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| 4 May
(Wednesday)
5:00 PM
Room 226 |
Armand Binet
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| Department of
Philosophy, Pantheon-Sorbonne
University (Paris 1),
Paris
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Simultaneity of
two events spatially separated
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In the first Einstein’s
paper about special relativity in
1905, he starts in giving a new
definition of simultaneity from
the constant speed of light. This
definition use the convention of
standard synchrony. We will
discuss why Einstein use a
convention to answer to the
central question of time. We will
understand how this convention
stay outside of any empirical
proof. Indeed, Winnie proved in
1970 that the standard synchrony
is not the only definition of
simultaneity compatible with
special relativity. After some
others attempts (especially from
Malament in 1977), it seems that
we live in a four dimensional
world and it does not make sense
to define only one simultaneity.
The convention of simultaneity
shows the inadequacy of our
vocabulary (here the word
simultaneity) with respect to the
latest physical theories.
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| 11 May
(Wednesday)
5:00 PM
Room 226 |
Tolgahan
Toy
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Department
of Philosophy, Middle East
Technical University,
Ankara
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A
Critical Evaluation of the
Principle of Compositionality
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In this paper I
will basically evaluate the
compositionality principle.
Firstly, I will analyze the
notion of syntax/semantics
interface. Then I will move to
several problems with
compositionality thesis. These
problems arises due to the reason that
the meaning of a word
is determined in a holistic way
due to Frege’s context
principle, that there is ambiguity with the
lexical items (i.e. polysemy),
indexical elements due to Kaplanian
semantics, and because of the problem of
domain restriction. These
problems show that it is not
that easy to establish a
compositional semantics. In
other words, it seems highly
difficult task to get the
ultimate meaning just by putting
words together by some syntactic
rules.
I will argue
that compositionality principle
fails at the semantic level due
to the holistic and contextual
nature of language. At the
semantic level, instead, I will
appeal to Davidson’s
truth-conditional semantics. In
other words, Davidson’s charity
principle, truth theory, and empirical semantics
will help us to give a better
account of meaning. But this
will be a holistic and
probabilistic account of
meaning. To reconcile this
strategy with the purely
compositional structure of
language, I will introduce a new
domain where compositionality
works. I call this new level
pre-semantic level. It will be
somewhere between syntax and
semantics. I will claim that
compositionality principle holds
at the pre-semantic level.
Unlike in the semantic level, in
pre-semantic value of an
expression is not its
correspondent in the world.
Instead, pre-semantic value of
an expression is its character as David Kaplan
introduced it for indexicals. It
means that at the pre-semantics
level, I will extend the
Kaplanian notion of character
from indexicals to every single
linguistic expression.
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