Workshop: Acquaintance, Familiarity & Value

The workshop Acquaintance, Familiarity & Value will take place at the University of Barcelona on November 6-7th, 2025. Invited speakers include:

• Natasha Korotkova (Utrecht University)

• Justin Khoo (MIT)

• Nils Franzén (University of Umeå)

• Carla Umbach (University of Cologne). 

In addition, the workshop will feature contributed talks by Elin McCready (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), Nate Charlow & Nathan Howard (University of Toronto), and Noa Buckle (University of Toronto). The conference will also include a poster session. 

We will explore topics surrounding the phenomenon of the “acquaintance inference" of aesthetic language. The use of aesthetic language to describe an object (e.g., predicates of personal taste, aesthetic adjectives, subjective attitude verbs) invites the inference that the speaker has first-hand acquaintance with that object. E.g., if I tell you that The Birth of Venus is a wonderful painting, you are likely to assume that I have seen The Birth of Venus. This seemingly trivial observation has intrigued linguists, aestheticians, and philosophers of language, especially in the last 10+ years (Pearson 2013, Ninan 2014, Franzén 2018, Anand & Korotkova 2018, Khoo 2024). Recently, researchers have turned their attention to other phenomena with similar features, e.g., the "practical opinionatedness" inference of moral predicates (Willer & Kennedy 2020), the familiarity inference triggered by verbs like ‘consider’ (Kennedy & Willer 2022), or acquaintance inferences triggered by other expressions, e.g. appearance predicates (Rudolph 2020).    

If you are interested in attending, please register here.

The provisional program of the conference will be available soon.

Program chair & organization: 

• Andrés Soria Ruiz (Universitat de Barcelona)

Advisory board:

• Teresa Marques (Universitat de Barcelona)

• Isidora Stojanovic (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

This workshop is generously funded by research project 'New Paths in the Philosophy of Hybrid Representations' (PID2023-150569NB-I00), the Barcelona Institute of Analytic Philosophy (grant CEX2021-001169-M, funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033), and ERC Advanced Grant 'Valence Asymmetries: the positive, the negative, the good and the bad in language, mind and morality' (GA nº 101142133). The workshop is also supported by the Faculty of Philosophy and the Department of Philosophy of the University of Barcelona

All enquiries should be addressed at asoriaruiz@ub.edu.