Colloquium by Nick Smith (Macquarie University)

This week: Lionel Shapiro, "Truth, Friction, and Tension"

A series of informal talks by philosophy faculty and graduate students. For a description and how to sign up, see http://philosophy.uconn.edu/brown-bags/.

Susan Schneider's AI group is having talks by Bill Lycan (on machine consciousness) and Jenelle Salisbury (on the unity of consciousness), with lots of opportunity for informal discussion.

Adina Berk (Yale University Press) will be giving a talk as part of the Publishing NOW Series

UConn’s Cognitive Science Colloquium Series presents: Pleasures of Suffering by Paul Bloom

Brooks & Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology & Cognitive Science
Yale University

Friday, November 30, 4pm, Oak 117

People are hedonists, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. This view is central to much of psychology and it fits many people’s own sense of why they do what they do. But what about our appetites for spicy foods, hot baths, horror movies, sad songs, BDSM, and hate reading? It runs out that people often seek out pain and suffering—in pursuits such as art, ritual, sex, and sports, and in longer-term projects, such as training for a marathon or signing up to go to war. Drawing on research from developmental psychology, anthropology, and behavioral economics, I suggest that these seemingly paradoxical choices show that we are driven by non-hedonistic goals; we revel in difficult practice, we aspire towards moral goodness, and we seek out meaningful lives.

If you are interested in meeting with Dr. Bloom on 11/30, please contact Dr. Xygalatas: dimitris.xygalatas@uconn.edu

This week: Bill Lycan on "Permanent Contributions in Philosophy"

A series of informal talks by philosophy faculty and graduate students. For a description and how to sign up, see http://philosophy.uconn.edu/brown-bags/.

Deborah Mower will be giving a talk titled "Moral Conviction and Civility."

Join us in the Logic Colloquium for a talk by Scott AnderBois!


AnderBois (Brown University):

"At-issueness in direct quotation: the case of Mayan quotatives"



Abstract: In addition to verba dicendi, languages have a bunch of different other grammatical devices for encoding reported speech. While not common in Indo-European languages, two of the most common such elements cross-linguistically are reportative evidentials and quotatives. Quotatives have been much less discussed then either verba dicendi or reportatives, both in descriptive/typological literature and especially in formal semantic work. While quotatives haven't been formally analyzed in detail previously to my knowledge, several recent works on reported speech constructions in general have suggested in passing that they pattern either with verba dicendi or with reportatives. Drawing on data from Yucatec Maya, I argue that they differ from both since they present direct quotation (like verba dicendi) but make a conventional at-issueness distinction (like reportatives). To account for these facts, I develop an account of quotatives by combining an extended Farkas & Bruce 2010-style discourse scoreboard with bicontextualism (building on Eckardt 2014's work on Free Indirect Discourse).

https://logic.uconn.edu/

Prof. Jill de Villiers of Smith College (Linguistics and Philosophy) will be giving a talk to the Expression, Communication, and Origins of Meaning Research Group. All are invited.

Jill de Villiers is Professor of Philosophy and Sophia and Austin Smith Professor of Psychology at Smith http://College.She will give a talk on concepts and language.