Speaker: Chris Kennedy (University of Chicago)
Title: “Coordination as Aggregation (or, When Meaning Is Like Voting)”
When: Friday, September 11th, 3:30-5pm
Where: 32-141
Abstract:
The philosopher Crispin Wright says a predicate P is ‘tolerant’ with respect to a dimension D just in case “there is some positive degree of change in respect of D that is insufficient ever to affect the justice with which F is applied to a particular case” (Wright 1975). Tolerance is most often discussed in the context of analyses of vague predicates like ‘big’ and ‘small’, but it is a feature of a wide range of linguistic constructions with indeterminate meanings, including generics, progressives, measure terms, modals, etc. Despite its ubiquity, tolerance —- and in particular the fact that it persists even when the semantic and pragmatic properties of a tolerant expression and the facts of the context of utterance conspire to make it go away —- has resisted explanation. In this talk, I will do three things. First, I will make the case that tolerance is something that linguists should care about. Second, I will show why existing accounts of tolerance, which have characterized it as (inter alia) a metaphysical, epistemic, semantic or cognitive fact, are unsatisfactory. And finally, I will offer a new explanation that characterizes tolerance as a pragmatic fact about how a community settles linguistic indeterminacy: this is a coordination problem, and I claim that coordination on shared resolutions of linguistic indeterminacy has the structure of aggregation. Framing the explanation in terms of Social Choice Theory, I will show that tolerance is the empirical footprint of a strategy for ensuring that coordination on an aggregate resolution of indeterminacy is possible.