Philosophy Colloquium - John MacFarlane / Panvariabilism
Philosophy Colloquium - John MacFarlane / Panvariabilism
Friday April 26, John MacFarlane joins us from Berkeley to give a colloquium talk titled "Panvariabilism," arguing that every lexical item should be modeled semantically as a variable. The abstract is below.
Sam Cumming, Paolo Santorio, and Dilip Ninan have argued that singular referring terms (pronouns and proper names) should be treated semantically as variables, and that epistemic expressions (including epistemic modals and attitude verbs) should be treated as assignment-shifters. Building on their work, I argue for a more radical view: all lexical items should be treated as variables, and the contents of attitudes and assertions should be modeled as sets of world/assignment pairs. I motivate this view through two distinct lines of argument. The first argues that the considerations invoked by Cumming, Santorio, and Ninan extend to all lexical categories. The second argues that assignment-sensitive contents and semantic values are needed to make sense of felicitous underspecification and metalinguistic negotiation. On the resulting picture, many questions we intuitively regard as questions about meaning are outside the scope of semantic theory.