UTCP Colloquium：Recent Issues in Philosophy of Language

Language: English and Japanese
Registration: https://goo.gl/forms/UKFW64YP6F6GHyZb2

Speakers：
Naoya Fujikawa(藤川直也) (Tokyo Metropolitan University)
Speaking of nothingness

Paolo Bonardi (Tokyo Metropolitan University)
Salmon, Schiffer and Frege’s Constraint

Organizers:
Kohji Ishihara (The University of Tokyo) & Takayuki Suzuki (The University of Tokyo)

Abstracts：

Naoya Fujikawa,
Speaking of nothingness

The word `nothing‘ is used as a quantifier, and that’s it: In particular, it is a big mistake to treat `nothing' as a singular term---Such a Carnapian view is recently criticized (cf. Oliver and Smiley, 2013; Priest, 2014, Jacquette, 2015). Indeed, it is not difficult to find cases where the word `nothing' is used as a singular term (for example, `nothing comes from nothing'). Then, what does it refer? In this talk, first, I criticize Oliver and Smiley (2014)’s claim that `nothing' as a singular term is an empty term that fails to refer to anything. Secondly, I examine the view that `nothing' can be used to refer to the absence of everything, which is understood as the complement of the mereological sum of all objects (cf. Casati and Fujikawa 2015; 2017).

References
Casati, F. and Fujikawa, N. (2015). `Better than Zilch?', Logic and Logical Philosophy, 24(2), 255-264.
Casati, F. and Fujikawa, N. (2017). `Nothingness, Meinongianism, and Inconsistent Mereology', Synthese, online first publication.
Jacquette, D. (2015). Alexius meaning: The Shepherd of non-being. New York: Springer.
Oliver, A and Smiley, T. (2013). `Zilch', Analysis, 73:4, 601-613.
Priest, G. (2014). One, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Paolo Bonardi, Salmon,
Schiffer and Frege’s Constraint

Since 1987 a debate has been going on between Nathan Salmon and Stephen Schiffer regarding a puzzle, devised by Schiffer (1987, 2006, 2016), about Salmon’s (1986, 1989) Millian-Russellian theory of belief reports. The goal of my talk is threefold: to show that Salmon’s (2006) solution to Schiffer’s puzzle (which consists in disallowing the move from ˹ believes that β˺ to ˹ believes β to be such that it˺) and Salmon’s (2006) argument for this solution are not entirely convincing; to raise a new puzzle, originating in ideas from Jennifer Saul & David Braun (2002), which achieves the same results as Schiffer’s puzzle but to which Salmon’s solution is inapplicable; to show that the import of both puzzles is not the failure of the aforesaid move (as Salmon maintains) or of the Millian-Russellian semantics of belief reports (as Schiffer maintains), but is the failure of Frege’s Constraint, in terms of which modes of presentation (guises, pleonastic propositions, etc.) are defined.

References
Braun, D. & J. Saul (2002). Simple Sentences, Substitutions, and Mistaken Evaluations. Philosophical Studies 111: 1-41.
Salmon, N. (1986). Frege’s Puzzle. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
_________ (1989). Illogical Belief. Philosophical Perspectives 3: 243-285.
_________ (1995). Relational Belief. In P. Leonardi & M. Santambrogio (eds.), On Quine: New Essays, 206-228. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
_________ (2006). The Resilience of Illogical Belief. Noûs 40: 369-375.
Schiffer, S. (1987). The “Fido”-Fido Theory of Belief. Philosophical Perspectives 1: 455-480.
_________ (2006). A Problem for a Direct-Reference Theory of Belief Reports. Noûs 40: 361-368.
_________ (2016). De Re Subtleties: Response to Nathan Salmon. In G. Ostertag (ed.), Meanings and Other Things: Themes from the Work of Stephen Schiffer. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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