Full Title: Situations, Information, and Semantic Content
Date: 16-Dec-2016 - 18-Dec-2016
Location: Munich, Bavaria, Germany Contact Person: Kristina
Web Site: http://www.situatedcontent2016.philosophie.uni-muenchen.de
Call Deadline: 29-May-2016
Backgrounds, Aim, and Scope:
The semantic content of natural language is multiply situated: Whether an utterance receives one interpretation or another depends on the discourse situation (in which the utterance takes place), on the target situation (which is described by the utterance), and on the interpreting agents' informational situation (which also contains the agents' background knowledge). Over the past decades, work on extralinguistic context-dependence has focused on discourse situations and target situations, and has paid less attention to the dependence of interpretation on the agents' informational situation. However, this kind of information-dependence plays a crucial role in the explanation of a number of semantic phenomena, including the behavior of epistemic/deontic modals and propositional attitude-sentences. Recent research in situated cognition has suggested an even more general scope of semantic information-dependence. The latter assumes that cognition (and therefore, all linguistic understanding) is fundamentally embedded in the situational context of the cognition.
This workshop aims to bring together linguists, philosophers, logicians, and cognitive and computer scientists to discuss the information-dependence of the semantic content of natural language. It covers all aspects of the interaction between situations, information, and semantic content -- both theoretical and experimental --, including
- agents' information and semantic content
- the scope of information-dependence in natural language
- analyses of semantic phenomena featuring information-dependence
- experiments on semantic information-dependence
- the impact of agents' information on attitude attributions - semantic aspects of situated cognition
- situation theory and situation semantics
- data semantics and dynamic/update semantics
- (partial) information and situations
- the formal analysis of (informational) situations
- the formal analysis of background knowledge
- partiality of information - type-theoretic approaches to information
Invited Speakers:
- Robin Cooper (University of Gothenburg)
- Nikola Kompa (Osnabrück University)
- Roussanka Loukanova (Stockholm University)
- Friedrike Moltmann (CNRS Paris, New York University)
- Floris Roelofsen (University of Amsterdam/ILLC)
- Markus Werning (Ruhr University Bochum)
- Thomas Ede Zimmermann (Goethe University of Frankfurt)
- more speakers to be confirmed
