last week’s mini-workshop featured frank veltman. he was trying out his new paper on imperatives and permission. y’know, explaining stuff like Ross’s paradox:

eat your veggies! doesn’t entail eat your veggies or eat some ice cream!

and (performative) free-choice permission puzzles:

you may eat your veggies or some ice cream entails you may eat some ice cream

craige roberts was in town to give comments and a good time was had by all.

as part of my current nsf grant on the semantics and pragmatics of modals in natural language, i’m hosting a series of mini-workshops here in the deuce.

(the mini-workshops aren’t regular, they’re occasional. and there’s a regular reading group associated with them - hence, omg. all of that is so i can send emails with subject-lines like “omg: this week’s reading”.)

anyway, we had our first mini-workshop last week: kai von fintel presented a paper, “must … stay … strong!”, that we’ve been working on lately. this is the fourth paper in our trilogy on epistemic modals, and is affectionately known as “shatner” to us. in it we take aim at the mantra that must p is weaker than p and give a new account of the evidential feel that must has.

chris potts and craige roberts gave us comments and provided lots of good stuff for us to think about. (so it was an invasion but a fun one.)

we’re mid-revision on the paper right now but we’ll get a draft up asap.

I was off to Rutgers for the semantics workshop this past weekend. Brian drew the short straw and had to offer comments on, and hence had to slog through, this paper. The comments didn’t disappoint (true, that) and the workshop was lots of fun (double true).

If you’d rather see the advertisement for the paper rather than the paper itself, you can check out the beamer slides for the talk. (I left the pauses in so you can recreate the whole experience…really.)

It was my turn at the Mind, Language, Etc. seminar this week. There is a heavy emphasis on the ‘Etc.’ part this go around, so we talked about belief revision for introspective agents — something I worked on a ways back. But it was good to return to it, and the trip has me thinking about some of the issues in better ways than I was before. So I count that as a Good Thing.

I think there are lots of benefits to splitting up time thinking about areas that don’t seem at first blush to have any points of contact. An additional plus: when the topic of the seminar rotates again, maybe I can trick them into another invite.

Just before Winter Break I went to Arizona to give a talk — some anxiety involved in returning to the alma mater, but it turned out to be a lot if fun.

I talked about truth-conditions for indicatives, and tried to say something both ecumenical and true. Here is the beamer presentation from the talk, and a draft of the paper.

Kai von Fintel and I have been working together on a project on epistemic modals for awhile now. We started out thinking we’d write up a short little something, but the paper has done some (asexual, we assume) reproduction. Anyway, I presented an incarnation of one of the spin-offs — “CIA Leaks” — at the Pacific APA session on “Relative Truth” this past weekend in Portland. Here are the beamer slides from it. A draft of the paper should be up in just a little bit (think: days, not months). (Andy Egan and Michael Glanzberg also gave papers in that session.)

If you are itching to know how that title can be informative, but just can’t wait, I’ll let the cat out o’ the bag. We dub the class of “relativist” stories “CIA Theories” since in our cleaned-up regimentation of them they insist that semantic values for certain constructions are (non-trivially) relative to contexts, indices, and points of assessment. We’re not big fans of CIA theories, and the paper throws down a gauntlet we say they must run. Mixing (or is it mangling?) the metaphors a bit, CIA theories end up with tons of holes. Whence the leaking.

Kai von Fintel, John MacFarlane, and I were slated to do an “information session” on epistemic modals. I think that means we were not supposed to intentionally misinform, but I’m not sure. Adding to the information-blocking, Kai got stuck in North Carolina and so only his slides made it to NYC.

Here are my slides from the event. Not quite self-contained, but maybe provocative in the right kinds of ways. I should probably collect some references to accompany them, but I’m lazy.

The annual Michigan Linguistics & Philosophy Workshop begins tomorrow. That’s handy since that’s when the participants are arriving.