PHIL40013: Uncertainty, Vagueness and Disagreement

March 2020

at the University of Melbourne

PHIL40013: Uncertainty, Vagueness and Disagreement is a University of Melbourne honours seminar subject for fourth-year students. Our aim in the Honours program is to introduce students to current work in research in philosophy of logic and language.

In 2020, we’re covering the connections between speech acts, epistemology and normative theory.

1. Introduction and overview, background
2. Speech acts: what are they?
   • J. L. Austin, How to Do things with Words, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1962. [Read Lecture 9]
   • H. P. Grice, “Logic and Conversation,” pages 41–58 in Syntax and Semantics: Speech Acts, edited by P. Cole and J. L. Morgan, Academic Press, New York, 1975.
   • Sarah E. Murray and William B. Starr, “Force and Conversational States,” pages 202–236 in New Work on Speech Acts, edited by Daniel Fogal, Daniel Harris and Matthew Moss, Oxford University Press, 2018. [Read Sections 9.1 and 9.2]
   • Nuel Belnap “Declaratives are not Enough”, Philosophical Studies 59:1 (1990) 1–30.
   • Mark Lance and Rebecca Kukla “Leave the Gun; Take the Cannoli! The Pragmatic Topography of Second-Person Calls” Ethics 123:3 (2013) 456–478.
   • Mark Lance and Rebecca Kukla Yo! and Lo! The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons, Harvard University Press, 2009. [Read Chapter 1]
   • Craige Roberts “Speech Acts in Discourse Context”, pages 317–359 in New Work on Speech Acts, edited by Daniel Fogal, Daniel Harris and Matthew Moss, Oxford University Press, 2018.
3. Assertion
   • John Macfarlane, “What is Assertion?” pages 79–96 in Assertion: New Philosophical Essays, edited by Jessica Brown and Herman Cappelen, Oxford University Press, 2011.
   • Ishani Maitra, “Assertion, Norms, and Games” pages 277–296 in Assertion: New Philosophical Essays, edited by Jessica Brown and Herman Cappelen, Oxford University Press, 2011.
   • Jennifer Lackey, “Norms of Assertion,” Noûs 41:4 (2007) 594–626.
   • Rachel Mckinnon, The Norms of Assertion: Truth, Lies, and Warrant, Palgrave, 2015.
   • Peter Pagin, “Assertion”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2015.
4. Common Ground and Accommodation
   • Robert Stalnaker, “Common Ground,” Linguistics and Philosophy 25:5–6 (2002) 701–721.
   • Mandy Simons, “Presupposition and Accommodation: Understanding the Stalnakerian Picture,” Philosophical Studies 112:3 (2003) 251–278.
   • Craige Roberts, “Accommodation in a Language Game”, pages 345–366 in A Companion to David Lewis, edited by Barry Loewer and Jonathan Schaffer, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2015.
   • David Lewis, “Scorekeeping in a Language Game”, Journal of Philosophical Logic 8:1 (1979) 339–359.
   • Paal Antonsen, “Scorekeeping”, Analysis 78:4 (2018) 589–595.
5. Cooperation, Convention and Norms
   • Sarah E. Murray and William B. Starr, “Force and Conversational States,” pages 202–236 in New Work on Speech Acts, edited by Daniel Fogal, Daniel Harris and Matthew Moss, Oxford University Press, 2018. [Read Sections 9.3 to 9.5]
   • Cristina Bicchieri, The Grammar of Society: the nature and dynamics of social norms, Cambridge University Press, 2006. [Read Chapter 1]
   • Cristina Bicchieri, Norms in the Wild: how to diagnose, measure, and change social norms, Oxford University Press, 2017.
6. Stereotypes and Generics
   • Sarah-Jane Leslie, “Generics and the Structure of the Mind,” Philosophical Perspectives 21:1 (2007) 375–403.
   • Sally Haslanger, “Ideology, Generics, and Common Ground,” pages 179–207 in Feminist Metaphysics: Explorations in the Ontology of Sex, Gender and the Self, edited by Charlotte Witt, Springer, Dordrecht, 2011.
   • Rachel Katharine Sterken, “The Meaning of Generics” Philosophy Compass, 12:8 (2017) e12431.
   • Jennifer Saul, “Are Generics Especially Pernicious?” Inquiry, advance access (2019), 1–18.
7. Authority and Epistemic Territory
   • Jennifer Nagel, “The Social Value of Reasoning in Epistemic Justification,” Episteme 12:2 (2015) 297–308.
   • John Heritage, “Epistemics in Action: Action Formation and Territories of Knowledge,” Research on Language and Social Interaction 45:1 (2012) 1–29.
   • Akio Kamio, Territory of Information, John Benjamins, 1997.
   • Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, “Why do Humans Reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34:2 (2011) 57–74.
8. Illocutionary Silencing
   • Rae Langton, “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 22:4 (1993) 293–330.
   • Ishani Maitra, “Silencing Speech,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39:2 (2009) 309–338.
   • Alessandra Tanesini, ““Calm Down, Dear”: Intellectual Arrogance, Silencing and Ignorance,” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 90:1 (2016) 71–92.
   • Alexander Bird, “Illocutionary Silencing,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 83:1 (2002) 1–15.
   • Mari Mikkola, “Illocution, Silencing and the Act of Refusal,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 92:3 (2011) 415–437.
   • Kristie Dotson, “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing,” Hypatia 26:2 (2011) 236–257.
9. Gaslighting
   • Kate Abramson, “Turning up the Lights on Gaslighting,” Philosophical Perspectives 28:1 (2014) 1–30.
   • Kate Manne, Down Girl: the logic of misogyny, Oxford Univeristy Press, 2018. [Read Chapter 1]
   • Andrew D. Spear, “Gaslighting, Confabulation, and Epistemic Innocence,” Topoi early access (2018).
   • Cynthia A. Stark, “Gaslighting, Misogyny, and Psychological Oppression,” The Monist 102:2 (2019) 221–235.

For further information, contact me. To participate, check the handbook.