The Research Seminar Series in Philosophy invites you to a seminar with Bram Vaassen, Umeå/Rutgers. The seminar title is "Worldly dependence in ‘therefore’-constructions".
Abstract: It is widely agreed that ‘therefore’-constructions, such as ‘He is an Englishman, and, therefore, brave’, convey a dependence and that this dependence projects out of entailment cancelling environments. Contrary to this consensus, I argue that ‘therefore’ constructions often convey a kind of worldly dependence that shows no tendency to project. I also show how this finding puts pressure on standard accounts of ‘therefore’s semantic contribution in terms of conventional implicatures (Grice 1975; Potts 2007) or triggered presuppositions (Pavese 2017, 2021, 2022; Stokke 2017; Kocurek and Pavese 2022). This finding indicates that there is a kind of dependence that is part of ‘therefore’s asserted content instead.
All interested are welcome to participate in this seminar.
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