Previous seminars

The verities of use

Seminar on Language and Communication <p><em>Wednesday, Feb 17 2010, 11:30 am ., </em></p><p><strong>Stefano Predelli (University of Nottingham) </strong><br><em>

Abstract

David Kaplan famously distinguished between 'the verities of meaning' and 'the vagaries of action'. In this presentation, I focus on the regularities governing the latter, discussing the somewhat special status of cases such as 'sometimes someone speaks' or 'I sometimes speak about myself', and of somewhat more 'exotic' cases, such as Sorensen's case of Mother Theresa's use of 'I am always humble'. I then proceed to a preliminary explanation of how my apparatus may be extended so as to deal with certain questions of non truth-conditional meaning, having to do with cases such as 'I am never fucking rude' or 'I never address You(form.) formally'.