| Linguists and philosophers collaborated to investigate the nature of subjective language and thought, with the goal of overcoming the limitations of the prevailing view of linguistic and mental content as essentially descriptive. |
This project brought together faculty from linguistics and philosophy for a three-year program of activities investigating the nature of subjective language and thought. Linguists and philosophers have traditionally examined the role of language and thought as a medium for (mis)representing objective facts about the world we are living in. However, language is also an important tool for sharing subjective perspectives with others, and clearly not all thoughts are objective. Overcoming the limitations of the dominant view of linguistic and mental content as essentially descriptive has implications that cut across traditional distinctions between linguistics and philosophy: they impact philosophical attempts to understand the nature of normative thoughts and reasoning, and they challenge the way linguists tend to think to about the nature of linguistic meaning. The methodological foundation for this project, therefore, is that progress on our understanding of subjective language and thought necessitates a large-scale collaboration between the disciplines.
Project activities included bi-weekly meetings, visiting speakers, and a major conference, and was designed to clarify empirical and conceptual issues in a way that will promote and enrich cross-disciplinary faculty research at the University of Chicago and catalyze new collaborations with scholars interested in subjectivity and normativity.
William H. Colvin Professor of Linguistics
University of Chicago
Dr. Chris Kennedy's work is geared towards discovering and describing the principles that are involved in relating linguistic forms to meanings; determining how this mapping is achieved through the interaction of properties of the linguistic system, properties of cognition more generally, and...
Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy and the College
University of Chicago
Malte Willer is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the College. He received his graduate training at the University of Texas at Austin, where he wrote his dissertation, Modality in Flux, under the direction of Nicholas Asher and Josh Dever. Before that, he studied...
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Expressions whose meaning have a distinctly subjective dimension, most notably predicates of personal taste, have received increased attention by linguists and philosophers in the last decade or...
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
Expressions whose meaning have a distinctly subjective dimension, most notably predicates of personal taste, have received increased attention by linguists and philosophers in the last decade or...
