Workshop on Groundedness in Semantics and Beyond
Co-organized by the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy and the ERC project Plurals, Predicates, and Paradox
Munich, 26-27 October 2012
The notion of groundedness has been central to research on the semantic paradoxes ever since Kripke’s seminal work on truth, and the notion continues to inspire work in this area. Recently, the notion has been applied more widely, for instance to criteria of identity, abstraction principles, and the semantics of modal predicates. There is also a renewed interest in the notion of grounding in metaphysics, and of course the focus on “grounded objects” in all of these areas is closely related to the emphasis on well-founded sets in set theory. This workshop aims to bring together researchers who deal with groundedness in logic, semantics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mathematics in order to get a clearer understanding of this concept and of its applications.
Topics include:
- Is there a unified yet substantive notion of groundedness underlying all these applications?
- What is the relation between groundedness and constructivistic ideas of “building” an ontology or a system of facts “from the ground up”?
- What is the relation between groundedness and the Vicious Circle Principle? Can the former be seen as a liberalized version of the latter?
- Does groundedness hold the key to the solution to the semantic and/or the set-theoretic paradoxes?
- What relation is there, if any, between the notion of groundedness in philosophical logic and metaphysicians’ notions of ground and grounding?
Speakers will include:
- Francesca Boccuni (San Raffaele)
- Denis Bonnay (Paris X)
- Kit Fine (NYU)
- Martin Fischer (Munich)
- Leon Horsten (Bristol)
- Luca Incurvati (Cambridge)
- Hannes Leitgeb (Munich)
- Øystein Linnebo (Birkbeck)
- Toby Meadows (St Andrews)
- Jönne Speck (Birkbeck)
- Johannes Stern (Munich)
