Please see the timetable for the CCR summer series below.  Talks start this Tuesday— everyone welcome!

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Developing and Applying New Quantitative Methods in Experimental Philosophy of Language

CINN Conference Room, Psychology Building

Tuesdays, 1pm-2:45

The philosophy of language has recently undergone an “experimental turn”, in which the most interesting contemporary philosophical work on language is informed by linguistic experiments. But how can experiments tell us anything about something as intangible as the meaning of a word? The experimental turn is based on the assumption that linguistic meaning is a psychological phenomenon that should be investigated using the tools of the cognitive sciences. This project brings some of the most innovative experimental philosophers, linguists, and psychologists to Reading in a series of masterclasses which will instruct audiences of graduate students and faculty in a variety of cutting-edge experimental methods that have been developed to investigate linguistic meaning.

If you’re interested in attending any of the masterclasses, please contact Patrick Connolly (pjconnolly1@sheffield.ac.uk)

April 30: Introduction to experimental philosophy of language

Nat Hansen, Reading, Philosophy, CCR

May 7: MASTERCLASS taught by Stephanie Solt (Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin): Experimental research on adjectival subjectivity

May 14: MASTERCLASS taught by Paul Egré (Institut Jean-Nicod, CNRS Paris): Contradictory Descriptions with Gradable Adjectives

May 21: MASTERCLASS taught by Ian Cunnings (Reading, Psychology): Understanding sentences in real-time: Evidence from eye-tracking during language comprehension

May 28: MASTERCLASS taught by Andrea Beltrama (University of Paris 7 – Diderot): How does our language makes us sound? Investigating social meaning through listeners’ perception.

June 4: No class

June 11: MASTERCLASS taught by Helena Aparicio (MIT Computational Linguistics Lab): Investigating context effects in the interpretation of Haddock Descriptions through experiments and computational modeling

NOTE: This session will meet from 3:00pm-4:45pm

Wednesday 8-May

Symposium featuring new work by Dennett in collaboration with Keith Frankish, bringing together experts from Psychology, Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and Artificial Intelligence. Other speakers include robotics innovator Josh Bongard (Vermont), philosophers of mind Emma Borg (Reading) and Cecilia Heyes (Oxford), philosopher of mental health Lisa Bortolotti (Birmingham), and Google Deepmind AI expert Murray Shanahan (Imperial College).

Details and registration: https://www.reading.ac.uk/Psychology/News/Growing-autonomy-in-human-and-artificial-agents.aspx

Thursday 9-May

Daniel Dennett will be interviewed live by the New Scientist and will answer questions from the audience.

In this lecture, Dennett will explore what it means to be ‘autonomous’, and how language and society shape our sense of being free, morally accountable beings. The lecture will be livestreamed online by the University of Reading.

Details and registration: http://www.reading.ac.uk/news-and-events/Events/Event792040.aspx

Friday 10-May

Daniel Dennett will have lunch and informal discussions with PhD students, postdoctoral and other early career researchers in the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences and across the University, facilitated by the Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neurodynamics (CINN) and CINN Imaging, the University’s neuroimaging facility.

Let us know you are coming: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=xDv6T_zswEiQgPXkP_kOXwIVFk29iotIrU3Szx4sip1UME9NS0IxS1pHQVk4SVc5RExJWURYUk04Wi4u