Program

09.15-10.30:  Kevin Mulligan (Université de Genève):  "Acceptance, Affirmation, Agreement, Acknowledgment, Assertion, Belief, Certainty, Conviction, Denial, Judgment,   Refusal, and Rejection"

 10.45-12.00:    Mark Textor (King's College London): "Reinach on Rejection and Negation"

  14.30-15.45:   Friederike Moltmann (IHPST - CNRS/Paris 1/ENS): "The Action-Product Distinction for Transitive    Intensional Verbs"

16.00-17.15:   Maria van der Schaar (Leiden University): "Wooden Horses and False Friends; a Classificationfor Non-Attributive Terms"

Abstracts

Friederike Moltmann: "The Action-Product Distinction for Transitive Intensional Verbs"

In 1912, Twardowksi introduced a distinction between 'actions' and 'products': actions (and states)are for example a 'thinking', a 'requesting', and a 'state of believing', whereas products include a'thought', a 'request' and a 'belief'. The two sorts of entities are distinguished in a number of ways:most importantly only products have truth or more generally satisfaction conditions and entersimilarity relations according to a shared content. In this talk I explore the way the distinctionbetween actions and products manifests itself with transitive intensional verbs, such as 'need','desire', 'see', and 'buy'. I argue that the complement of transitive intensional verbs serves not tocharacterize a constituent of a cognitive content, but rather the satisfier (truthmaker) of the productof the action or state the verb describes. Moreover in general it is possible satisfiers that constitute shared contents of transitive intensional verbs.

 Kevin Mulligan: "Acceptance, Affirmation, Agreement, Acknowledgment, Assertion, Belief, Certainty, Conviction, Denial, Judgment, Refusal, and Rejection"

Do our doxastic and intellectual states, activities and acts come in polarly opposed kinds, positive and negative ? I argue that this is, with one exception, the case. I rely on an account of the category of attitudes put forward by the earliest phenomenologists rather than the promiscuous and sloppy category of attitudes popular within analytic philosophy.

Maria van der Schaar: "Wooden Horses and False Friends; a Classification for Non-Attributive Terms"

The paper uses the method of linguistic phenomenology to explain how mere belief can be elucidated as botched knowing. First, three kinds of non-attributive terms are distinguished, modifying, privative and restorative terms. It is shown what the logical properties are of terms like 'fake', 'mere' and 'real', words that etiolate the meaning of the terms to which they belong, and in what way Partee (2010), in which it is asserted that these terms behave like ordinary terms, can be rebutted.

Mark Textor "Reinach on Rejection and Negation"

The Rejective View of Negation holds that sentential negation is to be explained on the basis of a prior understanding of the linguistic act or mental act of rejecting (denying). This act is supposed tbe 'on all fours' with assertion (judgement). In this talk I will develop and defend Reinach's objections against the assumption of an act of rejection