{"id":11400,"date":"2018-10-01T06:04:03","date_gmt":"2018-10-01T10:04:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=11400"},"modified":"2018-09-30T15:07:59","modified_gmt":"2018-09-30T19:07:59","slug":"lf-reading-group-926-todor-koev-universitat-konstanzmit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2018\/10\/01\/lf-reading-group-926-todor-koev-universitat-konstanzmit\/","title":{"rendered":"LF Reading Group 9\/26 - Todor Koev (Universit\u00e4t Konstanz\/MIT)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Speaker:<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/todorkoev.weebly.com\/\">Todor Koev<\/a> (Universit\u00e4t Konstanz\/MIT)<br clear='none'\/>\n <strong>Title:<\/strong> Strong Beliefs, Weak Commitments<br clear='none'\/>\n <strong>Date and time:<\/strong> Wednesday, October 1st, 1-2 pm<br clear='none'\/>\n <strong>Location:<\/strong> 32-D461<\/p>\n<p><strong>Abstract:<\/strong><\/p>\n<div class=\"moz-text-html\" lang=\"x-unicode\">\n<div dir=\"ltr\">\n<div>The standard Hintikkan semantics views &#8220;believe&#8221; as a universal quantifier over possible worlds, stating that the prejacent is true across all the attitude holder&#8217;s doxastic alternatives (Hintikka 1969). However, this semantics (i) fails to capture the fact that &#8220;believe&#8221; is a gradable predicate (e.g. &#8220;partially believe&#8221; v. &#8220;fully believe&#8221;) and (ii) makes no predictions about the degree of certainty of the belief agent. To remedy these problems, I propose a probabilistic semantics along the general lines of Kennedy &amp; McNally&#8217;s (2005) analysis of gradable adjectives. I argue that &#8220;believe&#8221; is a strong modal, i.e. it is a maximum-degree predicate. While belief attributions can sometimes be interpreted as hedges (e.g. &#8220;I believe it&#8217;s raining, but I&#8217;m not sure it is&#8221;), I argue (contra Hawthorne et al. 2016) that such weak uses are not the default as they canonically arise with first-person present-tense unembedded forms and under the right pragmatic conditions, i.e. when the belief component is not relevant to the question under discussion. Following up on a suggestion made in Chemla (2008), I propose that the weak sense of &#8220;believe&#8221; arises as an antipresupposition, i.e. as a scalar inference derived through competition with a presuppositionally stronger &#8220;know&#8221;-competitor. A weak interpretation amounts to a situation in which the speaker expresses full subjective confidence in the prejacent but reneges on publicly committing to it. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<b><br clear='none'\/>\n<\/b><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<fieldset class=\"mimeAttachmentHeader\"><\/fieldset>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaker: Todor Koev (Universit\u00e4t Konstanz\/MIT) Title: Strong Beliefs, Weak Commitments Date and time: Wednesday, October 1st, 1-2 pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract: The standard Hintikkan semantics views &#8220;believe&#8221; as a universal quantifier over possible worlds, stating that the prejacent is true across all the attitude holder&#8217;s doxastic alternatives (Hintikka 1969). However, this semantics (i) fails to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11400"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11452,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11400\/revisions\/11452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}