Fall 2008

(All talks are on Wednesdays in 1115 Skinner Hall at 4:00 unless noted otherwise, followed by a reception in the philosophy department lounge)

September 30, 2009
Speaker: Mark Schroeder (University of Southern California)
Title: "Two Roles for Propositions: Cause for Divorce?"

Abstract:
Nondescriptivist views - whether about conditionals, epistemic modals, or moral discourse - are often described as denying the existence of propositions of a certain sort. Moreover, when nondescriptivists in these domains do in fact endorse the existence of propositions, this is only because they claim, in Blackburn's words, to have "earned the right" to proposition-talk, by giving a deflationary treatment of sentences like "there are moral propositions", rather than because their theories actually appeal to propositions. The goal of this paper is to challenge this conception of nondescriptivists' commitments, by distinguishing two sets of theoretical roles that philosophers have traditionally taken propositions to play, arguing that it is quite costly not to appeal to propositions to play one of these roles, and advancing a picture of how things would have to be, in order for these roles to be played by different sorts of things.