Philosophy Department's 2024/25 Speaker Series is happy to have Dr. Adam Sennet.  Adam is a Professor of Philosophy at UC Davis, CA. https://philosophy.ucdavis.edu/people/adam-sennet

 

Talk Title: "Considerations about Use/Mention"

 

Abstract: How much can we learn about the meaning of words, especially offensive ones, from considerations of use and mention? Using an argument of Anderson and Lepore as our foil, we will investigate a generalization of their argument and try to offer a theory of why mentioning can produce the characteristic effects that use does. We intend to use this to defang a seemingly promising approach to investigating meaning and to hopefully raise a larger question about types of semantic/pragmatic explanations.