March 28, 2025

We are pleased to announce that, while visiting the Centre of Philosophy of the University of Lisbon, Cian Dorr (Professor of Philosophy, NYU) will give a mini-course, “The Multiplicity of Meaning”.

This four-session course will be based on a book manuscript which I am currently working on. The thesis of the book is that “intentional” relations, such as asserting, meaning, believing, knowing, expressing, and referring to, are massively one-many: almost always, when x bears one of these relations to y, x bears the same relation to enormously many other things very similar to y.  In the first session I will introduce this thesis of ‘Plural Signification’, discuss some examples which provide some prima facie support for it, and consider some salient objections.  In the second session, we will discuss the ways in which the pluralist approach can help with some puzzles associated with vagueness, including the Sorites Paradox.  The third session will introduce some neglected puzzles arising from “semantic plasticity” (fine-grained dependence of meaning on underlying physical facts), and explain how pluralism can solve them.  The final session will develop a pluralist solution to the semantic paradoxes.

The course will be given in 4 sessions, on the following dates and times: