Special Topic

Description

LOOKING FOR A 400-LEVEL COURSE in SEMESTER 2?

PHIL475 Special Topic will be taught by the distinguished philosopher Carl Posy.

Here is an ancient paradox:  

• One grain of sand is most certainly not a heap of sand.  If you have n grains, piled together, which still don’t form a heap; then, equally certainly, adding just one more grain won’t turn that pile into a heap of sand.  But then it follows that 10 trillion grains of sand piled together still don’t make a heap.  Absurd.

Here are three, more modern, conundrums:

• What’s odd about saying “I went to the beach yesterday, but I don’t know that”?    
• Why can’t your teacher announce a surprise exam for some day next week?  
• I believed every sentence in my book when I wrote it, and I haven’t changed my mind about anything.  Yet, nevertheless, I can still modestly say, “I’m sure that somewhere in this big book of mine I must have made some mistakes”.  How is that possible?  

What do all these have in common?   We will look at some treatments of these and similar paradoxes, and we shall see that each involves a clash of norms (of constraints upon how we should think and speak). In some cases it is opposing ontological norms (ways to think about objects in the world) that clash. Sometimes the clashing norms are semantic, sometimes pragmatic, and sometime epistemic.


We will see how this analysis leads us to metaphysical issues and to issues in the philosophy of language.  The metaphysical questions are, must physical objects have precise borders, and how can such objects be fully distinguishable one from another.  The linguistic issues concern vague predicates (predicates like ‘bald’, ‘red’, ‘tall’ that admit ‘borderline cases’), and the relation of semantics, pragmatics and assertion in the analysis of language. Along the way, we will also encounter some contemporary work on self-awareness.