Martin Niederl (University of Chicago)
Schedule
| 15:50 – 16:00 | Welcome and Introduction by Martin Niederl (University of Chicago) |
| 16:00 – 17:00 | Jacob McDowell (University of Chicago) Indexicality and the Contribution of the Environment |
| 17:15 – 18:15 | Irmena Tsankova (Central European University) Frege on the Articulation of Thought and the Activity of Thinking |
| 18:30 – 19:30 | Michael Powell (University of Chicago) Observational Self-Ascription and Error Through Misidentification |
Abstracts:
Jacob McDowell (UChicago):
Indexicality and the Contribution of the Environment
“In two seminal papers of the 1970s, Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge separately spearheaded externalist, or anti-individualist, approaches to semantics and attitude attributions. Burge, however, strongly dissented from Putnam’s use of the phrase ‘indexicality’ in describing the semantics of natural kind terms. While conceding that Burge was quite right to disagree with some connotations of that phrase, I believe Putnam’s main attraction to it was as a way of capturing what he elsewhere called ‘the contribution of the environment’. I will argue that this was the more substantive point of disagreement between Putnam and Burge – a disagreement that extends to their basic understanding of concepts. I will conclude that ‘the contribution of the environment’ marks an essential aspect of Putnam’s externalism, one that resists attempted reductions to social phenomena, such as the division of linguistic labor.”
Irmena Tsankova (CEU):
“Frege on the Articulation of Thought through the Activity of Thinking”
In Gottlob Frege’s writings, thoughts are characterized as, on the one hand, structured in a way that corresponds to the logical structure of the sentences expressing them, and, on the other, as expressible by indefinitely many sentences that each bear distinct logical structures. The two characterizations are, on the face of it, incompatible, for the former seems to suggest that thoughts bear a unique articulation, whereas the latter—that they don’t but are articulable in many ways, all of which are on par with each other. The fact that both claims figure prominently in Frege’s works and are even sometimes invoked within a few lines from each other poses an exegetical puzzle. While there have been various proposals, some more or less revisionary, about how to square Frege’s remarks with each other, it remains unclear how to adjudicate the matter in favor of one interpretation or the other. What extant interpretations share is the assumption that what is at stake in the exegetical controversy is the nature and composition of certain abstract entities. In this talk I aim to show that a promising alternative comes into view when one reframes the issue not as pertaining to Frege’s considered metaphysical views, but as internal to his project of devising a logically perspicuous notation. Instead of inquiring into whether thoughts are articulated or unarticulated entities, I will show that one can make sense of Frege’s remarks by asking a different guiding question, namely ‘what is the source of the articulation of concept-script sentences?’.
Michael Powell (UChicago):
“Observational Self-Ascription and Error through Misidentification”
Wittgenstein’s Blue Book remarks on the uses ‘as object’ and ‘as subject’ of ‘I’ (and ‘my’) have given rise to much discussion of ‘identification-dependence’ and ‘error through misidentification’. These discussions largely take the form of debates about whether self-ascriptions belonging to this or that sub-class are identification-dependent or identification-free (and accordingly either liable or immune to error through misidentification). In this paper, I consider a class of self-ascriptions which has so far avoided controversy: observation-based self-ascriptions. The orthodox view is that observational self-ascriptions are across the board identification-dependent and as such liable to error through misidentification. In this paper I argue that this is a mistake. I do so by distinguishing between direct and indirect observational self-ascriptions, and arguing that the former are typically, and paradigmatically, identification-free.
Time: 3rd of September, 15:50 – 19:30
Location: SR 1.004
SOPhiA 2026 