Dear all, our speaker for Macquarie's philosophy research seminar this coming Tuesday is Wylie Breckenridge speaking to his paper "Arbitrary Reference". Further details are below, please note the room change from earlier announcements. best, Albert * * * * *Date: Tue 18 May 2010* *Time*: 11am - 1pm *Location*: W6A 708 *Speaker*: Wylie Breckenridge (Sydney/Macquarie) *Topic*: Arbitrary Reference
*Abstract*: I will argue that we can refer to things arbitrarily. A speaker might say, "Let John be an arbitrary French man", and thereby succeed in referring to a particular French man, although we do not and cannot know which. We do this kind of thing whenever we employ 'instantial reasoning' - when we deduce that an arbitrary thing of kind k has some property p and conclude that all things of kind k have p. It may even be the way in which the content of a vague expression is fixed. If so, then we have an epistemicist view of vagueness, one that differs from Williamson's in how it explains our ignorance of the sharp cut-off points. *****************************************
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