Meeting on 02/19: Ahmad Jabbar

The Meaning Group will meet online on February 26, 1-2pm. Ahmad Jabbar will present his recent work on expressivist communication

Abstract:

At a level of idealization, we communicate with each other to find out what the world is like. Normative sentences (e.g. ‘Tax evasion is wrong’), Expressivists believe, are such that they don’t describe the world. A question (Q1) arises: what purpose does normative talk serve then? It seems like rational activity, and resembles descriptive talk; we assert normative claims, debate about them, etc. Recently, Perez-Carballo and Santorio (2016) have provided an answer to (Q1), which helps build a model of normative communication in analogy with the Stalnakerian model for descriptive communication. I present a few formal challenges for this approach.

Zoom information will be sent by email and can be obtained from Stefan Kaufmann.