The Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford is pleased to welcome Angelika Kratzer (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), who will deliver the John Locke Lectures in 2022 on “Reports of what we say, know, or believe”, with generous support by Oxford University Press and All Souls College.
Attitude ascriptions and speech reports are a litmus test for any semantic theory. They were at the center of discussion when philosophers and logicians became interested in natural language and began to develop the semantic frameworks we are relying on today. Mastery of attitude ascriptions and speech reports is a milestone in the cognitive development of a child and the human species as a whole.
Attitude and speech reports are built from smaller building blocks that combine and recombine to produce the interpretations those reports have. My lectures will be a search for those building blocks and for clues about how they might interact with each other. The goal – like that of any semantic theory – is a typology where the combinatorics of building blocks generates the range of possible interpretations of the constructions we are trying to understand.
Lectures will be given on Wednesdays at 17:00 in the Lecture Theatre Room at The H B Allen Centre.
After the first lecture, there will be a drinks reception with the generous support of Oxford University Press.
All are welcome.
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