We’re very happy that you’re interested in participating in the Graz Evaluative Language Workshop.
The workshop will take place in Heinrichstr. 26, 5th floor, room 09.51. Below you can find a preliminary program as well as abstracts of the talks.
There will be two dinners. Unfortunately, we can only invite the speakers but you’re very welcome to join the dinners. If you intend to join, it would be great if you could let us know by the end of next week. In case you have any dietary restrictions it would be good to know in advance too.
We look forward to meeting you soon.
Graz Evaluative Language Workshop - Timetable
09:30 - 10:00 Welcome and coffee
10:00 - 11:10 Stina Björkholm "A Dynamic Account of Moral Disagreement"
11:30 - 12:45 Kyle Blumberg and Peter Fritz: “Frege Cases and Deontic Modals”
12:45 - 14:00 Lunch
14:00 - 15:10 Nils Franzén “The Presumption of Realism”
15:30 - 16:40 Andrés Soria-Ruiz “Factual, Metalinguistic, and Evaluative Usage. Diagnosing & Modelling the Distinction”
17:00 – 18:10 Stephen Finlay: “Reasons as Evidence and Explanations”
19:00 Conference Dinner at Osteria De Sensi
09:30 - 10:00 Coffee
10:00 - 11:10 Max Kölbel “Do We Need Plans As Points of Evaluation?”
11:30 - 12:45 Jack Woods TBA
12:45 - 14:00 Lunch
14:00 - 15:10 Katharina Felka “Moore’s Paradox in Moral Discourse"
15:30 Afternoon activity
19:00 Dinner at Promenade
Abstracts
Stina Björkholm: "A Dynamic Account of Moral Disagreement"
A well-known problem for moral contextualism is that speakers who make seemingly conflicting moral claims turn out to be talking past one another. I present an account of disagreement without co-extension which appeals to dynamic pragmatics
Kyle Blumberg and Peter Fritz: “Frege Cases and Deontic Modals”
Let a Frege case be a context in which substituting co-referring singular terms does not always preserve acceptability. Frege observed that many ascriptions of attitudes like belief and knowledge constitute Frege cases, which has led to a substantial literature on attitude ascriptions. We argue that many deontic modals, such as “ought” on various deontic interpretations, also give rise to Frege cases. These new examples of Frege cases are of interest as they widen the range of test cases for semantic theories meant to deal with Frege cases. We also relate Frege cases involving deontic modals to a number of further topics in normative theory, including the distinction between subjective versus objective oughts, the closure of oughts under conjunction, the "ought implies can” principle, and the individuations of options in decision problems.
Katharina Felka: "Moore’s Paradox in Moral Discourse“
According to expressivism, moral utterances express non-cognitive attitudes like approval or disapproval in the very same way as ordinary descriptive utterances express cognitive attitudes like belief. However, Woods (2014) argues that expressivism doesn’t make the correct predictions regarding utterances like ‘Killing is wrong. But I don’t disapprove of it’: if expressivism were correct, such utterances should be Moorean infelicitous but they are not. The present paper investigates what the relation between moral utterances and non-cognitive attitudes consists in if it is not the expression relation. It argues for a minimal account that drops a fundamental assumption of the debate: that speakers communicate non-cognitive attitudes in making moral utterances. According to a minimal account, they only provide evidence for them. The result is a superior account of the relation between moral utterances and non-cognitive attitudes since it explains Wood’s observations while it avoids the pitfalls of its non-minimal competitors.
Stephen Finlay: “Reasons as Evidence and Explanations”
There has been vigorous debate over whether normative reasons are best understood as evidence of normative status (as argued particularly by Daniel Star and Stephen Kearns), or as explanations of normative status (as argued by John Broome and others). Other philosophers, like Ralph Wedgwood, have argued for a disjunctive analysis: we have two distinct concepts of normative reasons. I argue for a unifying reconciliation: every normative reason is both evidence for and an explanation of normative status, of subtly different kinds. By analyzing normative status or goodness in information-relative terms we find that every case of evidence of normative status relative to a richer body of information is an explanation of normative status relative to a poorer body of information. It follows that there are no extensional grounds for preferring one kind of approach over the other, although I suggest that linguistic clues favor an analytic reduction of reasons to explanations rather than evidence.
Nils Franzén: “The Presumption of Realism”
Within metaethics, it is widely held that the linguistic properties of moral terms favor objectivist and cognitivist views of moral language. I argue to the contrary.
Max Kölbel: “Do we need Plans as points of evaluation?”
In this paper, I shall try to assess whether introducing plans as points of evaluation for semantic contents or contents of thought (as is done, e.g., in the recent work of Allan Gibbard, John MacFarlane and Seth Yalcin) is required by any phenomenon (linguistic or otherwise).
Andrés Soria-Ruiz: “Factual, metalinguistic, and evaluative usage. Diagnosing & modelling the distinction”
In discussions about subjective and evaluative language, it is customary to (i) draw a distinction between factual and non-factual uses of these terms, and (ii) characterise non-factual uses by recourse to various mechanisms, such as metalinguistic negotiation, relativist, or expressivist semantics—seen as competing accounts. In contrast to this, I want to push the idea that some non-factual uses of evaluative terms are purely metalinguistic, and some are purely evaluative. This suggests that the right semantics of evaluative terms should mobilize three independent parameters: possible worlds, interpretations, and some species of a relativist/expressivist parameter, such as, e.g., hyperplans, judges, or normative standards.