Pictures and Propositions Conference

13-14 June 2016

Senate House (on the first floor in the Senate Room)

London

 

This conference brings philosophers from art and aesthetics working on pictorial representation together with philosophers of mind and language working on the nature of content. We believe that each party is well positioned to offer new insights to the other. For example, by attending to representational pictures, might we shed light on the nature and structure of content, an issue that has seen a recent revival in the philosophy of language but which has focused almost exclusively on sentential representation. Closely related, what can be said about ‘pictorial content’? Should we conceive of the contents of pictures as of a different, non-propositional category or might they be assimilated to the more familiar domain? And how are the contents of pictures determined? If visual aspects of a picture underdetermine its content, might linguistic resources such as presupposition or implicature help fill out what’s represented? These questions and more will be taken up by our panel of speakers:

2:00-3:30: Catharine Abell (University of Manchester)

3:30-4:15 Coffee/Tea

4:15-5:45 John Kulvicki (Dartmouth College)

10:00-11:30: Daisy Dixon (Cambridge)

11:45-1:15: Gabriel Greenberg (UCLA)

2:45-4:15: Dominic Gregory (University of Sheffield)

4:15-4:45: Coffee/Tea

4:45-6:15 Liz Camp (Rutgers University)