I’ll be going to a conference on relative truth in Barcelona next September. Here’s the announcement and call for papers. I like the company I’m being grouped in with!
bq.. 5-7 Sept 2005, Barcelona
Fregean orthodoxy has it that the contents of speech (thoughts) have absolute truth-values. If one thinks one has identified the content of an utterance and the presumed content is one whose truth value is still relative to some parameter, then one has not succeeded in identifying the content. Most philosophers of language follow this Fregean principle even today. Those who prefer not to speak of Fregean contents usually accept an analogous principle concerning utterances: that utterances of declarative sentences have absolute truth-values.
This orthodoxy has recently been challenged for a variety of different reasons. Some claim that relativizing the truth of utterances to moments of assessment is the only good way to avoid determinism. Some claim that the only way to make room for faultless disagreement is to relativize the truth of propositions. Some claim that the best semantics for epistemic modals involves relativised truth at the level of utterances. Some forms of supervaluationism about vagueness might also be seen as employing this strategy. There are further potential examples.
Thus relativizing utterance or propositional truth is a novel semantic strategy which is motivated by a variety of different phenomena. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together some proponents (and possibly opponents) in order to discuss any aspect of this topic.
Current list of contributors:
Kit Fine (NYU)
Manuel Garcia-Carpintero (Barcelona)
Andrea Iacona (Vercelli/Columbia)
Max Kölbel (Birmingham/Barcelona)
John MacFarlane (Berkeley)
Brian Weatherson (Cornell)
There is space for several further papers. If you are interested in presenting your work on this topic then please submit an abstract (ca. 1000 words) of your intended presentation by 15 April 2005 to “Max Kolbel”:mailto:m.kolbel@bham.ac.uk.
or
“Relativizing Utterance Truth”
c/o LOGOS research group
Dept. de Logica, Historia i Filosofia de la Ciencia
Facultat de Filosofia
Universitat de Barcelona
Baldiri i Reixac s/n
08028 Barcelona
Spain
There will be a limited number of rooms available at the centrally located “Residencia de Investigadors”, where the workshop will take place. The cost of a single room there will be 58 Euros (single) and 81 Euros (double) per night. No conference fee is planned.
There will shortly be a web page with information about the workshop accessible through the “LOGOS web site”:http://www.ub.es/grc_logos/.