Dear all, The Moral Sciences Club's next meeting will be held on Tuesday 21st February. We are delighted to welcome Daisy Dixon of Peterhouse, who will be giving a talk entitled 'Can Art Lie?'. Here is the abstract:
J.L. Austin (1962) showed that in addition to making true and false claims about the world, language is also used to constitute other actions like arguing and warning: our language has a force. He called such actions “illocutionary acts”. Novitz (1977) and Kjorup (1974; 1978) adapted Austin’s speech act theory to argue that visual, non-verbal art can perform these actions. However, there has been little exploration into the specific kinds of illocutionary acts art can or cannot perform. My talk will consider the act of lying; what Austin called an ‘abuse’ of the illocutionary act of assertion. I'll argue that art, taken in its ordinary context of the artworld, can lie, but only in a ‘Quality context’: a context in which Grice’s maxim of quality (“try to make your contribution one that is true”) is in effect. I'll show that this is a genre-curation sensitive issue. In contrast to cooperative verbal conversation, which is by default a Quality context, the artworld is not by default a Quality context. However, I show how an artworld context can become a Quality one through the practice of curation and through the relevance of genre, thus enabling its artworks to lie. My conclusion will have implications regarding the restrictions on the illocutionary acts performed by art, and the normative status of some pornography. The meeting will be held at 2:30 until 4:15, in the Barbara White Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. For those who have not yet paid, there is a yearly membership fee of £7.50 for students and £15 for others, or a one-off fee of £3 (£2 for students). These can be purchased online at: http://onlinesales.admin. cam.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=1&catid=75&prodvarid=87 -- Matt Dougherty, James Hutton, and Li Li Tan Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge [email protected] http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
