{"id":18211,"date":"2026-09-09T06:10:43","date_gmt":"2026-09-09T10:10:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=18211"},"modified":"2026-09-08T23:58:31","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T03:58:31","slug":"colloquium-chris-kennedy-university-of-chicago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2026\/09\/09\/colloquium-chris-kennedy-university-of-chicago\/","title":{"rendered":"Colloquium - Chris Kennedy (University of Chicago)\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"x_elementToProof\"><b data-olk-copy-source=\"MessageBody\">Speaker<\/b>:\u00a0Chris Kennedy\u00a0(University of Chicago)<\/div>\n<div class=\"x_elementToProof\"><b>Title<\/b>: &#8220;Coordination as Aggregation (or, When Meaning Is Like Voting)&#8221;\u00a0<\/div>\n<div class=\"x_elementToProof\"><b>When<\/b>: Friday, September 11th, 3:30-5pm\u00a0<\/div>\n<div class=\"x_elementToProof\"><b>Where<\/b>: 32-141<\/div>\n<div class=\"x_elementToProof\">\u00a0<\/div>\n<div><strong>Abstract:<\/strong><\/div>\n<div class=\"x_elementToProof\">The philosopher Crispin Wright says a predicate P is &#8216;tolerant&#8217; with respect to a dimension D just in case &#8220;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&#8221; (Wright 1975). \u00a0Tolerance is most often discussed in the context of analyses of vague predicates like &#8216;big&#8217; and &#8216;small&#8217;, 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 &#8212;- 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 &#8212;- has resisted explanation. \u00a0In this talk, I will do three things. \u00a0First, 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: \u00a0this 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.\u00a0<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaker:\u00a0Chris Kennedy\u00a0(University of Chicago) Title: &#8220;Coordination as Aggregation (or, When Meaning Is Like Voting)&#8221;\u00a0 When: Friday, September 11th, 3:30-5pm\u00a0 Where: 32-141 \u00a0 Abstract: The philosopher Crispin Wright says a predicate P is &#8216;tolerant&#8217; with respect to a dimension D just in case &#8220;there is some positive degree of change in respect of D that is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18211","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\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18211"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18227,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18211\/revisions\/18227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}