Dear all, The last meeting of the year will be held on Tuesday 21st May. There will be the traditional annual photograph. The photography for the annual Club photograph is due to start at 1.50 pm, *so we ask that members who wish to be in the photograph meet at the gardens of Newnham College by 1.40 pm.* After the photograph and before the talk we will hold the Annual General Meeting at 2.10 pm in the Jane Harrison Room, Newnham. If you have any items for the agenda, please let the Secretaries know by Monday, 20th.
For our last talk, we are delighted to welcome Pekka Väyrynen (Leeds) who will be giving a talk entitled “Practical Commitment in Evaluative Discourse”. His abstract is as follows: Evaluative and normative judgments play a distinctive practical role in our thought. This paper concerns how their practical role is reflected in language. It is widely assumed that at least those evaluative terms that can be used to express “thin” evaluative concepts, such as ‘good’ and ‘ought’, are associated with such practical roles somehow as a matter of meaning. But such semantic views are rarely given explicit defense or even articulation. I first elucidate some different forms such views might take, and identify a representative version as my target. I then argue that we have reason to reject this view. Terms like ‘ought’ can be used, even in normative contexts, to assert thin evaluative claims which don’t play the term’s customary practical role. This gives us a choice: either offer some plausible explanation of why the relevant practical features don’t show up in these cases despite the role they are assigned in our semantic theory, or else don’t build them into our semantic theory. I argue that plausible semantic explanations don’t look particularly forthcoming. (In the full paper I also outline what an alternative pragmatic account of how thin evaluative terms are associated with their practical roles might look like, to establish it as at least a serious option.) Time permitting, I'll close with some remarks on how my arguments bear on a range of views in metaethics and the philosophy of normativity. The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com) by midday on Monday. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
