Background beliefs in the construction of meaning workshop

Workshop: Background Beliefs in the Construction of Meaning

Dates:

January 9-10, 2025

Venue:

University of Tübingen
Fürstenzimmer, Schloss Hohentübingen, Burgsteige 11, 72070 Tübingen, Germany

Organizers:

Asya Achimova
University of Tübingen

Elin McCready
Aoyama Gakuin University

Dan Harris
Hunter College, CUNY

Ivan Rygaev
University of Tübingen

Description:

Emmy Noether research group “Socially-relevant pragmatic inference” (University of Tübingen) is organizing a kick-off workshop “Background beliefs in the construction of meaning”.

The process of utterance interpretation depends not only on the linguistic properties of the utterance, but also on the background beliefs of the listener, her ideology, and perspective. In this workshop, we ask how these factors affect the construction of meaning.

We bring together formal semantics, philosophy of language, psycholinguistics, and computational modeling to ask what types of utterances depend on background beliefs and perspectives in their interpretation, how background beliefs can be integrated in the process of drawing pragmatic inferences, what types of beliefs matter for the interpretation of utterances, and how background beliefs relate to the linguistic notions of context and common ground.