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The Forum is open to everyone, including students, visitors, and faculty members from all departments and institutes!

The 60 minute lecture is followed by a 10 minute break and a 30-60 minute discussion. The language of presentation is English or Hungarian.
The scope of the Forum includes all aspects of theoretical philosophy, including:
  • logic and philosophy of formal sciences
  • philosophy of science
  • modern metaphysics
  • epistemology
  • philosophy of language
  • problems in history of philosophy and history of science, relevant to the above topics
  • particular issues in natural and social sciences, important for the discourses in the main scope of the Forum.

Location




2 June 4:00 PM  Room 226
Hans Kamp
Department of Formal Logic and Philosophy of Language
University of Stuttgart
 Please notice: topic has changed!
 Articulated contexts and their dynamics
This paper presents an integrated DRT-based theory of two notions of context commonly used in the philosophical and linguistic literature. The notion of utterance context (crucial in accounting for deixis) and discourse context (needed in resolving intersentential anaphora and presupposition, and  currently employed by dynamic theories such as DRT) are orthogonal to each other, and could have been assumed not to interfere with each other.

Providing an integrated theory of both notions of context has been motivated not only by over-all methodological considerations but also by the empirical desideratum to  provide a uniform framework for the analysis of definite NPs.  Some definite NPs are deictic, others anaphoric, yet others are a mix of the two (e.g. first and second person plural pronouns that can denote groups composed of the speaker and a previously introduced, possibly plural, entity).

The paper reports that integrating these two notions of context has not as unproblematic and seamless as could have been expected offhand. An added benefit of the theory is (beside a uniform framework for various types of definites) is the discovery of cases when the two kinds of contextual information interact. Yet another benefit is that there considerably more  options than in earlier versions of DRT that took only discourse contexts into account: Analysts are no longer forced to choose between anaphoric binding and accommodation. Instead they can "reach out" into the (representation of the) utterance context.