Program

Hustle: The Politics of Language

Philosophy of language and semantics have not proven to be useful in a new age of rhetoric and propaganda. Does that mean its tools and resources are useless? Or do we need to think differently about these tools and resources in order to make them applicable? In this talk, part of a forthcoming book with David Beaver, I explore how to make the philosophy of language relevant to our current political moment, by rethinking the nature of presupposition and accommodation.

Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Before coming to Yale in 2013, he was Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University. Stanley is the author of Know How; Languages in Context; Knowledge and Practical Interests, which won the American Philosophical Association book prize; and How Propaganda Works, which won the PROSE Award for Philosophy from the Association of American Publishers. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Review, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among other publications.

Empirical studies of context at scale: the case of equality reasoning
or: How Leibniz Got it Wrong

The rise of very large linked open datasets has allowed us over the past few years to study the structure of knowledge graphs not only in theory, but also empirically at very large scale. I will report on a number of studies that all have empirically analysed the role of context in equality reasoning in linked open data, encoded in the owl:sameAs predicate. All of these studies show that the standard formal semantics of equality does not suffice in practical settings, and is simply ignored and violated at a large scale. At the same time, we can show that different notions of context are very useful in making sense of what users choose to do in practice, and that within local contexts, a sensible semantics for equality reasoning does emerge.

Frank van Harmelen is professor in Knowledge Representation & Reasoning in the AI department at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research interests include artificial intelligence, knowledge representation and the semantic web, approximate reasoning and Medical Protocols. He was one of the co-designers of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and the Ontology Inference Layer (OIL), and has published books on meta-level inference, on knowledge-based systems, and on the Semantic Web.

Objects and Events in Context

Traditionally, different conceptual modeling disciplines have been established to deal with the representation of entities of different ontological natures. For example, the Business Process Modeling discipline focuses mostly on “event-like” entities, and, in contrast, the (structural) conceptual modeling discipline focuses mostly on “object-like” entities. In this talk, I discuss the impact of the event vs. object divide for conceptual modeling, showing that a fuller modeling approach bridging this divide is required for representing complex application domains. Moreover, I argue that such an approach should be based on an in-depth ontological analysis of the nature of these entities. In particular, a notion that deserves the conceptual clarification afforded by such an analysis is that of “context”. I then propose some (non-exhaustive) interpretations for the overloaded term “context” when applied to ordinary objects and events dealt with by conceptual modeling.

Giancarlo Guizzardi has a PhD (with the highest distinction) from the University of Twente, The Netherlands. He is a member of the Faculty of Computer Science at the Free University of Bolzano-Bozen, Italy, where he leads the Conceptual and Cognitive Modeling Research Group (CORE). He has been active for more than two decades in the areas of Ontologies, Conceptual Modeling and Enterprise Semantics, authoring more than 230 peer-reviewed publications, which received more than a dozen international awards.

Why Polysemy Supports Radical Contextualism

After presenting two forms of Contextualism, I will argue that the phenomenon of polysemy supports the stronger one: so-called Radical Contextualism. My argument will be based on a comparison between indexicality and polysemy.

François Recanati has been a research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique (CNRS), a ‘directeur d’études’ at EHESS, a Professorial Fellow at the University of
St Andrews, and he has taught in several major universities around the world, including
Berkeley and Harvard. He is now a Professor at College de France in Paris. He is a co-founder
and past President of the European Society for Analytic Philosophy, and was elected a
Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012, and a
Member of Academia Europaea in 2019. In 2014 he was awarded the CNRS Silver Medal and
was made an honorary doctor of the University of Stockholm.