The Limits of Thought. A Short Introduction to Paradoxes
Ludovica Conti
This course explores the theme of paradoxes in contemporary philosophy, paying particular attention to their role in the foundational debate between the 19th and 20th centuries, and more broadly in the analytical tradition. After a brief introduction to the notions of argument, validity and soundness, the distinction between fallacies and paradoxes as different types of reasoning failure will be examined. The challenge raised by paradoxes, in particular, will then be examined in terms of its logical and philosophical scope. Various types of paradoxes (logical and semantic) will be presented and some exemplary derivations analysed. The possible explanations and solutions that have been proposed so far will also be discussed. The investigation will focus primarily on paradoxes related to the definition and formalisation of mathematical concepts, such as infinity, sets, cardinal and ordinal numbers, definability, and provability. Analysing the emergence and derivation of such paradoxes as Cantor’s paradox, Russell’s paradox, and the Liar’s paradox will provide insight into the formal and conceptual limitations of proposals that are still under discussion in the philosophy of mathematics.
Modality in Language
Paloma Jeretič
A core property about human language is its ability to not only refer to the real world, but also alternative ways the world could be. One way language does this is by using modals. In English, modals are words like might, must, can, have to, possibly. The meaning of modals is complex and multi-dimensional, making them a rich area of semantic investigation. Studying these types of meanings is essential in understanding how language encodes non-actual truths, and it provides a powerful framework for representing meaning more generally, beyond modals alone.
This course is a natural continuation of the introduction to semantics course from the first week. We will first familiarize ourselves with the theoretical concept of modality and identify the components of modal meaning. We will then introduce basic tools for modeling modality within a theory of linguistic meaning. Finally, we will zoom out on the cross-linguistic typology of modality, exploring how modal expressions vary from language to language, and inviting course participants to identify and investigate modals in their own language.
Computational semantics
Maskharashvili, Aleksandre
Semantics attributes a tenable interpretation or representation of the "meaning" of a sentence, whereas computational semantics studies how to arrive at that interpretation. Assuming, for instance, that we know how to represent meanings of ‘dog’, ‘every,’ and ‘bark,’ and we know how to put those words together to spell out a sentence (syntax) ‘every dog barks,’ under these premises, computational semantics aims at computing the representation of the meaning of ‘every dog barks.’ In this course, we will focus on compositional approaches to deriving sentence meaning in the tradition of Montague Grammar. We will study the core tools needed for this work, including type systems for classifying expressions, the lambda calculus for representing functions and their compositions, and syntactic rules for encoding sentence structure
Introduction to syntax
Maria Polinsky
This week-long course introduces the core principles of formal syntax with a central emphasis on syntactic argumentation—how linguists develop, justify, and evaluate claims about sentence structure. We will focus on phrase structure, constituency, and syntactic categories and discuss the ways of using empirical evidence, diagnostics, and counterexamples to support or challenge analyses. This course is designed for students from diverse academic and linguistic backgrounds, guiding them to engage critically with syntactic arguments and to articulate their own analyses in a clear way.
Why is there something rather than nothing?
Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra
‘Why do we exist?’ is a basic existential question that addresses the mystery of our existence. The question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ is even more basic, since it addresses the mystery of existence in general. This general question (‘the question’ from now on) will be the topic of my course at YALP. The question became a focus of philosophical discussion through Leibniz, who discussed it in On the Ultimate Origination of Things, of 1697, and then in the Principles of Nature and Grace, of 1714. Ever since, the question has been the object of attention of many philosophers from different schools and traditions, for instance, Adolf Grünbaum, Martin Heidegger, Robert Nozick, Derek Parfit, and Bede Rundle, to mention only a few. Heidegger called it the fundamental question of Metaphysics, and Parfit said it was the most sublime question of all. However, some philosophers, Wittgenstein for example, have maintained that the question makes no sense. There are also different ideas about the fact that an answer to this question is supposed to explain, and the type of explanation that must or can be given of such a fact. For instance, is the question about the existence of anything, whether contingent or necessary, abstract or concrete, or only about contingent concrete things? Do we need to identify a cause of existence or only general principles or laws that can explain existence? Does the question presuppose the Principle of Sufficient Reason? There is, indeed, a multiplicity of explanations of why there is something rather than nothing. Some philosophers maintain that it is necessary that there is something, and that is why there is something rather than nothing; others maintain that there being something is more probable than there being nothing, and that is why there is something rather than nothing; there are those who affirm that there is something because God freely chose to create some things; and yet there are others who think that the existence of something rather than nothing is a brute fact that has no explanation. These are the questions and ideas I shall discuss in my course.
Debates and Developments in Feminist Epistemology
Miriam Ronzoni
<Description forthcoming>
The syntax and semantics of exceptive and exclusive constructions
Luisa Seguin
Exceptive constructions express an exception to a generalization (von Fintel 1993; Potsdam & Polinsky 2019; Vostrikova 2021), as in Everyone came except John. The syntax of these constructions can vary. In some cases, exceptives are phrasal; that is, they have a structure similar to that of prepositional phrases, like with John. In other cases, they have a silent clausal structure and involve ellipsis (deletion of part of the structure): Everyone came except John didn't come. In this course, we will investigate the syntactic properties of exceptive constructions in a variety of languages, exploring how different syntactic structures can affect the semantics.
Then, we will turn our attention to the severely underexplored exclusive constructions, like Setting aside John, everyone is here/we shall go home. While on the surface they resemble exceptive constructions, we will see that exclusives differ both syntactically, semantically, and pragmatically from exceptives. Playing around with data from languages spoken in the class, we will probe at various questions concerning the structure and meaning of these constructions.
MORE COURSE DESCRIPTIONS TO COME SOON!