general relevant bimodal logical framework in which several of the barriers Russell examines can be given formal expression. I then consider various Ackermann-like properties corresponding to these barriers and prove that certain systems satisfy them. Finally, I respond to some objections Russell makes against the use of relevance logic to formulate Hume’s law and related barriers.

https://logic.uconn.edu/calendar/

All welcome!

Mark Jary is currently a María Zambrano Research Fellow at the Department of Linguistics and Basque Studies in the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). He is also Emeritus Professor in Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Roehampton (London, UK), where he taught Linguistics and Philosophy of Language for over 20 years. He received his PhD in Linguistics from University College London and has written extensively on subjects relating to linguistic mood, speech acts and associated topics. As well as articles in journals such as Mind and Language and Linguistics and Philosophy, he has published three books: Assertion (Palgrave, 2010), Imperatives (CUP, 2014 – co-authored with Mikhail Kissine) and Nothing is Said (OUP, 2022).

Abstract:

“Lexical solipsism rejected as a research strategy in linguistic science”

In seeking to explain how words are individuated, philosophers have often appealed to causal-historical chains and/or the type/token distinction. These approaches treat words as objects pertaining to public languages, with a mind-external existence. Those working in the generative tradition respond that the only scientifically valid notion of word is as an item of a speaker’s mental lexicon. These lexical items are not features of a public language but elements of a mind-internal system that generates hierarchical structures, in which they serve as terminal nodes. Without further elaboration, this position risks lexical solipsism, as it permits no obvious explanation of how individuals converge on lexical meanings such that communication is possible. We argue that to avoid lexical solipsism, generativists need to appeal to a causal-historical chain of public signs, and to view lexical acquisition as a process of lexicalising such signs. The result is that lexical items come to serve as representations of these public signs, sensitive to their reoccurrence in the environment. Importantly, though, the meaning of the lexical item is not the reference of the sign-token that is lexicalised. Rather, generativists can maintain their favoured internalist approach to lexical semantics.

TBA

TBA

TBA

The Social Epistemology Working Group (Also known as SEW or the SEWing Circle) investigates philosophical issues at the intersection of epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of technology and AI, and social and political philosophy. Activities include research presentations, reading groups, and external speakers.